We live to serve

Terry Caesar writes a paean to librarians.

Bookish or no, librarians exist to serve. . . the community, the public, the world. (Pick one.) Damned if this isn’t pretty much what they try to do, in just about every library on every campus I’ve known.

In this, they are at times shockingly in contrast to comparable figures situated either above or below them. Faculty labor under no comparable imperative to be helpful — to students, to visitors, to anybody; office doors can easily shut, or chairs swivel to a back wall. Staff often seem under some imperative to be unhelpful; the secretary at the dean’s office or the clerk at Human Services can send just about anybody away steaming with anger at having been treated rudely. One simply does not hear such stories about librarians. The contrasts are striking. Perhaps they are explained by the difference between a library and all other buildings. None focuses a campus like a library. No building is comparably open to all and none so wholly represents — no, literally possesses — the very rationale of the college or university itself.