Popular Librarian

I spent last week in the company of approximately one bazillion librarians (Give or take a zillion) at the Public Libraries Conference in Boston. There’s something kind of sweet about mass gatherings of librarians, notably how easy it is to pick each other out in crowds. Ever since I attended library school, I’ve heard admonishments about banishing librarian stereotypes, how we must do everything within our power to overturn the public’s view of us as quiet, bookish and moderately anal retentive. I bought into it for a while, but after being a professional librarian for over a decade, I’ve begun to feel it’s sort of futile, like nurses complaining that they’re known for being compassionate and tidy. Certainly we are more than quiet, bookish and moderately anal retentive (allow me to introduce you to the dust bunnies under my bed…they have names), but there’s no escaping the fact that those particular traits are somewhat endemic in our profession.

One evening during the conference I attended a banquet involving several authors speaking to several hundred librarians over broiled chicken. The dinner was scheduled to start at six. I arrived at approximately 6:03 to find almost every table full and most of the attendees almost through with the main course. This is not the first time that I have been brutally reminded that for a gathering of library professionals, fashionably late for a 6 o’clock reception is 5:30. Last fall at a gathering of media librarians I made the mistake of showing up at 6:15 to a “meet and greet” reception scheduled to begin at 6 to find the lobby deserted, the bartender packing up and nothing but a sad platter of wilted cauliflower and drying ranch dip left on a table. Party animals are us

This time around I will say that my table was a jolly lot, quite chatty all things considered. There was a intense discussion about adult programming at the library, which I’m sorry to say does not involve showing blue movies in the meeting room. This particular conversation had one librarian despairing that no one had shown up for her carefully scheduled evening of poetry reading. Someone had informed her afterwards that said reading had conflicted with “March Madness”, some sort of sporting event she had never heard of but was quite important, apparently. I didn’t want to break the news that chances were excellent that the “listeners to poetry” crowd was not likely the same as the “obsessed with the NCAA” crowd…easier for us to all believe that ESPN is to blame when our carefully planned programs fail. (Which reminds me…today I happened upon Dodgeball on HBO…still makes me laugh til I weep…”ESPN 8… If it’s almost a sport you’ll find it on The OCHO”…”If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball”. Stop me before I recite the whole freaking film and just go watch it)

Speaking of wrenches, it turned out that one of the librarians sitting at our table is, in his spare time, the editor of the Historical Wrench Monthly Newsletter. You may think that I kid, but I am not. Apparently historical wrenches are of great fascination to many. People as far a field as Australia subscribe to Historical Wrench Monthly, I learned, although I must point out that in Australia, they’re called ‘spanners’. And you thought that librarians are quiet, bookish and moderately anal retentive. No sir, we party like rock stars, every evening promptly at six.

// posted by Kati @ 12:13 AM 0 comments