Darn tootin'.

Well today... a middle aged customer needed help finding a book on cloud computing for a paper she was doing. She came to me and I dutifully took her to the stacks as she had asked for a book. After seeing there was not much there I guided her towards the Ebsco databases. I walked her through finding Ebsco on the library website then helped her with search strategies. I found a couple of articles, used the correct citation style and emailed them to her.

Her response was that "I should have come to the library two years ago." Darn tootin'.
Contestant #2 (his choice of pseudonym, by the way :)), branch library manager

There are two parts to this story that have the most meaning for me.

The first is the last (sentence): "Darn tootin'."

It encompasses how most librarians (particularly long-serving ones, like Contestant #2) feel about what we do, and adds a bit of Okie flavor humor to boot: of COURSE you should come to the library. Why WOULDN'T you?!?

Maybe we shouldn't automatically feel that people should know this, but it's nice when you get that reaction: Oh, I should have come here before! It's satisfying to see that they recognize that you've helped them, and can help them, and are ready and willing to help them again.

The second line isn't even a full line, but there's a world of information in it: "and then helped her with search strategies." Contestant #2 was just stating another obvious, but this level of personal instruction and education is one of the things public libraries do the best -- and what makes me proud to work in a library.

The great educational philosopher and progressive educator (well, truly, father of Progressive Education) John Dewey said, "Libraries are the best schools", and I tend to agree.

I'm taking a second graduate library class this semester in "Information Literacy and Instruction" (ugh, library schools so need to get better class-title-writers!), so I've been thinking about this a lot the last few months.

The writer and intellectual gadfly Ray Bradbury never stopped touting the educational aspects of the public library. Right up until he died a few years ago, at the ripe age of 80-something, he was saying things like

“Libraries raised me. I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don’t have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.”

and 

“I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library. Before I fell in love with libraries, I was just a six-year-old boy. The library fueled all of my curiosities, from dinosaurs to ancient Egypt…I discovered that the library is the real school.”

By the way, Ray Bradbury wrote his greatest work, Fahrenheit 451, on a typewriter in the basement of a public library.

Is the library the source of most great literature?

Darn tootin'.