What's the point?

I've been working in libraries my entire life--starting as a page in the 1950s at the Lincoln (NE) Public Library System.  In 1969 I read Theodore Roethke's poem "Dolor."  The poem changed my life. 

Instead of enrolling in library school, I enrolled in the University of Nebraska's education program and then the theater program.  Like Roethke, in school and public libraries I'd "seen dust from the walls of institutions,/Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,/Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium."  I didn't want my exciting future life to become covered in dust.

But libraries are the opiate of readers.  I couldn't stay away.


In December 2009, I finished my MLIS degree, the degree I should have gotten in 1970 instead of the masters in theater and literature.  I attended San Jose State University, taking all online classes while teaching English composition at Sacramento City College.  In the spring 2009 semester, I interned at the SCC library, and in the fall 2009 semester, I joined the reference desk as an adjunct librarian.

During my time in libraries I've seen and heard everything from the mundane and bizarre to the interesting and inspirational.

This blog is dedicated to the nameless library patrons I've met in the fifty plus years I've interacted with them.  Since I will again be working at the SCC reference desk during the spring 2010 semester, I will use this blog to chronicle what I have seen and now see and hear from behind the reference desk.