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!”