Why libraries need librarians

Vox reader Alexia Cherry asks: I work at a public library and I think a lot of the talk about libraries is generally uninformed about what librarians actually do. So many people that I interact with are shocked that you need to have a master’s degree to be considered a professional, and many people don’t know about the wide variety of library jobs available.

People do indeed seem to find librarians oddly mysterious! In August, Western Illinois University laid off its entire librarian faculty and at the same time insisted the university would still have “adequate coverage in the library.” The school seemed to be operating under the belief that librarians are only warm bodies who exist to check books in and out, and that they only have master’s degrees in order to artificially jack their wages up. Anyone, this line of thinking goes, could keep a library running without much work. They just need to know how to scan a barcode.

But then, libraries are undervalued in general, perhaps because they are such radical institutions. The truism is that if you tried to invent the public library today, the right would never let you get away with it — giving so many things to the public for free, and subsidizing them all with taxes, imagine. How many other spaces do we have left where a person can go and spend hours on end and still not be expected to buy anything?

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