Public Librarianship has been very concerned with helping the poor and disenfranchised of our cities and rural communites for decades. When I went to Library school no one had the tweety bird librarians hair-do. Actually, you all would agree that Librarians throughout your lifetime have never looked like that. THey looked much like teachers, nurses, and other professionals. The media and film noir has perpetrated this stereotype which ofcourse we know is ridiculous. We all know how important a good librarian is when we go to the Library and we are assisted professionaly by one. Given my backround in Library Science, I get totally miffed if I feel I have been served poorly by a librarian. The main focus of Librarianship is making the Library a user friendly place for the public to seek information. Truthfully. I have found most Librarians to be very helpful and informative. I have never seen any cob webs on their hair and they seem capable of using the same salons and hair equipment as the rest of us.

I think that part of the reason that we talk so ignorantly of the Librarian profession is because it is a woman dominated profession. There have always been men in the profession. When I was in graduate school we were informed that for men the profession was a lucrative one. Men tended to be made Head Librarians or Library Managers or system wide managers. Dealing with Gender discrimination in this field was considered a serious problem.

Teachers suffer from the same type sterotypes like Librarians. It has to do with some male fantasy of bringing out the beast in a repressed female.

The article was ignorant in many ways. I guess now that Librarians have exchanged their wardrobe and their alcohol abstinence has been exchanged for fashionable clothes and alcoholic beverages the librarians of yester year can be finally catalogued away where they belong.

Well, I have many friends who did finish the program and work in many different Library settings ( academic, public, private, hospital reseach libraries tetc.) Curiously, they all look like the rest of us. Most laugh at the stupidity of such articles like in the NYT. I would have liked to have been in some of the graduate school discussions that this article must of elicited.

Anyway, I came across this blog as I was looking to return to a part time program and possibly get my MLS. I am thinking of pursueing Librarianship when I retire. Talk to you all soon, I have to go get some pins to put my hair in a bun. Hmmm, where are my reading glasses ?

But it was a flash in the pan, wasn’t it? Now Styles is focusing on expensive pet care. I’ve advised our cats to stay healthy….

It seems to me that one of the issues people keep getting in a ruffle over witih this article is its portrayal of what librarians may or may not be. As far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t matter one whit what we librarians think of ourselves. If the public we are trying to serve still sees us as stuffy, bookish (and not in a good way), out of date, and out of touch, then we’re not doing our job. If a silly lifestyle article in the NYT can even hope to make a dent in that little PR problem, then god bless it. Maybe we could be debating the seeming lack of diversity in our ranks and all that that entails instead of bitching about a fluffy article and it’s use of the apparently offensive term guybrarian…instead of eating each other alive over something so superficial.

Dang

I was hoping its expansion would make me the hippest librarian around.

I get your point about the larger perspective for this article (having lived in New York in the last possible time that you could find a cheap place and get by, if you absolutely had to), but it intrigues me that I can write about many incendiary issues, and yet this is the huge, heavily commented “gatekeeper” discussion, one in which librarians keep telling other librarians what should and should not be discussed (lest we be misinterpreted… yet again).

I used to think it was fun to comment on the one or two male librarians I worked with — look at us, we’re cool enough to attract men! — until one of them advised me how uncomfortable he was being singled out by gender. My librarian colleagues who identify as transgendered are acutely sensitive to the gender labels as well. The accompanying thread on PUBLIB — where a male library administrator commented how he and his wife had walked around the conference, criticizing the weight and appearance of librarians — put some of these issues a little more bluntly to the forefront.

As someone who lived in New York for many years and who worked in publishing before going to library school, I may have a different perspective from everyone else.

In my opinion, this article is only nominally about librarianship. The story inside this story is, What is it to be young, idealistic, smart, bookish, and socially conscious in New York City in 2007? How do you survive? How do you find fulfilling work?

Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth has spoken in interviews about how back in the early 1980s all the smart, creative twentysomethings she knew worked at Kinko’s and made art at night. In the intervening years, New York has become oppressively expensive (the Times also just ran an article in which it was noted that $225,000 was a reasonable price to pay for a private parking space in Manhattan), and American society as a whole has become very dog-eat-dog. Youngsters can’t work at Kinko’s as they get their lives sorted out. They need real jobs with health insurance.

I’m not saying that librarianship is the last refuge of “creative types” who need day jobs–I’ll leave it to the Times reporter to put that kind of vapid spin on things. What I do say is that librarianship is a field that is hospitable to young people like those in the Desk Set (some of whom I know personally), i.e. socially conscious recent college grads who want to help people and who care about more than making money. A generation ago, they might have gone into publishing. But nowadays publishing is mostly about getting the wise words of Howard Stern and/or Rush Limbaugh into print and making loads of money while doing it. It’s not for the idealistic.

I think librarians need to stop taking everything in this article so personally. I went to some of the early Desk Set meetings more than a year ago, and I can say the only reason the word “guybrarian” was ever bandied about was because these young women were so genuinely delighted by the presence of a few young male librarians in their midst. It was used in a spirit of friendliness and perhaps almost flirtatiousness among friends. I can imagine young medical students joking around and using terms like “lady doctor” in the same way. If anything, in this context, the word “guybrarian” pokes fun at the stereotypes. It’s obviously not something they’d use in a professional context. (They don’t call their male bosses or library-school professors “guybrarians.”)

Anyway, I agree that the article was stupid, but might I gently suggest that the vitriolic reaction towards it makes us look humorless…you know, like the old stereotype of librarians.