Librarians

Librarians: Masters of the Info Universe

In honor of National Library Week we’d like to share some fun facts Famous Librarians J. Edgar Hoover, Casanova, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, former first lady Laura Bush, and Mao Zedong have all at one point worked as a librarian or in a library. Librarians influence our culture and society While clearing out old archives at the Palmer Theological Seminary in 2005, librarian Heather Carbo found a working manuscript of one of Beethoven’s final compositions Librarians are heroic Alia Muhammad Baker, the chief librarian of Basra, Iraq, removed 30,000 books from the city’s main library before it was destroyed during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Their numbers are many In 2009, there were 206,000 librarians, 50,000 library technicians and 96,000 other education, training and library workers Warning to readers about librarians A character in “The Callahan Touch”, one of science fiction writer Spider Robinson’s books, said, “Librarians are the secret masters of the universe. They control information. Never piss one off.” Happy National Library Week! (information for this blogpost was referenced from cnn.com)

Short-takes: A new look at librarians

Over the weekend, I read this interview with Marilyn Johnson, about her new book, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All. Johnson, author of The Dead Beat, follows up her chronicle of obituary-writers with an account of librarians. She even mentions book cart drills, which I’ve learned about from our own Debbie Pennino! I think librarians and library users might get a kick out of the piece.

Librarian Artists

Reading this month’s Lucky magazine, I was excited to read about featured
New York artist Roz Leibowitz [who] draws impossibly intricate sketches with nothing more than a pencil and an antique sheet of paper, which the former librarian pulls from her collection of 18th– and 19th-century ephemera.
I took a look at some of her other works at the Sears-Peyton gallery, and thought they were interesting, gothic pieces.   I liked the idea of a librarian-artist re-using found papers.  I think my favorite is The Blizzard.  What’s yours?  And do you have any other favorite librarian-artists?