Raring and Annoyed Librarians

Librarians are often stereotyped as being quite, demure and conservative.  That has not been my experience of them, but that is often what’s portrayed in popular culture.  Two librarians working against this stereotype are Jessamyn West who blogs at librarian.net (“Putting the rarin back in librarian since 1999”) and the anonymous Annoyed Librarian on the Library Journal’s blog site.  Both Jessamyn and Annoyed have strong public opinions, senses of humor and are concerned about protecting free access to information.

The “rarin” Jessamyn is a “sometimes librarian, sometimes writer, sometimes blogger, and sometimes technology instructor/consultant.”  She has a second blog and two published books, both about the digital divide.  She usually writes blog posts a few times a month.  The topics she tends to focus on include public access to information, policies that affect that, current news about libraries and some interesting history about librarians and librarianship. Whatever the topic, I found her blog easy to read and always interesting.  She posts quite a few pictures, links and writes posts of various lengths.   

In the last several months my personal favorite was the longer post I Got a Kindle about her buying a Kindle and then trying different ways to download books onto it.  It was both informative (for someone who does not have an e-reader) and did the result of her need to be able to help patrons with their e-readers and e-books.  One issue that she’s been following over the last several months is open access, particularly to information gained and published from scientific research that the public funds.  She encouraged readers to sign a We the People Petition and kept them updated as the Obama administration came out in favor of such a policy.   

The Annoyed Librarian is a much more prolific blogger, though I am unclear if the writer is actually one person or many.  The blog says that “The Annoyed Librarian is possibly the most successful, respected, and desirable librarian of her generation. She has no other interest than to bring her wit and wisdom to the huddled librarian masses yearning to breathe free. The Annoyed Librarian is a free spirit and you are lucky to have her.”  This tongue-in-cheek biography captures well the tone of the blog itself.  All the posts are about things that are negative or going wrong.  While funny and somewhat refreshing at first, after a while this negative and sometimes snarky take on everything made me an annoyed librarian.

However, the topics covered on this blog are wide, current and generally interesting to those in the librarian profession.  Just in the first half of April there have been blog posts about fines, librarian salaries, the mission of libraries and who they serve, the ALA, National Library Week, social media, and copyright.  In almost all of these blog posts there is some library related news and the Annoyed Librarian responds with a counter viewpoint.  For example, one interesting blog post called “An Ironic Complaint about Public Libraries” responds to an article about “mission creep” at public libraries.  Libraries are expanding the services they provide beyond just books, and the author of the article complains that this draws undesirables to the library.  Annoyed uses this as a launching pad to rant about conservatives cutting funding for mental health care and homeless shelters.  While this is satisfying, I’m not sure that it’s a great way to respond to someone with a different view point.  Unfortunately, she does not seem to actually engage and debunk the ideas presented in the article.

I will probably continue following both these blogs.  However, I’m much more likely to read a full blog post from Jessamyn than the Annoyed Librarian.  It seems like being raring is much more compelling and readable than being Annoyed.