Scott Douglas

There was the smell of old books, a smell that has a way of making all libraries seem the same. Some say that smell is asbestos.

I am convinced that grandkids are inherently evil people who tell their grandparents to "just go to the library and open up an e-mail account - it's free and so simple.

Plenty of patrons had asked me strange things, but this was the first who asked me where my car was parked. It was almost comical to look at the man, because he actually thought I was going to tell him. I struggled to come up with a reply, but the best I could muster was, "That's personal." What I meant to say was, "Sir, the fact that I work in a public library doesn't make me stupid, it just makes me poor. There's no way I'm going to tell you__ psychotic person who could very well have a knife in his pocket__here I have parked my car.

There__ something deep in the heart of every person that wantsto protect culture. The only thing about my pending career thatwas changed because of 9/11 was that I began to see it was the community,not the librarian, that was important to the library. Librarianswere only as important as the community they inspired. If Iwas going to continue with this career, my job wouldn__ be to protectinformation, it would be to bring the community together andinspire them to appreciate everything a library stands for.

When I tell people I went to library school, the most common reaction is either __ou__e joking, right?_ or __hey have schools for librarians? Do they teach you how to properly sssh people?

...killing rats wasn__ in my job description.

We don__ have to destroy the library of the past. We just need to give it a face-lift.

A library was nothing without its people. You say library and there__ this iconoclastic image of an old-lady librarian telling people to be quiet and not to run. But the thing was, that lady__hat iconoclastic lady__as with us when we cleaned. She wore blue jeans, too. Maybe she was what people thought about when you said library, but she didn__ make the library. People made the library. That__ what made a library. Without them, all the sacredness was gone. It was just a building with books.

To be great at something, you must look to the great ones of thepast and improve on the ideas and techniques that they started. Iwas motivated to do better__o improve on the ideas of others.

It took a bit of popcorn and a library snack bar to make me realize that being a librarian was about more than just giving people information. It was about serving a community. And if the community is hungry for more than just knowledge, then maybe it__ about time to open a snack bar.

I like to imagine that library school was started because of some sort of silly bar bet where a guy got really plastered and told his buddy that he could convince people that librarians needed to be trained in the art of librarianship. Sadly, this is not the case; its roots are a bit more academic.

The loudest elderly women always had the quietest elderly husbands.