To start, I just want to say how much I enjoyed The Hollywood Librarian: A Look at Librarians through Film. It covered several serious topics while still retaining a sense of humor and making librarianship an appealing field. Many of the featured movie clips were a bit too old for me to recognize, (my knowledge of movies from before the 90s is embarrassingly small) but it was interesting to see how the perception of librarians has (or really hasn't) changed since the 50s and 60s.
What is a library? What is a librarian?
Librarians and libraries exist to connect people with the information that they want and need. As we have discussed in class many times, libraries about about people, not books. The movie did a great job of showing how much goes into librarianship that largely goes unnoticed. Librarians run businesses, they facilitate fundraising efforts, they fight for freedom, they teach people to read, they help people learn English, They work with doctors to save lives, they connect with people who feel like outsiders. Librarians advocate for positive change and act to help the underdogs. Even though librarians do all of these things, and more, Hollywood mainly depicts them as pretty but stern women who sit behind desks and check out books or walk through the aisles to reshelve books while wearing heels and a pencil skirt. Oh, and don't forget, a librarian's hair should always be in a bun! The Music Man depicts Hollywood's view of librarians perfectly, or at least the musical number "Marian The Librarian" does, I can't judge the rest of the movie because I haven't seen it. Because librarians help the public, it seems that men think it is okay to bother and harass them while they are trying to do their jobs. I understand that this is a musical and it is supposed to be over-the-top, but the dramatic choreography and rhyming lyrics do not take away from the fact this type of behavior is unacceptable. Even though this movie was released 52 years ago, incidents like these still happen today. A library in the Detroit area recently had to add more security cameras because a man spent over a hour following one of the female pages around and asking for her phone number.
What points did Seidl make that were most provocative to you?
It would be easy to believe that librarianship is an ideal field in which women will be treated equally to their male counterparts because it is a field that is predominantly populated by women. This is done most obviously when Seidl discusses Melville Dewey and his horrible attitude towards women, in a clip from Party Girl a character says that he "hired women as librarians because he believed the job didn't require an intelligence. That means it's underpaid and undervalued!" This is particularly apparent at the library I work at, where most of the librarians are forced to work part time because the city does not want to pay for their healthcare. Some of the librarians split their time between three different libraries so they can work enough hours. This divide is particularly astounding when compared with the pay and benefits that are given to other professionals, like doctors and lawyer, who are working in fields that were dominated by men for so long.
What do you see as the most important role an LIS professional plays in society?
I think this question is really difficult because of all of the different types of libraries and the different communities that they exist in. The needs of each library are different based on the community that it is a part of. That being said, all librarians connect patrons to the information that they are trying to find. This ability to sort through vast numbers of books, articles, services, and webpages to find what a user is looking for is what keeps people coming back to libraries. As Neil Gaiman says, "Google can bring you back 100,000 answers, a librarian can bring you back the right one."
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