Moving from Gatekeeper to Gardener: An Introspective On Librarianship

Jamie LaRue

By Jamie LaRue

I believe that librarianship is at the threshold of transformative change. Some of that change is society-wide. Some of it is specific to libraries. In recent years, I’ve spent a lot of my professional time exploring and talking about three key trends. Together, they make up my platform as a candidate for ALA president.

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When a Question Reveals a Collection

Ms. Valentine, do you have a book on the Greek alphabet?

Why, yes. Yes I do.

It’s Camp Read a lot time, and I can hear children at the picnic table, their voices raised to that particular shrillness that usually means an argument is about to boil over. There’s activity over at the fishing pond, too – but I don’t have a line of direct sight to the lines to see if anyone is swinging them…ah, no swinging yet. But I have, I estimate, about forty seconds to help you find a book on the Greek alphabet. After that, who knows what will happen with the fishing lines and the picnic argument.

You walk over to the foreign language collection in the 400s, perhaps the shelf I am prouder of than any other in this collection of 14,000 items. I built it from nothing, almost. We needed materials for our ESL students.

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