An Ode to Librarians

You know the stereotypes about librarians. Older women, hair pulled back into a bun, glasses. Mean to patrons who ask questions. I am a librarian, and I resent the stereotypes. I am young, have short, curly hair, and love to help people, but I do wear glasses. While I was in library school and making new acquaintances, I dreaded the inevitable comments about shushing people, the Dewey Decimal system, and getting to read books all day long. I would always think that if only these people understood the Dewey Decimal system they wouldn’t joke about it—it’s much harder than it looks. The current version of Dewey is laid out in four big volumes. You start with the major subject of the book, like science or philosophy, and then work through many smaller subject divisions. Then you have the option to apply multiple qualifiers, like geographic location or format, to assign the number. And no, I don’t get to read all day, because I have work to do!

I recently traveled to Baltimore for a library conference. I was at dinner with some friends, who like me, defied many of the librarian stereotypes. We were young, well traveled, and comfortable in big cities. Over dinner at the Capitol City Brewery, we began poking fun at our fellow librarians, a pack of whom had just sat down at a nearby table, sporting their conference bags and nametags. “Pretty soon they’ll be giggling over metadata,” one friend said. (Metadata is a big thing in the library world these days.) We joked about how easy it is to pick out librarians in the airport and around the conference city. A Mary Kay conference was going on at the same time in Baltimore as our meeting, and you could tell easily who was a Mary Kay consultant and who was a librarian just by looking at the shoes.

Our dinner conversation moved on to other topics. We left the restaurant to return to our various hotels, and we walked into a mall because one of my friends wanted to find a bookstore. We went to look at the map of mall stores, and the first thing one of them said was “This map is horrible! It needs to be organized by type of store.” The directory had a listing of the stores by their location in the mall. We stood around the map and continued our tirade. “The whole point is to find a specific store by name, not to see a list of stores as they are laid out in the mall.” “Who designed this useless thing?!?” “Maybe it should be alphabetized.” All of sudden we looked at each other and realized how much like librarians we were acting—recommending a new organization scheme for the mall directory.

Even if we don’t fit the other stereotypes, we can’t completely escape our profession.