“Librarians are how libraries speak.” ~ The Bloggess

I’ve had a deep, abiding love for the writing of Jenny Lawson, aka The Bloggess, ever since she introduced the world to Beyonce, the giant metal chicken, and now it turns out she loves me too. And you. And you.  (It’s a few weeks old, but read it now if you haven’t yet.)

Makes your heart swell up, doesn’t it? See how my heart is so swollen up that it’s leaking out of my eyes? Yep.

We cheer the articles lauding the importance of libraries, and we scoff at those marveling at the discovery that librarians don’t all wear buns, and some prefer coding to card catalogs. But to read one like Jenny’s, where it becomes clear that it wasn’t just the library, but the librarians inside it, that made a difference, and to know that we’re still doing the work that makes that quietly dramatic change for our young patrons? Well, I take a different kind of joy in sharing that with my Facebook friends. It’s a sigh of relief that all of this that we do day after day? This matters.

As writing is the craft of the author, reader’s advisory is the craft of the librarian. Authors send their books out into the void, we catch them in and bring them back, and point them home.  The Bloggess is right:

 Librarians are how libraries speak.

We are not just the collectors and caretakers of our materials. We are the voice of the books we have on our shelves, speaking to potential readers when the books themselves can’t. When the books are quiet, or by first time authors, or just different enough that they’re not fitting tidily into the easily marketable genres, we are the voice of those books.

But librarians are the voice of more than what is on our shelves. As R. David Lankes says in this emotional call to action, (which I highly recommend everyone spend 20 minutes on this morning) The Community is Your Collection,

“We have the amazing vocation of improving the societies that we are a part of. We are the stewards of our community’s aspirations and goals.”

The people we serve are the most important piece of our collection. How can we be their voice? We are the ears, the heart, the muscle, and the voice of our services, our space and our resources. We are these things not for the sake of what’s inside the building itself, but for the transformative power that they hold when connected correctly with the right people at the right time in the right way with the right support. We are the conduits and the catalysts. A library changed Jenny Lawson’s life when a librarian put those books in her hand, but not because the books were there. It was because the librarian was there, was listening, was able to make that connection, and do it in such a way that made a difference.

Where else in our community can we be?

What other magical connections can we make?

Whose voice will you be?

Filed under: Community, Compassion, Reader's Advisory, Sunday Reflections