Family Man Librarian

I thought this comic strip on the topic of librarians, forwarded to me by Ashley, was pretty cute. It also touches on a sore point with me, that librarians are not that great at marketing themselves. By marketing, I don’t mean shameless self-promotion. Instead, I’m talking about making clear to their institutions how integral and vital their role and the role of libraries is to their success and to society in general, especially in this digital age. Over and over and over again, I am reminded of how persistently overlooked and underrepresented libraries and library issues are in the general scheme of things in my local environment. It’s incredible, especially given the facts…like huge (and growing) library website statistics, huge (and growing) use of online resources, huge influx of people in the library, especially on Monday nights when I am at the reference desk and there are literally students lining the walls because of lack of seating space. And most of them are using their wireless-enabled laptops or ones that they checked out at the circulation desk. I could go on and on and I get tired of beating the drums about this, yet it is so important because there is a pervasive culture of thought that relegates the library to a print-only, technological backwater. It’s very frustrating.