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The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > Libraries are fucking great.
 
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DeadFatDuckFat
Oct 29, 2012

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wizard on a water slide posted:

One of the projects I worked on for my MA was sort of ethnographic research on our huge local public library because I hadn't set foot in a public library in about 20 years. It's pretty cool and good, so much so that I applied for an assistant librarianship there recently.

I do not expect to get it. In my entire time there I never saw a librarian who was anything other than a vaguely prudish white lady. The stereotype is alive here. Also


This is totally a thing. I interviewed a childrens' librarian who works in that part of the building which is its own entire thing, and she explained that on several occasions she's had to make the hard choice about whether or not to ask sleeping clearly-homeless people to leave the childrens' library. Like she was torn between her obligation to keep the kids safe and the general policy of not letting adults loiter there and her compassion for the needy and it fuckin' sucked.

Depending on where a branch is located, letting random adults use the children's area can be a really loving bad idea for obvious reasons. People also don't realize how many parents expect their kids to just hang out at the library without supervision up until it closes at night. Librarians are increasingly expected to be babysitters, mental health experts, and beggars (getting funding from grants). Library work is fun and rewarding but it's not always the kind of work that people expect.

If you like interesting/funny library anecdotes, read the book Free for All by Borchert.

* # ¿ Oct 19, 2016 03:39
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The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > Libraries are fucking great.