What I Hope YOU Will Get Out Of It

What I Hope You Will Get Out Of It

I've always been a bit of a Nosy Nellie -- curious about how others live, what they do, how they spend their time and what kind of ice cream they eat at night.

This project is the flip side of that curiosity: I want to share these stories with others who are themselves curious about what goes on, day to day, in a public library.

The “others” include the obvious audiences of a library-dedicated blog: if you’re a library student interested in how public libraries operate, if you’re a library administrator feeling disconnected from frontline library service, if you’re a library school professor or instructor who, because of your academic focus, has been removed from “the real world” in libraries, I invite you to read the stories and catch a glimpse of what it's like, mid-2013.

I also have the (mistaken?) hope that people outside of the library world ("Library Land") might read some of these stories and reflections and get a better idea of what goes on in libraries and why that matters -- to individuals, to our country, to democracy itself. (I dream no small dreams here.)

If you're a taxpayer, a parent, a city leader, an elected official (or some combination of all of these) -- I want you to have a chance to see what we do and, I hope, recognize the values and the value of public librarians and public libraries.

Or, you know, if you're a bit of a Nosy Nellie, too, and are just curious to see what librarians do all day, anyway.