The vast waterfall of history pours down, and a few obituarists fill teacups with the stories.
Bibliomancy: “Divination by jolly well Looking It Up.
Yes, librarians use punctuation marks to make little emoticons, smiley and frowny faces in their correspondence, but if there were one for an ironic wink, or a sarcastic lip curl, they’d wear it out.
Who knows how many people are invisible because their stories don’t fit our categories?
In tough times, a librarian is a terrible thing to waste.
Libraries have always been there for me. Of course I’ll stand up for them!
Librarians are essential players in the information revolution because they level that field. They enable those without money or education to read and learn the same things as the billionaire and the PhD.
We are all living history, and it’s hard to say now what will be important in the future. One thing’s certain, though: if we throw it away, it’s gone.
Good librarians are natural intelligence operatives. They possess all of the skills and characteristics required for that work: curiosity, wide-ranging knowledge, good memories, organization and analytical aptitude, and discretion.
We’ll always need printed books that don’t mutate the way digital books do; we’ll always need places to display books, auditoriums for book talks, circles for story time; we’ll always need brick-and-mortar libraries.
Librarians consider free access to information the foundation of democracy.
They seemed to be quiet types, the women and men in rubber-soled shoes. Their favorite word, after literacy, was privacy – for their patrons and themselves.
This is the greatest and most fraught romance of modern society, the marriage between the IT staff and those who depend on them.