One of my first lessons as a big boy librarian about working with the public was put thusly, "You can bend or break almost any rule the library has for the public, but you better be able to justify it to the paper." That is a pretty bold statement to tell a kid fresh out of library school. "You got carte blanche, punk, but you are on your own if you get caught." I felt like I was given keys to the Batmobile or something.
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| I wanna Bat-bookmobile |
But then I had to actually talk to the press. I do not remember the details, but I know it had something to do with how we disposed of books. The journalist was following up on a patron complaint that we just throw away old, unused, musty, moldy and insect ridden books. How dare we! I could just feel the hint of Dateline-top-scare-story-itus in the journalists voice, so I did what any good librarian would do: I passed the problem up. The director took care of it from there.
But it raises an interesting question in any situation: do you serve the library or the public? Gut reaction says, "Serve the public, the community funds us and we are its intellectual backbone and stuff!" That's true I would say 95 percent of the time. But there's that five percent of the time when you have to protect the library from the public. In the age of lawsuits, do you help up the lady that fell in the stacks? In the age of Twitter, do you dare make a bad impression on a problem patron who is damaging the library? In the age of blogging, do you admit that a person on staff with command over a decent-size portion of the budget wishes the library was a Bat-bookmobile?
In case you are wondering, if you type "J is for" in the Google machine, the next automatic results were for "junkie," "James," "jellyfish," and "jungle fabric." I could have easily done three paragraphs on how each relate to the library.