Two blog posts I have come across today linked to some great information about librarians, and will give you food for thought about what it means to deliver information to those who need it.
First, Mary McGregor‘s Brooklyn Biblio blog has a post entitled Extreme librarianship : Biblioburro! (20.07.2011), which links to information about a documentary shown on the American Public Broadcasting Service called Biblioburro : The Donkey Library (NB: the documentary isn’t available in Australia due to restricted rights [currently that is] but the trailer can be seen on Youtube from Simon and Schuster under the title Biblioburro). The documentary aired on 19.07.2011 in the USA on PBS, and hopefully it will get an airing in Australia. For some other online information about this film, see this saved search, the Biblioburro Facebook page, and the works listed at Trove.
Secondly, Jessica Danielle writes, in an article entitled Libriotypes : putting the SUPER in superficial (03.08.2011), about challenging stereotypes by showing that many librarians just don’t fit the usual expectations society has of them. Jessica says
if they took a few more minutes to know me, perhaps they could shake some of those ridiculous concepts out of their heads and appreciate that I am a person who likes to help people find information, gain knowledge, learn technology, and understand how to sift through the rubble to find reliable material.
There is a link to the Warrior Librarian Weekly’s article, Rejecting the stereotypical librarian image, with a list of websites about librarians (the list is from 2008, and a few of the links are now dead). Jessica Danielle’s blog is Librarians + Stereotypes :: A blog about the two.
UPDATED 20.08.2011
I have managed to find an Australian story about the Biblioburro. SBS’ Dateline current affairs program made a story about Columbia’s Luis Soriano titled ‘Four-legged library’ – I decided to put it up in another post because it was worth a look. Go to it here…
