Ah, Sunday Styles, the bastion of vapid reporting, bullshit trend pieces and gee-whiz prose. It’s all on display in yesterday’s piece by Kara Jesella on a group of librarians who hang out at Daddy’s bar in Williamsburg, talking books, wearing flowers in their hair and trying too hard to look cool. “We’re not the typical librarians anymore,” said Rick Block, an adjunct professor at the Long Island University Palmer School and at the Pratt Institute School of Information and Library Science, both graduate schools for librarians, in New York City. “I think we’re getting more progressive and hipper,” said Carrie Ansell, a 28-year-old law librarian in Washington.
Other brilliant insights into why young’uns are choosing libraries as their professional domain: it’s “cool”; finding unexpected people in the field; and more to the point, library science is now, as Jessamyn West puts it, more of a “techie profession” than it used to be, requiring information, research and computer skills like never before. So yes, being a hipster librarian is cool – but what of the books? Somehow that didn’t get mentioned so much…