When she worked as a graduate assistant for the School of Library and Information Science while she completed her master’s degree, she only worked at the public library as a substitute.

People often don’t understand what librarians do and why they need master’s degrees, Baker says. A woman once asked her straight out why she needed a master’s if she was just putting books in alphabetical order. “I thought that was extremely rude,” she says.

The Geauga library system requires a bachelor’s degree to work in reference. Some libraries require MLIS degrees, but others don’t require any at all. Baker says you need an MLIS degree to be “a hardcore librarian.” She recognizes that there’s some elitism in saying that, but library students mean business. Library school used to be busywork, and often civilians will think being a librarian is something that’s easy and certainly doesn’t require a master’s degree. It also doesn’t help that there are many “paraprofessionals” in the field — people who work in libraries without library science degrees.

Chris Delfosse sits on Dewey, a gigantic stuffed bear wearing a plastic top hat in the Reinberger Children’s Library Center on the third floor of the Kent State Library. Many of the graduate assistants come to this children’s library room to work because they like the friendly atmosphere.
Delfosse’s specialization is school library media. She got her bachelor’s degree in 7-12 education from Youngstown State and is a licensed teacher. She loves teaching teens, but she was offered a graduate assistantship and wanted a master’s degree, so she came to Kent State.

Delfosse’s earliest memory of a library isn’t quite what you’d picture for a future librarian. In middle school, her parents often dropped her off at the library, and she would promptly leave to go across the street to the shopping center. “The librarians were cool. They wouldn’t tell on me,” she says and laughs.

A little feisty
Librarians seem to have a kooky sense of humor. “Meta” is a prefix used in library science to signify “information about” something. Rice, trying to explain the meaning, points out that The Simpsons and Family Guy are TV shows that parody TV shows, so they could be called metasitcoms. The Web site librariangear.com sells a T-shirt only a librarian could love: Three shirts are drawn on it above the word “Metashirt.”

Linda Absher is the creator of Lipstick-librarian.com, a tongue-in-cheek Web site for fashionistas who find themselves working reference desks. The 46-year-old is a reference librarian at Portland State University in Oregon. A lipstick librarian is able “to apply liquid eyeliner flawlessly while writing your collection development policy on the sly during a public services meeting.” (And if you do, send her a picture.)

It all started in 1992, when Absher and a fellow library student at the University of California, Berkeley were imagining their futures as librarians over a few glasses of wine and pictured themselves as “hip, hilarious librarians who no one would ever think would fit the stereotype.”

And then she went to her first American Library Association conference later that year and was stunned. “Over 20,000 librarians, and most of them fitting the stereotype down to their crinkled summer reading campaign T-shirts,” Absher says. “It was quite a shock.”