By Tonya F.
I will always be a librarian at heart. Having been a public librarian for 8 years, every day brought with it the opportunity to make a great impact on every individual that walked through the door. While libraries are indeed evolving, the ambition is still the same; to engage and enrich the community.
It would be hard to surmise how libraries have changed my life with just one story. From my own experiences as a child struggling to overcome low reading skills, to a shy teenager that was given kindness by the school librarian to sit quietly in the library during lunch (a privilege she granted to no one else)…libraries were a respite from the world around me. It was with this in mind that I greeted every new day as a librarian. Whether it be the recommending of a book or movie to a patron, teaching free computer classes, helping a student go beyond Google for their schoolwork, or assisting a job seeker with their resume and job searching…the honor to impact the community in which I served was never far from my mind.