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Die Hipster Librarian Trash?
July 12, 2007
As the New York Times recently proved with its "A Hipper Crowd of Shushers," dopey journalism lives. Sure, it was in the airy Style section, but the article still failed at its small mission (what makes librarians cool?) and so spectaculary that at first I didn't have a reaction. Nothing new, important, or relevant was said. I went about my editing.
Then a pretty heated thread started on Publib under titles like "librarian attire" and "librarian style," wherein some professionals argued that not enough of their kind "makes an effort" to look put together at conferences, on Capitol Hill, and on the job. Nerves were touched, feelings hurt, and I felt compelled to reread the Times piece, and it dawned on me what an impact such a little piece of fluff could have.
The librarian image has been debated for as long as I've been at LJ, and long before that, and it strikes me that now more than ever, it needs proper sorting out as the profession keeps graying (and I'm slowly but surely losing book reviewers to retirement). What's going to compel younger generations to join up? A slick treatment in the Times? Or editorials by the likes of librarian Nicole Scherer?
In her rebuttal in The Huffington Post, she wrote, "Librarians are cool, not because of how we dress...but because our job is cool: We protect people's freedom to seek out and find the information they need: All service and no shushing." I couldn't have said it as good at that. And I don't understand how the Times writer didn't elicit a quote along those lines from the librarians interviewed. The young New York City librarians I know—I live in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, a neighborhood mentioned as a hotbed of librarian cool in the article—have brains and came to librarianship not to gain pop
culture points but because they were attracted to the idea of public service in this era of challenged personal freedom.
If they are deemed "cool" in the process, so be it, but I think they would resent being aligned with the group of rich, mainly white twenty- and thirtysomethings living in my neck of the woods snidely called "trustafarians" by the older, considerably crusty generation of original punks/artists/carpenters who began gentrifying that section of Brooklyn nearly 20 years ago. My librarian friends certainly aren't rich (one can't get a job!) and don't live in any of the heinous, flimsy high rises being built for fantastic views of the East River. In a word, they ain't hipsters (see illustration, left).
All in all, however, I think that dialogue, both dopey and informed, is great for the librarian image, which our very own Francine Fialkoff discussed in her February editorial "The Image Thing." If it gets people talking loudly enough, maybe a few crazy kids will get interested and want to be librarians, and not Paris Hilton, when they grow up.
Posted by Heather McCormack on July 12, 2007 | Comments (3)
