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What
image comes
to mind when you hear the word lawyer? What about used car
salesman or computer programmer or accountant? Most people have a
pre-conceived idea of what a person in each of these professions, and
many others, looks like. Did your lawyer wear a power suit?
Was the car salesman in a cheesy polyester suit with a bad
hairdo? Was your computer programmer wearing glasses and
have a pocket protector? Now, what do you picture when you hear the word librarian? There have been various descriptions written about what a librarian looks like. Katherine C. Adams wrote that a librarian is stereotypically described as a "loveless frump hiding behind her spectacles and surrounded by her books." (1) Thad A. Dickinson writes the stereotype of librarians as "drab spinsters peering over the rim of their glasses and ready the 'shush' a library 
patron..." (2) The first words in
the article The Image of the
Librarian in Commercial
Motion Pictures: An Annotated Filmography by O'Brien and Raish
are "Spinsterish. Bespectacled. Shy." (3). Alison Hall delves into the source
of the stereotype in Batgirl was a
librarian by writing,
"[i]n books, films, TV, cartoons, comic strips, the unmistakable
impression emerges of a very dull, earnest body, usually female, with
glasses..., her hair in...a BUN, wearing sensible shoes, support hose,
tweed skirt, droopy sweater..." (4).
Male librarians fare
no better, when they are acknowledged at all. Since librarianship
is considered a "female" occupation men actually willing to become
librarians are considered to be effeminate and/or homosexual.
People
assume they are a "broken down man who failed in other lines of work."
(5) or are "too dreamy and vague to
hold down a real job."
(6) Do any of these descriptions and
assumptions sound familiar?How did so many people get this picture in their head? At some point in time were all the librarians' middle aged women with gray hair in buns and glasses? That is very doubtful. It is much more likely that our stereotypical images of certain occupations comes from the media. We saw it in a movie or on television, or read about it in a book. I know I have never met a car salesman in a cheesy polyester suit, but that is still what I picture. I have, on the other hand, seen car salesmen depicted this way in movies and on television on many occasions. Does what we see in the media overshadow what we have witnessed in our own lives? We know what people are likely to picture when they hear the word "librarian". But what do people assume librarians do in a day? Sit around and read books? Check out books when patrons are rude enough to disturb their reading? Dust shelves and organize the books on them? This hardly describes what real librarians do, however, do media sources represent the vast array of tasks librarians do? If we examine various depictions of librarians in several different media sources, what will we find? Gray haired middle-aged women who always say "shhh"? Click on the links on the side to see what was discovered in a small sampling of media sources that depict librarians in some form or another. To access the bibliographic records for any items on these pages please click the button to the left of the abstract. Kristi Mulhern
kpmulher@interchange.ubc.ca LIBR500 Foundations of Information Technology University of British Columbia Fall Term 2003 |