WE’RE ALMOST DONE
I’m passionate about the work I do, and I truly love my library. It’s like a child I’ve had the opportunity to help raise with the rest of my library family. The library has come so far over the past few years, and I am so proud of all the work we’ve put into it. I don’t think I could ask for a better job or a better group of people to work with. I know the difference we’re making in the lives of the people in our community. I get to be a witness to it every day.
I haven’t always felt this way about libraries. Before I came to work at CCJPL, I didn’t even have a library card. If you had asked me to tell you my most vivid memories of libraries, I could have only given you two.
THE STABBING
The first memory would have been when I was in fourth grade. I was sitting in the school library, minding my own business, when another boy stole a note being passed to me from a girl in our class. He and I argued back and forth across the table until I finally got angry enough that I threw my pencil at him.
I wasn’t trying to hurt him. Don’t get some mental picture of me going all psycho on a classmate with a pencil. It wasn’t like that.
But the sharp end did catch him in the side of the head and a little blood started trickling down. When the kid next to him pointed this out, my wounded enemy went into a complete panic. His tears, snot, and vomit made the situation far worse than necessary.
My first memory of libraries ended with me getting a paddling from the principal. And no, I never did get the note from that girl.
FOLLOWING THE LIGHT
My second memory of libraries would have been from my freshman year of college. I was going through an experimental stage in life and playing the role of the hippie kid.
Late one experimental afternoon, as a friend and I strolled around campus, we wound up following a ray of sunlight shining onto the ground between the buildings. It was important that we find out where the light led. It became a mission, a quest, a pilgrimage.
As we walked from between two building and into the wide-open lawn in the center of campus, we looked up to see the sun setting just behind the library. In that moment, I understood. Euphorically, I proclaimed, “The light leads to the library.”
Looking back twenty-something years later, perhaps the light did lead to the library after all. It just took me a while to get here.
OUR PATRONS, THEIR VIDEO
If asked today to list my most vivid memories of libraries, there would be too many to count. I’ve spent the last six years working in a magical place, with magical people who do magical things. But there are a couple of special memories that help remind me of what it really means to work in a library.
Early on in our YouTube series, we had to shoot a couple of scenes for our second video that required some extras. We were shooting near the public computers, so I announced what we were doing and asked who wanted to be in a video. Several of the volunteers were regular patrons who stayed at the homeless shelter down the street. It only took us an hour or so to shoot everything we needed, and then everyone went back to what they were doing.
A couple of weeks later, I completed editing the video and posted it on YouTube. I went out into the public computer area and showed the folks who’d been in the video how to access it. For the next few weeks, every time I’d walk through the public computers, I’d see at least one of them watching their video.
Their total screen time in the video wasn’t more than a few seconds, but that didn’t matter. It was theirs. That’s when I realized what a sense of ownership means to someone who has nothing.
One day, one of the patrons from the video asked me if I could help him real quick. I asked him what he needed and he told me he wanted me to show him how to send the video in an e-mail. He wanted to send it to his family, just to let them know he was okay. I was starting to learn what it meant to work in a library.
FAMILY
Every year at our library, we have a Genealogy Night Lock-in. It’s a night when we stay open until midnight and allow our local genealogists to geek on ancestry. In 2012 a lady showed up for genealogy night because she’d seen one of our posters. She approached Nancy Matthews, a member of our local Genealogy Society, and asked for help.
The lady’s parents had passed away and after their death, she’d learned that they weren’t actually her biological parents. She was trying to find out about her birth parents. Nancy took her back to a group of genealogists who spent the evening trying to put together the puzzle of this lady’s past with what little information she had to work from.
Using the information she acquired at the library that night, she came to learn that she’d been stolen from the hospital at birth. Eventually, she managed to find out who her birth parents were and was reunited with a family she never knew she had. She saw a poster, and came to a library, and asked for help.
FAREWELL
These are the reasons we do what we do. We aren’t in the library industry for the money. It doesn’t pay that well. We’re here because somewhere along the way, we realized we could make a difference in people’s lives by working in a library.
I’m not a writer. I’m just a tech guy who knows a little bit about people. I don’t know whether you’ve learned anything from me or not, but I’ve done my part. I wrote the book. What happens next is up to you. Now go out and start your own revolution. #makeithappen