Worshipping at the Feet of Goddess Librarians

I don’t know how I’ve missed Librarian Avengers for oh so very long. Because the site rocks. Deeply. An example: on the FAQ page under “What is this site about?” the cheerful response is, “This site is about kicking your butt if you don’t start saying thank you at the reference desk.”

Right?

Librarian Avengers was started by user experience designer Erica Firment in 1997. Firment writes that she was “a young English Major when I wrote an essay called Why you should fall to your knees and worship a librarian and hooked it up to the domain name I got for my birthday. The positive response from the library community was one of the forces that propelled me into graduate school.” And the rest, as they say, is Internet history.

The essay, “Why You Should Worship A Librarian” is still at the core of the site. It’s mind-blowingly on-target, reminding us in no uncertain terms about why librarians rocks. Here’s a teeny excerpt:

Ok, sure. We’ve all got our little preconceived notions about who librarians are and what they do.

Many people think of librarians as diminutive civil servants, scuttling about “Sssh-ing” people and stamping things. Well, think again buster.

Librarians have degrees. They go to graduate school for Information Science and become masters of data systems and human/computer interaction. Librarians can catalog anything from an onion to a dog’s ear. They could catalog you.

You can read the whole piece -- and surf the whole site -- here.