LISNews: Library Futurists

All right, I’ll say it. I better say it soon or it will no longer be true.

I’m young. I’m what the library literature and conferences call a “millennial.” One of those young adults born after 1980 with all that technology and social networks. This means I work with faculty members who have children older than me. As you can imagine there is a bit of a culture gap in many discussions: music, movies, tv, politics, back pain, medical procedures.

I am also a librarian. One of those women with the bun, glasses, and all those books. This means that those millennial students I see during my library instruction sessions see me as a step beyond the loser category.

So how do I connect those two dots of my life? Because to be truthful, I don’t belong in either stereotype. Actually, I’m made up of more dots than that. I’m also a wife, mother, Midwest farmer’s daughter, baker of pies, knitter, eater of chocolate, gopher in all house projects, keeper of the budget, fan of inappropriate jokes, butt of inappropriate jokes, reader, researcher, lover of Christmas carols, and a million more quirks depending on my mood and whether I’ve had enough sleep.

I suppose that part of my life as a librarian is that I love to organize. I want to see the connections, form the pattern, establish the bonds between information to discover truth. So what do those isolated dots of my personality create? Perhaps the dots form a picture of a lovely Sunday picnic in the park that all measures up to me, a millennial librarian who is “practically perfect in every way.”

Perhaps, it just means that I am one more person trying to do my best is my chosen career. As a librarian, I want to provide others with whatever information they desire. As an instruction librarian, I want to teach students that accessing relevant information, while seemingly complex, is one of the most important skills they will develop. I love showing students the information that is available to them and helping them see themselves as part of something larger.

I’ve had the chance to show students that there is more to research than Google. There was one student who was researching the use of social networking especially blogs in businesses. We ended up in the stacks and he noted, “I didn’t think the library would have books on stuff like this.” A successful encounter.

There have also been times where I’ve been less successful. Once after a week of class sessions where I discussed different types of sources, one student commented in her course blog, “I don’t know what all these books are for.”

And of course there are those encounters that leave you wondering. I had a student who needed print sources for a paper. She was researching graphic novels. Here was our discussion as I found some scholarly works.

Me: “Here’s an article discussing the portrayal of the Holocaust in two graphic novels.”
Her: “Was that like during World War II?”
Me: “Yes.”
Her: “Must have something to do with X-Men then.”

I was quiet and it is at times like that when I let the dots drift. Sometimes you don’t want to see the routes a line must travel in order to make two points connect. Yet, somewhere in that path of graphic novels, the Holocaust, and X-Men, the library made a stopping point. And that creates a beautiful picture.