What if society treated librarians like they do superstars of the TV, music, movie, and political scene?
This was my fantasy today. I have a somewhat active imagination, which usually gives me great inspirations and new ideas. Today’s was just random.
If the world had librarian superstars…well, first off we’d be rich. Or at least a few of us would be. We’d be on MTV Cribs showing off our awesome houses, computers, and book collections (oh the book collections!!!). We’d be interviewed all over the place. All the young librarian starlets would brag about which LIS program they got accepted into, and upon graduation they would immediately move to Dublin, Ohio looking to become the next big star.
Ideas would be the hottest commodity on the market. To have a truly fresh, new idea for the library world mean that you’d skyrocket to the top–for a while. Then if you ran out of ideas, you’d be forgotten (wait, doesn’t this already happen?).
Intelligence would be higher on society’s values than entertainment. Although, I’m willing to bet that we’d still have Librarian Paris Hilton, Librarian Brittany Spears, and Librarian Jackass–because even we need something to laugh at. Yet eventually, we would be told that we don’t live in the “real world”; that we are so wrapped up in our own Library Land that we are oblivious to the needs of Everyday Joe. Hmmm….
Everyday people would talk about librarians over the water cooler–who is divorcing who, who adopted an African baby without the normal due process, and who looked like they were on drugs at their last presentation. Librarians would no longer have to fight for a marketing budget–administrations everywhere would be throwing money at advertising agencies to promote their libraries and librarians. After all, everyone wants the new blockbuster idea out of their library.
Each superstar librarian would have an entourage. Well…some do right now. We call them support staff, and unfortunately some of them get treated like “hair and makeup crew” currently anyway.
Librarians are an invisible profession–you don’t know about us until we’re gone. Thank the gods we’re a loud bunch–we fight to make sure that we don’t disappear. But what would we do if we didn’t have to fight so hard?
Me? I’d be Superstar Librarian Ryan Reynolds. I’d work as a Superstar Information Literacy Librarian somewhere, using humor to get the importance of information evaluation across.
Alright Superstar Librarians…who would you be and what would you do?
