Story by Grace Dobush | Photos by Melissa Gaug

A group of rowdy 20-somethings has taken over one of the big picnic tables on the Zephyr Pub patio on a Tuesday night. Cocktail glasses, pitchers of beer and ashtrays begin to clutter the surface of the table but are moved aside for a few of the young people to get up on the table for a photo. A Zephyr worker who has seen it all tells them they’ll have to get down after the picture.

Raucous laughter, loud talking and gossip dishing — it seems like a completely normal scene at a college-town bar.

Completely normal, until they start comparing their collections of library cards.

It’s library bar night — on a Tuesday, no less — and the Master’s of Library and
Information Science students are cutting loose on this brisk spring evening.
Contrary to stereotypes, most library students are not bespectacled old
maids, wrapped in wool and skulking through the stacks, caressing books in place of human lovers. In fact, some of the future librarians I’ve met — the future leaders of summer reading programs for my future children — really know how to party.

Media stereotypes
Librarians have gotten a bad rap in movies and TV shows. If they have any spoken lines beyond shushing unruly patrons, it’s often only to scold someone in a whisper.

At library night downtown, they “mostly talk about professors, and then it just gets worse,” MLIS student and designated driver Monica Rice says loudly.
Before the dozen future librarians outgrew the tables at The Loft and barhopped over to the Zephyr Pub, MLIS students Cari Baker and Chris Delfosse, both 23, put songs in the jukebox — Elvis Costello, Blondie and a classic from the Police. “ ‘Roxanne’ is a drinking game. Every time they say ‘Roxanne,’ you have to drink. It’s intense,” Delfosse jokes.

She has a disposable camera and is set on finishing up the film tonight.
In addition to the occasional night out at the bar, the MLIS students sometimes do bowling or movie nights. Once they watched the movie Party Girl, in which a New York nightlife queen is forced to take a job in a public library. The main character, played by Parker Posey, resists the Dewey Decimal System at first but, by the end, realizes that librarianship is her calling. The reviews of the movie were lukewarm, but “she’s making the library part of her partying, and I think that’s the greatest thing,” Baker says.

Another example of an attempt at a positive image of a librarian was the made-for-TNT fantasy film The Librarian: Quest for the Spear, starring Noah Wyle. But it failed. “It was so bad,” Baker says. Plus, “he had 22 degrees, but not one was in library science.”