There was the smell of old books, a smell that has a way of making all libraries seem the same. Some say that smell is asbestos.
I am convinced that grandkids are inherently evil people who tell their grandparents to "just go to the library and open up an e-mail account - it's free and so simple.
Plenty of patrons had asked me strange things, but this was the first who asked me where my car was parked. It was almost comical to look at the man, because he actually thought I was going to tell him. I struggled to come up with a reply, but the be...
When I tell people I went to library school, the most common reaction is either “You’re joking, right?” or “They have schools for librarians? Do they teach you how to properly sssh people?
It took a bit of popcorn and a library snack bar to make me realize that being a librarian was about more than just giving people information. It was about serving a community. And if the community is hungry for more than just knowledge, then maybe i...
We don’t have to destroy the library of the past. We just need to give it a face-lift.
I like to imagine that library school was started because of some sort of silly bar bet where a guy got really plastered and told his buddy that he could convince people that librarians needed to be trained in the art of librarianship. Sadly, this is...
The loudest elderly women always had the quietest elderly husbands.
...killing rats wasn’t in my job description.
A library was nothing without its people. You say library and there’s this iconoclastic image of an old-lady librarian telling people to be quiet and not to run. But the thing was, that lady—that iconoclastic lady—was with us when we cleaned. S...
There’s something deep in the heart of every person that wants to protect culture. The only thing about my pending career that was changed because of 9/11 was that I began to see it was the community, not the librarian, that was important to the li...
To be great at something, you must look to the great ones of the past and improve on the ideas and techniques that they started. I was motivated to do better—to improve on the ideas of others.
