Lightening talk given at Reference @ the Metcalfe seminar on 8 May 2012.

1. Slugs and snails and puppy
dogs tails....
What’s a 21st century Librarian made of?
Jennifer Wilson
Fairfield City Library Service
May 2012

2. At a staff meeting in 2008 we gave Fairfield
Library staff a challenge – let loose with the
outline of a human body and the children’s
craft kits they were to design the librarian of
the future, describing who they were, what
they would need to know, be able to do and
the tools they’d be using.

3. Here’s what they came up with…

18. We’ve heard a lot today about change and
new opportunities and tools, apps and
changing customer demands. It doesn’t
change the fact that the reason many of us
are reference librarians is the thrill of the
chase – the ability to track down that perfect
resource to answer the customer’s question.

19. Being the National Year of Reading it’s fitting
of course to end with a story. In China
Mieville’s YA novel Un Lun Dun our hero
Deeba has re-entered the alternative version
of her home city of London by climbing up
through the shelves of her school library.
Emerging above the Wordhoard Abyss and
having avoided the warrior booktribes, shelf-
monkeys and wordcrows, she meets, funnily
enough, a librarian.

20. Let me introduce you to Margarita Staples –
Extreme Librarian.
Bookaneer.

21. ‘My job was never boring,’ Staples said.
‘There’s nut-and-bolts stuff like getting the tarpaulin over the shaft when it rains and so on.
Cataloguing and reshelving. The shelves are in a shocking state, And when you’ve got
everything ever written or lost to keep track of, it’s quite a job. And there’s fetching books.
‘I used to really look forward to requests for books way down in the abyss. We’d all rope up,
follow our lines down for miles. The order falls apart a way down but you learn to sniff out
class-marks. Sometimes we’d be gone for weeks, fetching volumes.’ She spoke with a faraway
voice.
‘There are risks. Hunters, animals and accidents. Ropes that snap. Sometimes someone gets
separated. Twenty years ago I was in a group looking for a book someone had requested. I
remember it was called ‘Oh, All Right Then’: Bartleby Returns. We were led by Ptolemy Yes. He
was the man who taught me. Best librarian there’s ever been, some say.
‘Anyway, after weeks of searching, we ran out of food and had to turn back. No one likes it
when we fail, so none of us was feeling great.
‘We felt that much worse when we realized that we’d lost Ptolemy.
‘Some people say he went off deliberately. That he couldn’t bear not to find the book. That
he’s out there still in the Wordhoard Abyss, living off shelf-monkeys, looking. And that he’ll be
back one day, book in hand.’
Mieville, China. Un Lun Dun (2007)

22. What are your 3 indispensable tools?
Tweet what you think @jemawi