the pinakes
from papyrus to pdf

ON TATTOED LIBRARIANS

To be fair, the recent Salon.com interview with writer Marilyn Johnson about her new tome, This Book is Overdue: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All, is not the first place I’ve seen the “librarians can be hip! Librarians can have tattoos!” theme. In fact, that’s part of the problem — I’ve seen that canard a few too many times now and it’s beginning to bug me. Even the director of my graduate school is guilty of the same maneuver.

Of course librarians have tattoos.

Some even have professionally relevant tattoos! I have one friend, an MLIS, with an entire scene from Where the Wild Things Are across her back (the subject of a children’s lit research paper she wrote at SLIS). But tattoos are hardly new. Body art has a legacy stretching back thousands of years, and the contemporary, widespread popularity of tattoos — blossoming in the early nineties, still going strong twenty years on — shows no signs of abating. Tattoos aren’t limited to record store clerks anymore. My wife has two tattoos — and she’s an accounting paraprofessional. So are accountants considered hip now too?

At the root of all this is a defensiveness about our profession that some librarians have adopted. Are we really so afraid of hair buns and cardigans? Libraries and librarians have real-world challenges to deal with. Budgets are being slashed. Technology is transforming information use. We’re still figuring out what is the 21st century librarian’s skill set.

Meanwhile, any and all trades with practitioners under 40 are going to have plenty of tattooed or otherwise hip professionals, just as they are bound to also have a few nerdy, bookish types. Heck, there are plenty of people over 40 with tattoos. It’s become…unremarkable. So the more we remark on it, the more we try and make a big deal about the appearance of librarians, the more silly and vain we look. Librarians can and do come in every stripe, every style, every age. That’s no longer the point.

Johnson does point out a number of great things libraries do — this entire passage is on point: “As for librarians, they’re civil servants. They deal with all kinds of social welfare problems, from childcare to homelessness to people who can’t navigate the bureaucracy to get benefits or help finding a job. The buck stops at the library. If we keep cutting library aid, people who can’t figure out how to file for taxes, or how to use e-mail, are going to be out of luck. About 20 percent of the population is not wired; they don’t have Internet access or a smart phone.”

These are the talking points librarians should use when trying to influence public perception, not the punkish color of our hair or the trendiness of our musical taste (though it’s unfortunate, as my friend Nicole pointed out to me, that Johnson doesn’t highlight the value academic and special librarians bring as well; public libraries are only one sector of the profession).

When you get down to it, that kid who always talks about how hip or popular he or she is is never actually hip or popular. Let’s stop being afraid of a harmless stereotype and have a little fun with it, and get serious when we talk about all the good things we can do.