Librarians! What Are We Hiding?

I’ve worked behind the circulation desk of my local public library for 19 years and I love my job. But that job has gone through plenty of changes. So who exactly are we? And how does the world see us? I decided to perform a quick Google search and find out.

I typed in the phrase “Librarians are…“ and here’s how Google’s auto-fill completed the thought:

Generals in the war on ignorance
Weird.
Annoying
Novel lovers
Hiding something
Obsolete.
Awesome.
Hot.
Great people.
Heroes every day.

Am I a novel lover? Absolutely. Hot? I’d like to think so. A hero every day? Well, I do feel  heroic whenever I  intuit where a book that a patron is desperate to read has been mis-shelved, and deliver it safely into her hands.

I decided to fine tune my results by running a few more librarian-related questions through my favorite search engines. (Yes, I’ve got favorite search engines. How librarial is that?)

Being a librarian is…
Great
Stressful
Hard
Boring.

(I’d say it was all of the above.)

A librarian is…
A trained information specialist.
Coming to dinner.
Stacked.

Librarians should…
Read.
Rule the internet.
Know.
Know how to spell.

Librarians can’t…
Save the world.
Buy me love.
Help falling in love.

Why Do librarians…
Love their jobs?
Make more money than teachers?
Makes less money than garbage collectors?

Librarians can…
Help struggling readers.
Change the world.
Work from home.
Have tattoos.

Librarians enjoy…
The silence.
Life.
Shampoo.
The ride.

Sadly, when I typed in: “Your librarian…” the only result I got was:
Hates you.

(Which, it turns out, is the name of one disgruntled librarian’s website.)

And finally?

Librarians never…
Die. They just check out.

So what can we conclude? We librarians are awesome. We can help struggling readers. We can have tattoos. We can’t help falling in love. But we can (still) help change the world.

Is any of this accurate? Who knows? If you want to talk about it, you’ll find me behind the circulation desk at the Bala Cynwyd Library.

Unless I’m at the tattoo parlor.

(Roz Warren is the author of Our Bodies, Our Shelves: Library Humor  and Just Another Day At Your Local Public Library , both of which you should buy immediately.)