Category Archives: Pop culture studies

The shushing librarian: Celebration or scorn?

Library Services in the Digital Age screenshot

“Library Services in the Digital Age” report from the Pew Research Center

A recent survey from the Pew Research Center, “Library Services in the Digital Age,” has been getting quite a bit of attention by writers clamoring for the return of quiet zones in libraries and the shushing librarian. Why? Because quiet study spaces rank high in the section on desirable library resources, just below librarians to help people find information, borrowing books, and free access to computers and the Internet.

I value the need of quiet zones in libraries. Most libraries, if provided enough space and funds (that’s the catch), have zones for both quiet and group study — proving that serving one need does not necessarily negate another need. Libraries serve diverse needs of diverse communities, as this study shows. My own workplace, a community college library, has a designated quiet study zone, as well as a group study space near the entrance.

No objections here to serving multiple needs of our community, including the need for a little quiet in a loud, busy world.

What I do object to, however, are phrases like this:

Even some libraries, whose professional shushers were once celebrated in cartoon and sitcom, now have music and special segregated areas designated for “quiet study,” which is what a library used to be.

~ Tim Kreider, “The Quiet Ones,” The New York Times Sunday Review

Professional shushers? Really?! Celebrated in pop media, eh? Righhhhht.

How about this New York Public Library worker in Breakfast at Tiffany’s? Not seeing too much celebration or dignity in this shushing librarian cameo.

The opening paragraph in this Salon.com essay was encouraging:

Librarians hate to be depicted as bun- and glasses-wearing shushers, hellbent on silencing any and all noisy activities within their sacred domain. Fair enough: Librarians are highly skilled, well-educated and socially aware as a rule, and should not be reduced to a cultural stereotype ranking only a notch or two above a church lady on the hipness scale.

~ Laura Miller, “Bring back shushing librarians,” Salon.com

But the next line?

Nevertheless, there’s a lot to be said for that shushing.

THUD.

How about we return to the first shushing librarian in film, Hugh E. Wright in The Good Companions (1933)? His shushing is met not with a round of (quiet) applause, but with a young woman’s dismissive attitude. And continued breaking of the silence rule. Yep, total respect for that initial cinematic shush. ;)

The Prime of Miss Jean BrodieOr how about the school librarian in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie who yells out, “This is a library. Not a fun fair!” to two giggling young girls? I’m not detecting anything but mutual loathing in those collective facial expressions, seen in the screenshot at right. I’m pretty sure that school librarian was NOT voted Most Popular School Staff Member at the end of the school year.

Or what about the public librarian in Waitress! or the school librarian in The Last American Virgin who both nearly faint at the shouting and fights that erupt in their libraries. Or the Quaker librarian in The Philadelphia Story, shushing and spouting off thees and thous, earning derision and wide-eyed stares from stars James Stewart and Katharine Hepburn.

Unflattering portrayals all, with librarian characters who serve as the butt of jokes, not as the receiver of esteem or respect.

So next time you’re in the mood for a shushing librarian, I suggest picking up the librarian action figure with the patented shushing super power, as seen below, and shush away to your heart’s content.

I’ll be in my library, doing my job and helping my users — not with a bang or a whimper, but with a smile.

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New year, new resources

In the midst of a review-and-reorganize mode that happens to me every January, I wanted to highlight a few sites and resources that I’ve added recently to my Resources page. Enjoy!

Pop! Goes the Librarian

This new blog by new librarian Maria Atilano began as a Social Media Management class project this past summer, and has since continued past library school. Fun, bright, cheeky, thought-provoking. I like it all. :D

Pop Goes the Librarian header

Libraries/Librarians in the Movies

Go Pinterest! The “library ninjas” at Saint Mary’s College Library started this Pinterest board to showcase reel libraries and librarians — and have even used some pics from this here blog. :) I also periodically check back in for any new titles I need to add to my Master List. Also, their other Pinterest boards are fun, too, including Mad About Austen and Books You Pretend to Read.

Screen Shot 2012-12-29 at 3.02.32 PM

From Spinsters to Cyberpunks: The Changing Face of Female Librarians

Library Student Journal 2011 imageThis is an essay available online through the open-access Library Student Journal, from the December 2011 edition. It’s always illuminating to be able to view a library science student’s perspective (see Pop! Goes the Librarian above), and this article’s author, Rosemary Kiladitis, was a media student before turning to library science. This article is an interesting read, with such observations as:

This discomfort, even shame, over a stereotypical image threatens to overwhelm the profession as it continues the vicious cycle of passing this discomfort onto newcomers. Dupré (2001) argues in “The Perception of Image and Status in the Library Profession” that the obsession with the stereotype, not the stereotype itself, is the problem.

When considering the image of the librarian and how the bun-headed spinster is played for laughs throughout the years, I go to the familiar: the movies. The cinema creates a snapshot of society in a given time period, and the image of the librarian is there for all to see.

What happens to the bun-headed spinster? Despite the professional angst, I believe she is a beloved touchstone.

Any new resources you’ve come across lately, or new movies you’ve seen featuring librarians? Please leave a comment and let me know!

Battle of the sexes

English: Knowledge, mural by Robert Lewis Reid...

Knowledge mural, Library of Congress

The keeper of knowledge has always been a powerful position. Although modern librarianship is moving from a “sage on the stage” perspective and toward more of a “guide on the side” outlook, one traditional depiction of librarians is that we are the modern gatekeepers of books and knowledge.

A clever twist on this traditional depiction are the Books in the 1973 sci-fi cult classic Soylent Green. The Books are people (see below), or as Matthew Battles put it, “a clear-eyed cabal of aged worthies ensconced deep within the ragged stacks of a library.”

Belle Mitchell as Book #3 in Soylent Green

Cyril Delevanti as Book #4 in Soylent Green

The materials librarians select help reflect, perhaps even shape, society’s collective knowledge. Perhaps the greatest influence of librarians is on children; the suggestive power of influencing what young children read can help determine future career and life choices (see the library scenes in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, 1945, and The Human Comedy, 1943, as examples).

Exercising a feminist standpoint, the users of this knowledge — those who run the world in political offices, the military heroes, the broadcast news anchors — are still mostly men. Despite progress made toward sexual equality, we still live in a patriarchal society. However, those traditional “gatekeepers” of the knowledge men use to obtain and sustain those powerful positions are mostly women. Most librarians, in reality AND in film, are female. Only about 1 out of 4 real-life librarians are male (see source here).

George Backus as Miss Anderson in Citizen Kane

The 1941 classic Citizen Kane is an interesting example of this battle of the sexes in miniature. A brief but memorable scene shows how a female librarian/archivist — a woman in an aggressively gender-neutralized exterior, see right — controls access to the personal papers of a prominent male figure, in this case the archives of newspaper tycoon Charles Foster Kane. See also The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Librarians hold one key — the key of access — to potential knowledge. Thus, the battle for knowledge crosses over, intersecting with the battle between the sexes. One could argue that this tension — male users wanting the knowledge that female librarians possess — has helped cause negative, stereotypical portrayals of reel librarians (Spinster Librarian, anyone?), as well as the overly sexed “Naughty Librarian” kind of roles.

Marilyn Johnson, in her book This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All (read my review post here), puts forward the theory that:

As a rule, librarians cultivate a professionalism that projects sexual neutrality, which permits them to guard their trove of both innocent and risque books from a position of high-minded principle, and also helps keep the stalkers at bay. But there is a tension between the business-like and the generally modest librarians and the occasionally racy books they guard that finds expression in the culture in a stream of winks and leers.

Now, don’t get me wrong. One of the points of this blog is to show a greater diversity of reel librarians, and many positive examples in roles both big and small exist (see my Hall of Fame and Honorable Mention lists for a start). In the specific blog post, I am trying to explore possible reasons behind negative portrayals of female reel librarians, of which, unfortunately, there are still plenty of examples.

It is also interesting to note that the invention of film emerged about the same time that women became the major force in the field of librarianship (both in the late 1800s). Also, an overwhelming majority of film directors and producers are men – perhaps further shifting more tension between knowledge/power and men/women, resulting in more negative characterizations of reel librarians?

Something to think about. And the beat goes on….

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This book is overdue (and reviewed)

This title’s been on my to-read list for awhile, Marilyn Johnson’s This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All. Johnson, bless her, is a writer fascinated by librarians. :) I do love people who recognize and appreciate the skills of librarians (see “husband, my”), and it’s funny and sweet the things Johnson marvels at.

Here’s how Johnson describes her book:

This book can be read as a journey into increasingly activist and visionary forms of library work. The walls of the library have grown porous now and in some cases are merely virtual, as librarians have come out from behind their desks to serve as active enablers in the digital age. [p. 10]

And here’s how she explains her initial fascination with librarians:

I became interested in librarians while researching my first book, about obituaries [that would be The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries]. With the exception of a few showy eccentrics … the most engaging obit subjects were librarians. An obituary of a librarian could be about anything under the sun, a woman with a phenomenal memory, who recalled the books her aging patrons read as children — and was also, incidentally, the best sailor on her stretch of the Main coast — or a man obsessed with maps, who helped automate the Library of Congress’s map catalog and paved the way for wonders like Google Maps. [p. 5]

For obvious reasons, I also kept going back to the chapter on librarian bloggers, “The Blog People,” reading aloud passages to my husband.

Librarians were the last people I’d expect to make noise on a social network. And yet, in the last decade or so, librarians took to blogging with a vengeance. … Unedited and unmonitored, blogs represented a kind of free expression that librarians traditionally supported and celebrated, but had rarely taken the opportunity to practice. [p. 50]

Open, casual, approachable, dedicated to demystifying technology and networked to the eyeballs, the bloggers became the public face of the twenty-first-century librarian. [p. 52]

Librarians, in short, were swarming in the Web, exploring and mapping it, while linking readers to the shiny, or useful, or fascinating things they found along the way. [p. 55]

This last quote came at the end of this long description of Johnson’s amazement at all the useful things a librarian will link to while writing a post (like podcasts or Google map directions or links to online degree programs). Throughout this passage, I kept thinking, “Why wouldn’t you link to stuff like that? It just makes sense.” But then, I’m a librarian, and I just think that way. ;)  It’s nice to have others appreciate that kind of detail.

There’s a brief chapter, “Follow that Tattooed Librarian” that includes the “sexy librarian” image and includes shout-outs to the librarian movies Party Girl (1995) and Desk Set (1957). She also highlights a strip club in Las Vegas called “The Library.” The strippers at this club were also fascinated with real librarians and asked them for advice to make their acts more realistic! ;)

Other funny, endearing quotes and non-sequitors throughout the book:

In tough times, a librarian is a terrible thing to waste. [p. 8]

Someday, I will stop being surprised at all the things librarians read; they’ll read anything. [p. 49]

I had no idea poop was such a problem for librarians [p. 61]

“‘Sorry to get all reference on you’?” What a great phrase. [p. 111]

As a breed, librarians tend to share a sense of humor that is quirky, sardonic, and full of wordplay, but nothing captures their gift for self-mockery quite as vividly as the book-cart drills, held at various state conferences and culminating each year in a contest at the American Library Association’s summer convention. [p. 124, see the 2010 championship routine below]

I couldn’t pick the archivist out of a police lineup of librarians. Except for the tattooed ones, all of them looked like people I’d known at Oberlin. [p. 233]

Best thing about this book is how reader-friendly it is. You don’t have to read straight through. (I sure didn’t!) It’s the kind of book you can flip to, read for awhile, smile, laugh, cry, put it down, and then pick up again when you need to. That’s probably why it took me so long to return it to the library.

In short, if you’re a librarian, you will love this book. If you’re not a librarian, then be warned, because after reading this book, you will fall in love with us. Or more in love with us. And reading this book will increase your chances 100% of saying “thank you” the next time you visit your local library and find yourself sharing a smile with your friendly librarian. :)

And here’s a clip of the ALA 2010 Book Cart Drill Champions, “Night of the Living Librarians”

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So what’s it all about, eh?

I’ve written quite a bit so far about character types, stock types, stereotypes, etc., of both male and female reel librarians and delved into why those types exist. But what is the next step… how do we librarians react to our own celluloid images?

Do we…

… ignore the portrayals completely and feel embarrassed by them?

… protest the stereotypical characteristics (thereby most likely alienating others and begging for misquoted mutterings of Methinks thou dost protest too much)?

… throw a pity party and play the song “It’s My Party” over and over?

… state proudly, “I… am a librarian!” and fall over in a drunken stupor? ;)

Does it even matter how we react?

I think it does.

In the article “Loveless Frump as Hip and Sexy Party Girl:  A Reevaluation of the Old-Maid Stereotype” (which I’ve cited before on this blog), Katharine Adams wrote, “stereotype is not irredeemably negative,” and “the loveless-frump image offers librarians to rewrite the cultural narrative within which we live” (291). Recognition of reel librarian stereotypes — or whatever you choose to call ‘em — can lead to freedom from those stereotypes. We librarians can laugh at our own images, perhaps appreciating how a librarian’s role helps a particular film’s plot or story structure instead of obsessing over how the librarian’s image reflects badly (or not at all) on the profession itself.

Side thought:  The same sentiment above could be extended to librarian blogs and bloggers! Why not let the world know that librarianship is overflowing with professionals full of wit and humor and style and intellectual curiosity?

It also helps to recognize that stereotypical traits do not stamp every librarian portrayal; the adjectives sexy, intelligent, funny, and adventurous can also be applied to male and female reel librarians. I hope this blog has helped, and continues to help, shine a light on the myriad and depth of reel librarian roles. And I’m not the only one who shares this passion for librarianship and pop culture! Please visit the related sites I’ve listed and linked to on the sidebar. –>

As Adams observes, “the strategy of the lipstick librarian [...] promotes manipulating stereotypes of women with a sly smile and a knowing wink” (297). Awareness and identification of this knowledge is the key to transcending stereotypical roles and fulfilling the diversity of librarians, real and reel.

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