Gratitude #8 – Librarians

I am so grateful for librarians. I love them. They’re like the superheroes of information. And for libraries. In a lot of ways, you can judge a culture by its libraries. Does the citizenry have unfettered access to books and information? Are both men and women allowed to visit them? Can they be found in all communities or just in affluent or upper class areas? Are they funded well enough that they can stay open more than a few hours a week? Libraries help preserve our history, provide fun and educational programming, and can be a meeting place for the community to explore shared interests, collaborate on projects and be entertained. Used diligently, a library can help level the playing field for those who want to learn but don’t have a lot of personal resources. Remember Good Will Hunting?

I’ve known a bunch of awesome librarians in my life. In elementary school, our librarian was really supportive. Every year, I checked out a copy of Moby Dick.  Despite my very young age, I had the notion that it was really something that I should read. Every year I would check it out and every year I would return it with little more than “Call me Ishmael” having been read. The librarian never shook her head or tut-tutted me. She never said “Oh, you don’t want that, honey. Try this book about the sleepy puppy that finds a friend.” Moby Dick honestly was beyond my attention span and reading level at the time, but the fact that she supported me in giving it a shot each year without making me feel embarrassed helped teach me that there is no shame in aiming high.

Getting through that book was like my white whale

In law school, the librarians were life savers. Even though basically every statute and court opinion that has ever been written is available digitally on Westlaw or Lexis, in our first year we had to touch actual books in order to complete our assignments. It’s a great policy. Westlaw and Lexis subscriptions cost a lot of money; libraries are free. For those who don’t end up practicing at a big firm or organization, the digital options are often prohibitively expensive. Still, it was insanely challenging. In law school, you usually don’t just go to a card catalog with a particular book in mind. You have a legal problem and have to imagine all the places one might find information about it. This will include case books, statutes, law journals, legal encyclopedias and more. There are even “Words and Phrases” books that are like doing Google keyword searches but everything is on paper and it’s a scavenger hunt to locate everything. The law librarians are masters of their domain. Any one of them probably knows 5x more about the law than practicing attorneys.

words, words, words!

Some of the smartest, coolest people I know are librarians. My metal-loving friend Andrew from undergrad is an Outreach Librarian for the National Library of Medicine at National Institutes of Health. He routinely goes to conferences with the smartest scientists in the world who are working on problems like curing AIDS and understanding aging and he trains them on how to access resources and the latest research. He’s even gone to Native American pow-wows and to Ethiopia (twice!) to train people. How cool is that?

He can teach you how to use the National Library of Medicine’s database AND give you a review of the latest Swedish death metal band

On the other end of the audience spectrum, my niece Rebekah is a Children’s Librarian. She works for the public library and as the librarian for a special needs school. I never knew before talking with her about her jobs just how much science is involved in her work. She knows about child development, cognitive psychology, sensory processing, the neuroscience of how we learn, and all manner of other why-you-need-a-Masters-Degree-to-be-a-librarian kind of stuff. She develops age-appropriate programming for children of varying age groups, skill levels and abilities. She writes lesson plans for all her programs and scheduled time with kids. Even storytime involves an understanding of developmental science. She makes sure each storytime is deliberately structured to include core ingredients for the development of literacy and pre-writing skills. And she makes it fun.

This woman does NOT simply
“read stories to little kids” for a living

So, thank you, librarians. I am thankful that all of you stuck with your education to learn how to know *everything* and that you endure a million stupid questions a week. You’re awesome and people should let you know how much you are appreciated on a regular basis.

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Cool Moby Dick Illustration by A. Burnham Shute (Moby-Dick edition – C. H. Simonds Co) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons