Scary Librarians!
Last week, I was at the hair salon getting my hair cut. It’s a super friendly place and I was chatting with one of the young women who works there – she’s 19 years old. Since I’m a new client, she asked me what I did for a living. Of course, I said “I’m a librarian”. Her response? And I quote, “You’re awfully nice to be a librarian”. All I could say was “that makes me really sad”.
It turns out that her concept of librarians is that they’re, you guessed it, kind of scary and always telling people to be quiet. The frowning shusher, intent on policing behavior and collecting fines.
You and I both know that’s an outdated stereotype, but the sad truth is that so many people still think the same thing.
And the sadder truth is – there are still too many librarians acting that way.
In my years of working in libraries, I’ve seen this many times and – I’m sorry to say – was guilty of it myself in my early days. I thought the library should be a quiet space and that we should teach people, especially children, responsibility by holding them accountable for borrowed materials by charging fines.
But over time, I realized that what I was really doing was just turning kids off to books and libraries. Maybe permanently. They’re the kids who grew into adults who say things like “You’re awfully nice to be a librarian”. And then I read a quote by Doug Johnson, author of the Blue Skunk Blog that said “The goal of a library is not to get back all the books, but all the readers” (Doug Johnson, 2013).
For complete show notes, please visit masterfullibrarian.com/ep-31