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silveradept[This year's December Days are categorized! Specifically: "Things I should have learned in library school, had (I/they) been paying attention. But I can make that out of just about anything you'd like to know about library school or the library profession, so if you have suggestions, I'll happily take them.]
The librarian in literature and media is a very different creature than the librarian at the local public library. For one thing, the librarian in literature and media has adventures outside their workspace, or a workspace that allows them to go on adventures. The adventuring librarian also has an encyclopedic knowledge of things that will be relevant to them while they are adventuring, so that they can decipher texts or spot inconsistencies in well-crafted lies. It's less true now that the librarian is a Squishy Wizard that needs protecting, but it is still true that adventuring librarians tend to be put in party and ensemble situations where someone else handles the tasks of main strength, even if the librarian can tell them how to apply that strength in such a way as to produce maximum results. Or sometimes perform an apparent feat of incredible strength by analyzing the situation and applying a small amount of force to a nexus point that causes an often Rube Goldberg-esque chain reaction that removes the obstacles or defeats the villain (or their unnecessarily slow-moving death trap.)
People come in to the library and all is about whether we've seen that media properties (often yes) and ask us what we think about the perception and portrayal of librarians (we'd like their budget, please, and yesterday, if you can get it). Adventure librarians are dramatized because nobody wants to watch a show about people doing ordinary things, or even really cool things, where maybe one in a thousand people gives feedback past the immediate help, and you don't actually know what happened to most of the pale who came in today for something. You could follow the regulars, but there's all those good potential stories about kids and job searches and technology questions that will just simply hang there without resolution, unless you chased them all down and followed the, and that's well out of anyone's documentary budget. Cheaper to make a show where librarians save the world on the regular. Better television, too.
Then there's the other role that librarians, especially women in libraries, are put in - the uptight and fussy librarian. According to The Librarian Stereotype, this used to be applied to men who joined the profession, since most people saw librarianship as a second career for men who failed at some other pursuit. While the library saw itself as the place where people went to get themselves educated and what children went to get themselves good literature, the works were just as important as the people, and so the image persisted. Having set up the image of the librarian as an uptight marm, that idea becomes significantly fetishised and the subject of a few works of erotica where the fussy librarian is really just sexually repressed and once there's the right penis in her life, it totems out that she's actually very sexually adventurous. (And she wears her hair loose, instead of in tight buns.) The Hot Librarian is essentially built on this idea, and many a person believes they're the person that can unlock that repressed personality. If those people would stop to notice, they'd find that many of the people who they think are repressed are actually married already, or otherwise attached to a partner. That doesn't stop the creepy people, even though it should.
Which is not to say that librarians don't do a little bit of unrealistic pedestal-placing themselves. Because this work is generally thankless and unrecognized, even though it is essential to a lot of people's lives (hi, feminized profession), there's a bit of a trend to compare oneself to the librarians that appear in the magazines and newspapers for their excellent work. The people who actually receive the accolades that all librarians deserve become, essentially, "rock stars" as the public face of the profession. I have no idea what it feels like to be one of them, but I do understand the desire to live a bit vicariously through them and to see whether or not the things that made them so successful could be adapted to our location, with possibly the same sort of excellent results. It is very much the same feeling that the person who works at the multinational conglomerates can get when everyone above them on the corporate hierarchy is receiving praise and bonuses and they're being told there will be no raises for anyone. There will be days where the work itself will be enough, and there will be days where you would like widespread recognition for doing the things that you do on a regular basis. Burnout is something that never stays too far away.
One of the things that library school doesn't adequately prepare you for is that the profession itself does excellent, valuable, necessary work and that you are likely to never be recognized for that work throughout your career. There are professional organizations you can join, and committees you can serve on, and all sorts of things in that regard, but there's not really any defined way that you can rise to some sort of prominence in your field. It's like being an artist - a seemingly-random few people will become megastars, some others will be able to gain a measure of local fame, and others might become the house band for a local thing or two, but the grand majority of everyone will do the work because they enjoy it and receive no game at all for it. For people that are externally motivated, this can be a hard switch.
The librarian in literature and media is a very different creature than the librarian at the local public library. For one thing, the librarian in literature and media has adventures outside their workspace, or a workspace that allows them to go on adventures. The adventuring librarian also has an encyclopedic knowledge of things that will be relevant to them while they are adventuring, so that they can decipher texts or spot inconsistencies in well-crafted lies. It's less true now that the librarian is a Squishy Wizard that needs protecting, but it is still true that adventuring librarians tend to be put in party and ensemble situations where someone else handles the tasks of main strength, even if the librarian can tell them how to apply that strength in such a way as to produce maximum results. Or sometimes perform an apparent feat of incredible strength by analyzing the situation and applying a small amount of force to a nexus point that causes an often Rube Goldberg-esque chain reaction that removes the obstacles or defeats the villain (or their unnecessarily slow-moving death trap.)
People come in to the library and all is about whether we've seen that media properties (often yes) and ask us what we think about the perception and portrayal of librarians (we'd like their budget, please, and yesterday, if you can get it). Adventure librarians are dramatized because nobody wants to watch a show about people doing ordinary things, or even really cool things, where maybe one in a thousand people gives feedback past the immediate help, and you don't actually know what happened to most of the pale who came in today for something. You could follow the regulars, but there's all those good potential stories about kids and job searches and technology questions that will just simply hang there without resolution, unless you chased them all down and followed the, and that's well out of anyone's documentary budget. Cheaper to make a show where librarians save the world on the regular. Better television, too.
Then there's the other role that librarians, especially women in libraries, are put in - the uptight and fussy librarian. According to The Librarian Stereotype, this used to be applied to men who joined the profession, since most people saw librarianship as a second career for men who failed at some other pursuit. While the library saw itself as the place where people went to get themselves educated and what children went to get themselves good literature, the works were just as important as the people, and so the image persisted. Having set up the image of the librarian as an uptight marm, that idea becomes significantly fetishised and the subject of a few works of erotica where the fussy librarian is really just sexually repressed and once there's the right penis in her life, it totems out that she's actually very sexually adventurous. (And she wears her hair loose, instead of in tight buns.) The Hot Librarian is essentially built on this idea, and many a person believes they're the person that can unlock that repressed personality. If those people would stop to notice, they'd find that many of the people who they think are repressed are actually married already, or otherwise attached to a partner. That doesn't stop the creepy people, even though it should.
Which is not to say that librarians don't do a little bit of unrealistic pedestal-placing themselves. Because this work is generally thankless and unrecognized, even though it is essential to a lot of people's lives (hi, feminized profession), there's a bit of a trend to compare oneself to the librarians that appear in the magazines and newspapers for their excellent work. The people who actually receive the accolades that all librarians deserve become, essentially, "rock stars" as the public face of the profession. I have no idea what it feels like to be one of them, but I do understand the desire to live a bit vicariously through them and to see whether or not the things that made them so successful could be adapted to our location, with possibly the same sort of excellent results. It is very much the same feeling that the person who works at the multinational conglomerates can get when everyone above them on the corporate hierarchy is receiving praise and bonuses and they're being told there will be no raises for anyone. There will be days where the work itself will be enough, and there will be days where you would like widespread recognition for doing the things that you do on a regular basis. Burnout is something that never stays too far away.
One of the things that library school doesn't adequately prepare you for is that the profession itself does excellent, valuable, necessary work and that you are likely to never be recognized for that work throughout your career. There are professional organizations you can join, and committees you can serve on, and all sorts of things in that regard, but there's not really any defined way that you can rise to some sort of prominence in your field. It's like being an artist - a seemingly-random few people will become megastars, some others will be able to gain a measure of local fame, and others might become the house band for a local thing or two, but the grand majority of everyone will do the work because they enjoy it and receive no game at all for it. For people that are externally motivated, this can be a hard switch.
