Media Mondays: Librarian-A-Matic

And, we're back. A week's vacation from blogging leaves me refreshed, and hopefully over sickness.


Simply click and drag accessories to attempt to create a correct representation of a librarian:



You can verify how well you did in the answer key below.



The accurate representation of the librarian is pictured below. She is elderly, of course, with grey hair tied back in a bun. Her glasses are lowered to the tip of her nose and her mouth curled into a sneer. The high collar, low sleeves and long skirt conceal nearly all of her ghastly skin, and she clutches a thick tome (an obscure work on Dickensian letters) close to her body. All of this adds up to an inaccessable public employee who detests the prescence of patrons, and is punctuated by the finger lifted to her lips, shushing anyone daring to raise their voice above a whisper.

If you have created anything but the librarian represented here, you have either made an incomplete or simply inaccurate librarian model. If you created a sexy librarian, you are clearly deluded, and live in a world outside of reality. Sexy librarians, like unicorns and leprachauns, are creatures of myth and nothing more. Additionally, if you created a male librarian, you are misinformed. There is no such thing as a male librarian. Or if there is, they are certainly not heterosexual, as my friend Jason (who is gay) informed me, once he found out I was entering the LIS program:You'll be the first straight librarian ever!

While it would be fun to use the blonde bun to recall Marian the Librarian in the Music Man, this is another incorrect media projection of what librarians really are. Clearly no librarian could be as young as is represented in the film, since none are younger than seventy years of age. And while it may be tempting to put the Hitler moustache on the librarian to emphasize the totalitarian grasp in which librarians hold their library materials, this would be a slight, and thus unfair, exaggeration.

My goal is that as a result of your participation in this exercise, you have gained a greater understanding of what constitutes a librarian. My goal is that you can now more quickly identify one next time you take a trip to the library, or even during your next trip to the grocery store, church, or senior center. Knowledge, after all, is power.






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