Librarians

Re "Cybraries," Nov. 9 (Orange County) and Nov. 10: Having just returned from addressing the New England Law Library Consortium, may I raise another issue for the millennium: the role of specialized librarians in specific fields. With Internet access available for professionals, legal librarians are now challenged to rethink their traditional role in law firms and law schools. One possibility for the future: librarians as directors of competitive research. Specialized libraries might also use their ability to distill a glut of information into viable knowledge and sell it to organizations and even developing nations.

They're doing the dance again -- the soul-sapping, time-wasting annual ritual of figuring out how many of society's most important public servants to push off a cliff. RIF season, some call it, for Reduction in Force. This year, Los Angeles Unified is going for the gold. An astounding 9,500 teachers, nurses and human services employees have been notified by mail that their jobs are on the line, as well as 2,000 administrators. Nowhere near that number will be laid off in the end, but the law requires that teachers be notified of the possibility of impending doom long before budgets are set. And so, year after year, we go through this maddening, disruptive and costly process.

You sit down to write a novel, and soon the characters are crowding around demanding attention with the urgency and self-obsession of 3-year-olds. A few weeks in, and you can no longer shake them. In fact, nothing shuts them up until the manuscript is ripped from your hands on deadline, when you go from total control to utter powerlessness with one click of the Send button. Goodbye! Good luck! After that comes the weird silence of the empty nest, with its combination of freedom and loneliness.

Several years ago a young man who was majoring in philosophy and French got a part-time job in his university library to help pay his bills. Over time, it occurred to him that he loved that hallowed sanctuary, surrounded each day by bound volumes of ideas and by records of our history. He knew then what he wanted to do with his life and went on to graduate school to study library science. Today, he's a librarian at a college in New Orleans, helping rebuild a collection wiped out by Hurricane Katrina.

Soon after I became a school librarian, a teacher came to me about Mario, an eighth-grader who had never read an entire book. Mario struggled to read at all, and English was not his first language, but he was a bright kid whose teacher believed in him. I recommended a short, funny, mysterious book that appeals to reluctant boy readers. Mario took it home, read it in a week and came back with his friends in tow to check out the remaining titles in the series. When he was ready to tackle more challenging content, I started him listening to audiobooks while following along in the text, a strategy helpful for building fluency and comprehension.

In a basement downtown, the librarians are being interrogated. On most days, they work in middle schools and high schools operated by the Los Angeles Unified School District, fielding student queries about American history and Greek mythology, and retrieving copies of vampire novels. But this week, you'll find them in a makeshift LAUSD courtroom set up on the bare concrete floor of a building on East 9th Street. Several sit in plastic chairs, watching from an improvised gallery as their fellow librarians are questioned.

Judith F. Krug, a forceful advocate for the right of librarians to stock their shelves without fear of censorship, died of stomach cancer Saturday at a hospital in Evanston, Ill., where she lived. She was 69. Director of the American Library Assn.'s Office for Intellectual Freedom since it was founded in 1967, Krug started Banned Books Week in 1982 to promote the right to read stories and express opinions without interference from censors.

California paid for my master's degree in library and information science. While I am grateful to have had the grant and the opportunity to go back to school, I wish now that I had instead trained to be an electrician, a plumber or an auto mechanic. California does not value librarians. Other states employ an average of one public librarian to 6,250 patrons. As of last year, 3,432 full-time librarians served 37,253,956 Californians. In other words, California librarians were each expected to serve 10,854 patrons.

As both a librarian and a teacher I'm upset and dismayed that USC has decided to close its graduate School of Library Science, one of the better ones in the country. This move seems to be part of a nationwide trend based on the assumption that with the development of computers to retrieve information, librarians will become increasingly less necessary. I believe this assumption is wrong, and detrimental to education and the business of information retrieval. Key words in education are "equal access to information."

Re "Some Overdue Attention," editorial, June 11: Forget White House book fairs and task forces on diversity. The simple solution to the librarian shortage is adequate compensation. City of Los Angeles librarian recruits must possess a master's degree in library and information science, and many have experience as librarians. Yet the city offers them a paltry starting pay of $33,500 to work evenings and weekends with an increasingly quarrelsome public. These information-savvy prospects naturally choose to work for high-tech companies that compensate them in proportion to their education and skills.

"So a comedian walks into a library and decides to work there …" That's not my line. It's from Meredith Myers, the self-described Standup Librarian who just had something very unfunny happen to her. She got fired from a West Hollywood library job that she loved. But let's back up, all the way to Florida, where Myers discovered as a child that a library is a place to think, dream and figure things out. As an adult, she grabbed books on the PR business, leading to a 10-year career as a publicist.

California paid for my master's degree in library and information science. While I am grateful to have had the grant and the opportunity to go back to school, I wish now that I had instead trained to be an electrician, a plumber or an auto mechanic. California does not value librarians. Other states employ an average of one public librarian to 6,250 patrons. As of last year, 3,432 full-time librarians served 37,253,956 Californians. In other words, California librarians were each expected to serve 10,854 patrons.

Prison pitfalls Re "State ordered to slash inmate levels," May 24 I would be happy to see the release of the thousands now incarcerated for nonviolent crimes such as possession of marijuana or cocaine. I do not see them as a threat. If, for much lower cost, they receive drug treatment, education and job training in the community and are allowed to freely participate in society, most will become law-abiding, productive Americans. That most nonviolent "drug offenders" in prison are African American or Latino reflects not the prevalence of drug use but the way the "war on drugs" has been focused on those communities.

Rosemarie Bernier, the librarian at Hamilton High School, sees hundreds of students every day. She knows them by their study habits, the questions they ask and the books they read. Joelle and Johanna love to run their fingers through old books. We find them in the stacks, admiring the beautiful, old binding of a Jules Verne novel. Another group of "regulars" gathers at a table. Nahum and Livingston leaf through sheets of sample calculus problems, while Antonio reads the final chapters of Toni Morrison's great novel "Song of Solomon.

Soon after I became a school librarian, a teacher came to me about Mario, an eighth-grader who had never read an entire book. Mario struggled to read at all, and English was not his first language, but he was a bright kid whose teacher believed in him. I recommended a short, funny, mysterious book that appeals to reluctant boy readers. Mario took it home, read it in a week and came back with his friends in tow to check out the remaining titles in the series. When he was ready to tackle more challenging content, I started him listening to audiobooks while following along in the text, a strategy helpful for building fluency and comprehension.

Children who labor Re " Where coal mining is often child's work ," May 15 The harrowing article and pictures depicting child miners in India who are paid a pittance for body-racking labor and doomed to an early death show the inevitable result of unrestricted corporations coupled with an impotent labor force. Those who would destroy labor unions and denigrate workers' rights — while fighting for unfettered corporate excesses earned on the backs of cheap labor — should look to the reality of children worked to death for the sake of higher profits.

In the 1957 movie "Desk Set," Katharine Hepburn played a research librarian for a fictional television network and Spencer Tracy played a computer systems engineer who sets up a room-sized computer that the librarians fear will eliminate their jobs. A telephone call comes asking whether the King of the Watusis owns an automobile. The question is fed into the computer, and out comes a lengthy movie review of "King Solomon's Mines."

After describing the bustling activity going on in a library, Susan Freudenheim writes, "All this activity puts to rest the memory of the library as a place where you have to 'shush' " ["The Latest Chapter in L.A. Libraries," Aug. 11]. Librarians, as lively and creative professionals, wish to distance ourselves from the "shush" stereotype aggravated by the recent emergence of the Librarian Action Figure. Also, we want to include as many people as possible, including those to whom silence is oppressive.

In a basement downtown, the librarians are being interrogated. On most days, they work in middle schools and high schools operated by the Los Angeles Unified School District, fielding student queries about American history and Greek mythology, and retrieving copies of vampire novels. But this week, you'll find them in a makeshift LAUSD courtroom set up on the bare concrete floor of a building on East 9th Street. Several sit in plastic chairs, watching from an improvised gallery as their fellow librarians are questioned.

That annoying person talking loudly on a cellphone may one day be barred from using the Newport Beach Public Library. Librarians want new regulations that would allow them to discipline unruly patrons, and the Board of Library Trustees gave them the go-ahead Tuesday to draft penalties. As a public space, libraries must balance the needs of orderly patrons with the reality that some people smell strongly, make too much noise or stay on the computers for too long. How to reprimand adults without impinging on their public benefits is now the challenge for city staffers.