You don't look like a Librarian! Review and peregrinage (or is that getting completely lost?)
You Don't Look Like a Librarian! Shattering Stereotypes and Building Positive New Images in the Internet Age by Ruth Neale
... Yes, there used to be a shocking time when you could not avoid the emerging trend of tattooed librarians belly-dancing on the web... maybe perhaps we can think about early sixties feminists burning their bras as a sign of revolt. Now, today, thank God, we can avoid viewing such sites, and no, it is no longer mandatory to belly-dance and therefore show your beautiful tattoos doing so, when you pass your MA in Librarianship.
Before picking up the book I frankly thought I did not give a flying monkey about what librarians looked like. As long as the basics are there. The basics? Clean body/hair/clothes/shoes (having said that, my favourite librarians in films do not have the basics, as you will see later) but then of course there are other basics... if you're working with the public like I'm sure many of you do, it's important to look helpful and non-scary. I have put the following
next to my door and it helps, somehow (it also had quick a few "likes" on the library facebook page) or... if you're feeling particularly LGBTQ friendly this year, you could always wear your "Nobody knows I'm a librarian" T-shirt. Humour I think is always a great great thing (dangerous too, that's true, not long ago I tried to do a Russian advert for my collection, I can't show you my poster because it's in copyright troubled waters but there was also the issue that my humour would have been perceived as mocking something quite iconic, though it was not my intention) Anyway...
Great thing about the book, it has an e-companion to go with it
(oh I love that so much with some American books! You probably really don't care about that one, but I show you anyway the companion site to the book Beginner's Russian made by UCLA)
Chapter 1 deals with stereotype. And indeed everyone every day is faced by stereotype... we see an effeminate man and he must be gay though he might be happily married with a woman and have three kids. A black guy in a hoody and it is late at night, and you get nervous.We must try our best not to assume anything, try to be as fair as we can.
So let's try to work with my own stereotypes now. What did I assume when I started this book? Well, I see it is printed in the USA, so I have my usual preconceptions against US citizens: they will not speak of much outside of their country. But I have to say I'm immediately wrong, as they speak about some British site. And of course the author mentions Antony Brewerton as we all remember, I'm sure, a fantastic picture of his, wearing sun glasses and yelling on a microphone. "Wear lipstick, have a tattoo, belly-dance, then get naked: The making of a virtual librarian".
But I have to say my first stereotype was right, much of the book will speak about librarians in US American popular culture and chapter 2 Pop Culture and Librarians was a complete discovery for me. I love movies (ie films made in Hollywood) and cartoons, and graphic novels, but how's about BDs (French and Belgium French graphic novels), mangas, Spanish and German cartoons etc... and what about foreign films and novels? There are many portraits of librarians in many French, Spanish etc... films. So I skipped through that sorry (but I solemnly promise that one day I will watch It's a wonderful life ;-)
As I was completely lost I had an interesting discussion with one of my Assistants about intellectuals in Anglo-Saxon culture, it’s as if you have to “turn down” your culture, and I really wonder if, in Italian films say, you wouldn’t find a higher number of attractive librarians...(please do comment on the blog if I'm wrong, or right, or anything!)... Speaking of which... yes! Casanova was a librarian, but he really didn't like his work, and he really didn't do much work as a librarian (it was just the job of sitting in a library, moving things about from time to time to justify his salary, or rather his pension, for he was very old then), which is great for us as he produced what is considered one of the most beautiful French writings of the 18th century. So that's one librarian in film, one, with Fellini's Casanova
Another stereotype was with Librarians' salary which are not that great in the USA either, and many jobs not labelled as 'librarians' jobs' were better paid...
I'd like to tell you about a Russian film I saw recently. Бубен, барабан is the story of a librarian selling books from her library on the black market so that she can have enough to eat. Needless to say it continues with a story of lost love and then... no I won't tell you. So I do understand the point of the author speaking about librarians' relative low salaries, but at least, we, outside of Russia and Ukraine -and many other countries I'm sure-, are lucky enough to get a minimal salary for our work as librarian. The two Russian Librarians who stayed in my house last year were telling me that their salary was not enough, one had a richer partner, the other a second job. And I remember Mike Heaney telling me that he had mentioned the need for a minimal salary for Russian Librarians when he talked at a conference in Saint Petersburg.
The survey done by Ruth Neale is very impressive (see end of the book) and the author also got a reasonable number of answers from non-English speaking countries. What a shame then, that the only librarians interviewed were all native English speakers and mostly Americans from the US.
Main point to me... how to "brand yourself" (a term I have seen a few times now coming from ALA publications, and no, it is not necessarily about tattoos, though some are cute I really like the classification ones, but no, I will not have PQ tattooed on me, for French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese literature because in colloquial French PQ means toilet paper, hilarious! Anyway...) maybe some will not like such a capitalistic term, as some are shocked equally with the term "customer care" however those terms should be used without fear. And to be frank with you (and I'm sure I was not the only one) I got very nervous at the beginning of this year, knowing that all new students had to pay higher fees. I was thinking, will they be happy enough with what I have to offer in my library?
So branding yourself is an everyday thing... if you are, like me, more or less doing everything in your library, (from cataloguing, classifiying, cleaning the loos at times, helping readers, mentoring, moving books to... weeding and e-worlding and etc...) it is about dumping everything you are doing to help the reader who comes and asks for help. And of course, branding is online too. The first thing your future employer will do will be to google you. Be up there, in the virtual world, but be up there regularly (and yes that reminds me that really I do not put too much on this blog, nor on my personal twitter account)… e-sustainability perhaps we could call that. And the author of the book is quite good at that (her blog is regularly updated). But I think there are limits in branding yourself and I'm not really too keen to go through all the "librarians' blogs", sorry but I think there is a bit of e-navel gazing up there.
Twenty years ago I was in Hollywood at a party (nothing too grand sorry to disappoint you, my aunt happens to be friend with Kevin Costner's hairdresser and it was her birthday party) and one guy asked me what my job was. I said I was a librarian, and he left the room immediately. Lovely. Turned out he was a film director (or so he said...). But then, a few years later, there was the great exclamation "I'm a Librarian!" from Rachel Weisz's character in The Mummy (1999) so it's not all that bad really!
Book worth reading? Yes! I would spend more time on the first chapter and the survey (…unless of course you want to impress with your knowledge of popular US culture in which you find librarians... I love graphic novels and cartoons and found quite a few wonderful stuff there, for example Rex Libris or Shelf Check). The accompanying site is really worth a look and one has to admit that Ruth Neale has done an impressive piece of work. Who’s next to do something similar but for the rest of the world’s popular cultures? (having said that, it has probably been done I have not searched for it... A great part of our job is to catalogue, catalogue, catalogue and try to build more and more links between different languages so that, hopefully, if theses about librarians in films have been done in Japan and Slovakia, we should know about it... just after saying that, I had a brief look at LISA, and there's quite a subtantial amount there already :-)
To me, the image I certainly do not want to be associated with, is the terrifying looking monk in The Name of the Rose : he looks scruffy, in a bad mood, probably has bad breath, the access to the library is very restrained... in short he looks like some of the dragon-like-librarians that used to terrify me in highschool or in the Sorbonne (contrary to my lovely, helpful, humble librarians in my quartier or in my other school ). However, one has to be careful with the term "positive image"... after all, that guy too, was a librarian... so yes, there are Conan the Barbarians/Librarians indeed... My favourite images of librarians is in Soylent Green I don't really give a damn about the way they look and yes they do not even have the basics we can afford to have here (clean clothes and body, etc...) but I respect very much what they do... (would it be grandiloquent to think then about the work done by the Connecticut Four?)
Let's continue to ALA, CLA and CILIP and ABF and AEB and VDB.. and... -as long as these associations remain faithful to their ethics- help librarians in other countries that are not as lucky as we are.
... Yes, there used to be a shocking time when you could not avoid the emerging trend of tattooed librarians belly-dancing on the web... maybe perhaps we can think about early sixties feminists burning their bras as a sign of revolt. Now, today, thank God, we can avoid viewing such sites, and no, it is no longer mandatory to belly-dance and therefore show your beautiful tattoos doing so, when you pass your MA in Librarianship.
Before picking up the book I frankly thought I did not give a flying monkey about what librarians looked like. As long as the basics are there. The basics? Clean body/hair/clothes/shoes (having said that, my favourite librarians in films do not have the basics, as you will see later) but then of course there are other basics... if you're working with the public like I'm sure many of you do, it's important to look helpful and non-scary. I have put the following
next to my door and it helps, somehow (it also had quick a few "likes" on the library facebook page) or... if you're feeling particularly LGBTQ friendly this year, you could always wear your "Nobody knows I'm a librarian" T-shirt. Humour I think is always a great great thing (dangerous too, that's true, not long ago I tried to do a Russian advert for my collection, I can't show you my poster because it's in copyright troubled waters but there was also the issue that my humour would have been perceived as mocking something quite iconic, though it was not my intention) Anyway...
Great thing about the book, it has an e-companion to go with it
(oh I love that so much with some American books! You probably really don't care about that one, but I show you anyway the companion site to the book Beginner's Russian made by UCLA)
Chapter 1 deals with stereotype. And indeed everyone every day is faced by stereotype... we see an effeminate man and he must be gay though he might be happily married with a woman and have three kids. A black guy in a hoody and it is late at night, and you get nervous.We must try our best not to assume anything, try to be as fair as we can.
So let's try to work with my own stereotypes now. What did I assume when I started this book? Well, I see it is printed in the USA, so I have my usual preconceptions against US citizens: they will not speak of much outside of their country. But I have to say I'm immediately wrong, as they speak about some British site. And of course the author mentions Antony Brewerton as we all remember, I'm sure, a fantastic picture of his, wearing sun glasses and yelling on a microphone. "Wear lipstick, have a tattoo, belly-dance, then get naked: The making of a virtual librarian".
But I have to say my first stereotype was right, much of the book will speak about librarians in US American popular culture and chapter 2 Pop Culture and Librarians was a complete discovery for me. I love movies (ie films made in Hollywood) and cartoons, and graphic novels, but how's about BDs (French and Belgium French graphic novels), mangas, Spanish and German cartoons etc... and what about foreign films and novels? There are many portraits of librarians in many French, Spanish etc... films. So I skipped through that sorry (but I solemnly promise that one day I will watch It's a wonderful life ;-)
As I was completely lost I had an interesting discussion with one of my Assistants about intellectuals in Anglo-Saxon culture, it’s as if you have to “turn down” your culture, and I really wonder if, in Italian films say, you wouldn’t find a higher number of attractive librarians...(please do comment on the blog if I'm wrong, or right, or anything!)... Speaking of which... yes! Casanova was a librarian, but he really didn't like his work, and he really didn't do much work as a librarian (it was just the job of sitting in a library, moving things about from time to time to justify his salary, or rather his pension, for he was very old then), which is great for us as he produced what is considered one of the most beautiful French writings of the 18th century. So that's one librarian in film, one, with Fellini's Casanova
Another stereotype was with Librarians' salary which are not that great in the USA either, and many jobs not labelled as 'librarians' jobs' were better paid...
I'd like to tell you about a Russian film I saw recently. Бубен, барабан is the story of a librarian selling books from her library on the black market so that she can have enough to eat. Needless to say it continues with a story of lost love and then... no I won't tell you. So I do understand the point of the author speaking about librarians' relative low salaries, but at least, we, outside of Russia and Ukraine -and many other countries I'm sure-, are lucky enough to get a minimal salary for our work as librarian. The two Russian Librarians who stayed in my house last year were telling me that their salary was not enough, one had a richer partner, the other a second job. And I remember Mike Heaney telling me that he had mentioned the need for a minimal salary for Russian Librarians when he talked at a conference in Saint Petersburg.
The survey done by Ruth Neale is very impressive (see end of the book) and the author also got a reasonable number of answers from non-English speaking countries. What a shame then, that the only librarians interviewed were all native English speakers and mostly Americans from the US.
Main point to me... how to "brand yourself" (a term I have seen a few times now coming from ALA publications, and no, it is not necessarily about tattoos, though some are cute I really like the classification ones, but no, I will not have PQ tattooed on me, for French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese literature because in colloquial French PQ means toilet paper, hilarious! Anyway...) maybe some will not like such a capitalistic term, as some are shocked equally with the term "customer care" however those terms should be used without fear. And to be frank with you (and I'm sure I was not the only one) I got very nervous at the beginning of this year, knowing that all new students had to pay higher fees. I was thinking, will they be happy enough with what I have to offer in my library?
So branding yourself is an everyday thing... if you are, like me, more or less doing everything in your library, (from cataloguing, classifiying, cleaning the loos at times, helping readers, mentoring, moving books to... weeding and e-worlding and etc...) it is about dumping everything you are doing to help the reader who comes and asks for help. And of course, branding is online too. The first thing your future employer will do will be to google you. Be up there, in the virtual world, but be up there regularly (and yes that reminds me that really I do not put too much on this blog, nor on my personal twitter account)… e-sustainability perhaps we could call that. And the author of the book is quite good at that (her blog is regularly updated). But I think there are limits in branding yourself and I'm not really too keen to go through all the "librarians' blogs", sorry but I think there is a bit of e-navel gazing up there.
Twenty years ago I was in Hollywood at a party (nothing too grand sorry to disappoint you, my aunt happens to be friend with Kevin Costner's hairdresser and it was her birthday party) and one guy asked me what my job was. I said I was a librarian, and he left the room immediately. Lovely. Turned out he was a film director (or so he said...). But then, a few years later, there was the great exclamation "I'm a Librarian!" from Rachel Weisz's character in The Mummy (1999) so it's not all that bad really!
Book worth reading? Yes! I would spend more time on the first chapter and the survey (…unless of course you want to impress with your knowledge of popular US culture in which you find librarians... I love graphic novels and cartoons and found quite a few wonderful stuff there, for example Rex Libris or Shelf Check). The accompanying site is really worth a look and one has to admit that Ruth Neale has done an impressive piece of work. Who’s next to do something similar but for the rest of the world’s popular cultures? (having said that, it has probably been done I have not searched for it... A great part of our job is to catalogue, catalogue, catalogue and try to build more and more links between different languages so that, hopefully, if theses about librarians in films have been done in Japan and Slovakia, we should know about it... just after saying that, I had a brief look at LISA, and there's quite a subtantial amount there already :-)
To me, the image I certainly do not want to be associated with, is the terrifying looking monk in The Name of the Rose : he looks scruffy, in a bad mood, probably has bad breath, the access to the library is very restrained... in short he looks like some of the dragon-like-librarians that used to terrify me in highschool or in the Sorbonne (contrary to my lovely, helpful, humble librarians in my quartier or in my other school ). However, one has to be careful with the term "positive image"... after all, that guy too, was a librarian... so yes, there are Conan the Barbarians/Librarians indeed... My favourite images of librarians is in Soylent Green I don't really give a damn about the way they look and yes they do not even have the basics we can afford to have here (clean clothes and body, etc...) but I respect very much what they do... (would it be grandiloquent to think then about the work done by the Connecticut Four?)
Let's continue to ALA, CLA and CILIP and ABF and AEB and VDB.. and... -as long as these associations remain faithful to their ethics- help librarians in other countries that are not as lucky as we are.
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