For decades we have been familiar with a stereotype that often goes unnoticed. This stereotype has remained within our society whilst others have either been banished from our culture, or have simply faded into the abyss of ancient pre-conceived notions. This criminally unfair stereotype has rarely been challenged in popular culture and has often been supported in films and television. This is, of course, the stereotype of the librarian.
Sat behind a desk in the York St. John Fountains Library I found Charlotte, a trainee librarian. She has worked within libraries for two years and has spent a year working inside the Fountains library. Therefore, despite what some would think her lesser status as a ‘trainee’, she is fully equipped to enlighten an audience of false stereotype believers as to the way of a true librarian.
Firstly, she dispelled the myth that libraries are a quiet and easy workplace to operate as she described working in an academic library as a “fast paced environment” with a tendency to turn “frantic” within the months of September and May, with May being a particularly frenzied month due to many students’ dissertation’s being due in that month.
Charlotte also claimed that she hadn’t met a single librarian that fit the “strait-laced stereotype”, on the other hand she has met many other librarians like herself that are young people that “listen to heavy metal music and regularly attend concerts”. This dampens any concerns that librarians despise any level of volume higher than that of a book page being turned. Furthermore, Charlotte has also encountered librarians that “display sleeve tattoos” which goes further to tackle the notion that librarians are middle-aged spinsters that hold Victorian-esque social standards.
As for those who believe that being a librarian is an undemanding occupation to follow, Charlotte also has a rebuttal to that belief. “As librarians we are required to harbour vast amounts of knowledge regarding the books and specialist materials that our library, we don’t just sit there telling people to be quiet.” In addition, libraries are frequently used as information centres as Charlotte recalls being asked for directions to local supermarkets and other, more intriguing, queries such as “being asked how to write an address onto an envelope”.
As the Fountains Library is a twenty-four hour library, Charlotte is no stranger to working night shifts either. Working into the early hours of the morning has supplied Charlotte with many anecdotes which include “finding various students fast asleep trying (her) best not to wake them”. Working through the night also provides challenges as at this point the librarian essentially becomes an IT technician as IT technicians do not work night shifts in the academic library. This means that Charlotte, as do other librarians, has to also be tremendously skilled with computers whilst also being able to solve tech-based problems for students.
With regard to the concept of librarians being misanthropic, Charlotte revealed that she often volunteers to provide young people who suffer from dyslexia with reading therapy, in order to aid them with using academic tools and specialist literary materials that will ultimately enhance the quality of their education.
Stereotypes are easily maintained and are very difficult to shake, but in our evolved surroundings of the twenty-first century it is time to abandon conventional images of specific people as you will find out that, as with librarians, there is more than meets the eye.