Educators That Rock!: Marilyn Johnson
Photo by Margaret Fox.
Marilyn Johnson was first introduced to libraries in high school, when she worked as a page at the Chardon Public Library in Ohio. She loved climbing into the attic to get back issues of old newspapers, but quit after being refused a nickel-an-hour raise.
Years later she wrote “This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All,” examining and extolling the unseen faces and facets of the library world, and tearing down long-held stereotypes.
“[T]he truth is, with all librarians that I meet, if you think you know what type they are, if you stand there and talk to them for a little while, they’re each spectacularly individual,” Johnson told findingEducation.
Through her profiles of missionary librarians, virtual librarians, specialist librarians, archivists and even anarchist librarians, Johnson proves not only that librarians are each one of a kind, but also that they are truly irreplaceable.
To learn more about Johnson and her work visit her Web sites: This Book Is Overdue and MarilynJohnson.net.
fE: While researching your first book, “The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries,” you were consistently drawn to the stories of librarians and found the seed for your next book. Why librarians?
MJ: I read a ton of librarian obituaries, and every one was different. I read about a music librarian who served the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and a British librarian who helped get films online. There was also a librarian who was a sailor on the Maine coast, and she remembered people’s favorite books 50 years after they had come to her library. She was the heart and soul of her community. (Read about more of the librarian obituaries that inspired Johnson.)
fE: There are librarians who call themselves anarchists and there are librarians who are Catholic missionaries. How do such different personalities coexist in the same field?
MJ: Both of the groups that you mentioned are interested in social justice in one form or another. The Radical Reference librarians fascinated me because [when the Republican National Convention met in 2004] it was their idea to bring good information to the 50,000 people protesting in the streets of New York, who wouldn’t know the number for legal aid, who wouldn’t know which streets were closed, or what the laws of assembly in New York were, or where to find public restrooms.
Missionary librarians, as I like to call them, from St. Johns University in Queens, N.Y., teach students the online tools to find the information they need, connect to their professors, and post the information that they gather in academically useful ways, before sending them back to their home countries. So, when a typhoon hits their area or an insurrection occurs the students are wired.
In Bangladesh, an NGO developed a pilot project where women on bikes who carry computers with online access would go to remote places and try to answer questions of people who were isolated. The women aren’t called librarians. They’re called InfoLadies, but they share a similar mission.
fE: Do you find that the blogger librarians and the technophobes inhabit separate cliques?
MJ: If you have two librarians in the room, they’ll get into an argument about something, because they don’t like to be lumped together, and they don’t think in any one way. Every time there’s a new format or tool for print or visual information, there’s a big debate about it. I love getting a sense of the discussion and being able to participate in it online.
But I also appreciate the librarians’ teacherly instinct. [Through blogs] they try to organize their online experiences so that other people can duplicate their efforts. And most of the bloggers make it very clear they’d be happy to answer your questions. It’s like my little laptop has thousands and thousands of hands reaching out. I can grab any of them and find my way to good information or new ways to organize things and new ways to connect with people.
fE: What was it like entering the Second Life world?
MJ: I had a tremendous time! Being in Second Life gave me license to run around asking questions. I didn’t actually have a sign over my head that said “reporter,” but my thumbnail profile said “I’m working on a book about librarians in the digital age.”
I had this fantastic source in England who, as far as I can tell, lives online. She writes a blog as her avatar Sheila Yoshikawa about how to build tree houses and skate ponds, and where to buy virtual reality skirts made of butterfly wings. She also provides information services at the university level, and holds weekly book talks and discussions about what’s new in the world of information.
I lived in this world for about six or so months and visited frequently after that. As the book was being published, some of these initiatives were coming to an end. The Alliance Library System in Illinois, which pioneered a lot of library initiatives in Second Life, has had devastating cuts and they are no longer the sponsors of space and classes there.
But the pixellated libraries are not going to go away. As the Web changes and grows, you’re not going to be clicking from one page to another; I think it will be more like a movie set that you can go into. And there is an army of librarians who have gotten very good at manipulating the tools of that world, and those skills are going to be useful no matter what happens.
fE: Do you think the future of libraries is a kind of Second Life experience?
MJ: The future of libraries is multiplying. The kinds of libraries are multiplying. So you could have specialist libraries in little buildings, like the American Kennel Club library—one of these charming little libraries dedicated to a single subject. You can have the general library, you can have the research library and you can have the library that exists online. All of these places are really about the most traditional idea of a library, which is linking people and resources.
fE: Partly because findingEducation is based in New York, and because he seems to love authors as much as we do, we were fascinated by your profile of David Smith. Can you tell us more about his work?
MJ: David Smith is a perfect example of a librarian who defies categorization. He was noticing writers coming to the big research library at 42nd and 5th,, the one with the lion statues out front, and because Smith reads a lot and goes to readings, he started recognizing authors. And at some point he got over his self-consciousness and would say to these authors, “Let me know if you need any help. I’m a great fan of your work.” And he would pass out his business card. He went out of his way to help them meet deadlines and find material. He would also buy used copies of their books and press them into other writers’ hands. And in doing this, after a while, he created a community of writers. He’s no longer there, which is unfortunate, but there are other librarians who are informally carrying on his mission.
I think often when people gather statistics about libraries and try to dissect their usefulness, what they don’t take into account is the extraordinary communities that develop in libraries.
Marilyn Johnson’s Favorite Sites:
Awful Library Books
Adventures of Yoshikawa
Lower East Side Librarian
Writer 2.0
If I Ran the Universe…
