Humor Deficit: A Librarian's Guide to Being Funny and Competent

SUMMARY

A quote from the Warrior Librarian web site states, “A smiling librarian is an awesome sight; it challenges the stereotypes, creates an atmosphere of change and frightens the heck out of 95% of the borrowers.” Initially, I thought this was very funny but suddenly realized that we are, more often than not, portrayed as a frumpy, humorless lot: remote, grey-haired and possessing “SHHHHH” as our sole workaday vocabulary. Parker Posey might look cute and cool, the heroine of The Mummy is glamorous when the glasses come off and the gams get exposed, but we remain curmudgeons in comfortable shoes when our constituents visualize us in shuddering dreams that end with being thrown out of the stacks for excessive noise or mutilated for keeping books too long.

SLA (here after known as The Special Libraries Association and not the Symbionese Liberation Army) has recently updated its “Competencies for Information Professionals of the 21st Century.” The SLA report defines competencies broadly as “the interplay of knowledge, understanding, skills, and attitudes required to do a job effectively, in order to show the interrelationships between knowledge, skills and other characteristics. Professional competencies are most closely connected to the special librarian's knowledge base in the areas of information resources, information access, technology, management, and research, while personal competencies “represent a set of skills, attitudes and values that enable librarians to work effectively …” In other words, if you're in an astronomy library it helps to know about stars, not just Lindsay Lohan, but Alpha Centauri, and it helps to have your books, magazines, and data bases in some general order, BUT, it helps more to have people want to be in the library and be able to work and learn while they're there. The old firmly held belief that the users of our library should resemble members of a Soviet Gulag, silent, hard-working and terrified is slowly being dispelled. The word “special” means “fun” to most children when you tell them they're going to have a “special time.” Special librarians similarly oversee access to vast pools of data that their constituents enjoy. Astronomers are fascinated by and love the stars. It isn't much of a reach to say that their librarian should make the place in which they're looking for data enjoyable. Since their searches are fraught with frustration, filled with pitfalls and black holes, it won't hurt to have that enjoyment spiced with laughter, much the same as kids on a playground laugh after they've repeatedly missed a jump or a swing.

Thus, although the SLA document is thoughtful and well meaning, it fails to recognize or to mention the word “humor,” an intangible, yet essential ingredient for fostering a long-term relationship with one's colleagues and community.

KEYWORDS:

• Humor
• competencies
• liaisons
• collaborations