It's official, the cranky librarian has arrived!

When I first started working as a clerk at the circulation desk, you would have had a hard time convincing me the library really required professionally trained staff. I after all, was as good on the desk and finding materials as the director was. Or so I thought. And even after starting my MLS degree and listening to professors talk about the important work MLS trained librarians did, I wasn’t convinced. But now, after working as the library director for over 2 years, I’m beginning to think differently. Which is why, looking over the Rural Library Project’s website kind of irritated me.

The project helps small rural communities create their own library. They help get funding for building, collections, and small operating budgets. And here’s the rub. The project suggests a library can be run 20 hours a week for about $30,000 a year. That includes staff, materials, building upkeep and overhead. I know a lot of small libraries run on these kind of budgets and they do so with the help of volunteers and very low paid, overworked, part-time staff. But just because it’s done, doesn’t mean it is either good, right or appropriate.

Here’s why. Patrons and board members will often say to me things like – “oh volunteers can do a story hour. It’s just reading to kids after all.” That concept totally ignores the work, effort and training that goes into a true story time: a story time that is age appropriate, promotes literacy or early literacy and excites parents to bring them and their children into the library. Or there’s the suggestion that working at the circulation desk is easy. Anyone after all should be able to wand barcodes in and out, right? Wrong! Circulation requires being able to search for items, find read-a-likes, trouble shoot system problems, know the collection and patrons well enough to do readers’ advisory, teach patrons how to do reference searches, use databases, use patron computers, trouble shoot patrons computers, etc. etc. etc. More and more I’m beginning to think it’s too much for the average volunteer or part-time staff person. It requires expertise, practice, a willingness to learn new things and a dedication to continuing to learn. We need employees of a very high caliber and we need to be willing to pay to find such employees, even if we are a very small rural library.

I hear librarian’s say all the time that we need to educate people to the work we do. Yet, when I think about most people’s view of that work, it feels like educating others is a very high mountain to climb. Yet, I am no longer willing to say that if money’s is tight we can cut staffing – because I need people who can do more things, have more skills, have a higher level of training, not less. In fact it isn’t true that the jobs around here can be done by anyone. This work truly does require a very special set of skills, training and personality. So, it’s official – I now have become a librarian who cringes when people say, “oh I wish I could work here, it must be so nice just working with books all day!”

The One Person Library vs. The One Very Crazy Person Library

I was reading Rudi Denham’s article on single staff libraries in Canada (Denham. 2004). She wrote “Even when staff members buy groceries, speak at the Rotary club or attend a child’s hockey practice, they are ‘the Library’ in the eyes of the community. They promise to renew books while standing in the produce aisle fingering broccoli crowns, and they open the library window to take returned books, even though the branch is closed.” Déjà vu all over again, I thought. Only last night I was volunteering at the local art center staffing the ticket booth for a concert when two teen boys came and kept pointing at me saying to their parents “it’s the librarian.” That afternoon, I’d been at Walmart when I’d gotten a request to put a book on hold for someone. And I regularly get handed books to be returned when I’m heading out to the post office before the library opens.

When I’m talking to other library directors, or even board members, I think they don’t understand how extensive this job can be. Not only all the different tasks, but how the work extends beyond the doors of the library. Pam North in her article Management Bliss: The Unexpected Joys of Being a Library Manager (2008) lists some of the jobs of a library manager as supervising, maintaining the budget, collection development, reference questions, training, problem solving, programming, public relations. But Denham with her single staff rural libraries remembers the other tasks, shoveling snow, deicing the front steps, changing light bulbs, plunging the toilet, bringing in the trash cans.

There’s so much to do, it’s overwhelming. And then there’s the worry about funding, too. I imagine talking to the village board, who stand poised to cut our budget, and speaking about the long view. The impact of libraries on communities, I want to tell them, may not be as immediate as filling in a pothole, or funding the police department, but in the long range what we do for quality of life, literacy, the employability of our communities is powerful. Yet, when I sit down to do my work as a library director focusing on the long range is difficult even for me.

I want the problems at the circulation desk to be fixed today. I want the conflicts with patrons, staff, board, funders, vendors to be solved this minute. I’d like well trained, technologically savvy, customer oriented employees who can take on new assignments easily, to exist now. The Friends of the Library that all the articles say will make my job easier, I want them now, even though currently no such group exists. The trained dedicated volunteers who could help with the circulation load, now please. The community advocacy group that gets the word out about the library, in place today would be great! I know the importance of a long range plan. I’ve been pushing the board to create one for a year or more. Yet, I’d also like instant gratification too. I’d like to reach all those goals today, or at least by the end of the week. Reminding myself I’m talking about baby steps to meet goals over a year, or two, or five is tough.

Part of the problem is the assumption that when I get there – those trained employees, those dedicated volunteers, those library advocates, then everything will run smoothly. There won’t be these problems cropping up that need fixing. Pam North writes in her article that “management is not all about paperwork and problems – rather it offers the ability for us to have a positive impact on our library and its collection and services, the staff, the community, and ourselves” (North, 2008, p. 34). Yet, most days it does feel like this job is all about “paperwork and problem solving.” Even our successes seem to lead to new problems. For instance, three years ago I started a weekly afterschool story time for the K-2nd graders. The first year we struggled along, with only 2-4 kids coming the first few months. By the end of the school year we were up to a fairly regular group of 8-10 kids. The second year the program regularly saw 12-15 children coming. It was a good group that the volunteers and I got to know well and we all had a lot of fun. This year, there’s been an explosion and we are seeing more children appear every week, with numbers hitting 35 to 40 in recent weeks. It’s getting to be larger than the one volunteer board member and I can handle, because we haven’t seen a corresponding increase in volunteers coming to help with the program. So, now our successful program adds a new wrinkle and another problem to solve.

Management in fact does involve spending a great deal of time with problems. Because libraries, like everything else in life are dynamic organizations. We are changing and evolving everyday. So what works today, may not work tomorrow. There will, I realize, always be issues cropping up that need immediate attention and that take the focus away from other things. We will constantly need to be on the look out for new ways of doing things, new things to do, new issues to adapt to.
Will a long range plan, with a step by step guide for meeting goals over time solve many of these issues? My hope is that knowing where we want the library to be in one year, two years, five years, may be a reminder to me that I don’t need to do it all today. It will help me stop the push to just work a little harder, a little faster, a little longer, in the hopes of accomplishing it all now. Because all that seems to do is drive myself and everyone else nuts.

The change a library creates in the community or our patrons lives may be felt over months or even years, not hours or days. And changing the library itself isn’t going to happen in an instant either. A long range plan, is just that, planning for change over time, not overnight. I need it for the library, not just to know where we are heading, but to identify a reasonable amount of time to take to get there. Because otherwise, a one person library, can become a one very crazy person library!


Denham, R. (2004). Keepers of the Lighthouse. Feliciter. 50: (2) 52-53.
North, P. (2008). Management Bliss: The Unexpected Joys of Begin a Library Manager. Oregon Library Association Quarterly. Fall 2008. 32-34.