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• 1 media/Screen Shot 2021-04-15 at 5.52.16 PM.png 2021-04-15T14:42:11-07:00 Superhero Librarians 41 It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a librarian! plain 2021-04-16T15:23:44-07:00 It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a librarian! The eponymous purveyor of popular culture, Archie McPhee sells the Librarian Action Figure.
  She's "an homage to those warriors of the printed (and electronic) word that keep fighting for literacy in the face of dwindling budgets and the decline of the printed word... This hard vinyl 3-3/4" action figure has a removable cape that symbolizes how heroic librarians really are" (Archie McPhee).
  
  Librarians engage in valuable and meaningful work as the sustainers of curated collections and knowledge that will be passed along to future generation. Laila El Mugammar evocatively writes "An ode to campus libraries", describing the way academic academic librarians inherit the superhero moniker, writing:

  The first thing you must know before entering is that every librarian is a superhero: one you deserve and one you need right now. Librarians teach you to find reliable and credible academic sources. They help you find peer-reviewed sources for your papers, perfect your bibliography and connect you with faculty. They illuminate the dark jungle of post-secondary education (El Mugammar 2020).

  These are not "Shhh" librarians or Morgenstern's elinguated librarians. El Mugammar writes about the opposite--librarians as advocates and mentors who pass the torch:

  All librarians become mouthpieces. They speak for those who have been lost to time and advocate for those who struggle to find their voices now. I only hope that if I am lucky enough to become a librarian myself, I can supervise a nervous undergrad as she discovers the magic of her first medieval manuscript, and watch as the light spreads across her face like gold  (El Mugammar 2020).

  El Mugammar see something admirable--something she wants to become--in the librarians she praises; enough so that she imagines entering the profession herself. This inheritance narrative is part of the way generations of librarians uncomfortably pass on the mantle of our benignant profession and by doing so we perpetuate a genre of hero narratives all our own. 
  
  
  The Nancy Pearl action figure didn't start out as a caped crusader. In fact the first gen librarian action figure in 2003 was depicted as a kitschy cardigan wearing stereotype, complete with a button on her back that makes her arm move with "amazing shushing action!" She sold 28,000 in a week and then went deluxe gen2 in a red outfit complete with a "library diorama with a reference desk, computer, book cart, multiple book stacks (Archie McPhee).
  
  
  The [super]hero narrative is nothing new in librarianship--it's an inheritance of vocational awe reinforced with celebratory and tacky accolades that both mock and perpetuate it. But it also manifests in sincere stories like Mugammar's which depict libraries in a positive light. She writes under the headline:

  Libraries have your back during a crisis

  The University of Toronto Library has over one million digitized texts in their collection and recently made an anti-Black racism reading list available to its community. The University of Ottawa Library has been providing online “care packages,” which include podcasts, art, films and even virtual pet therapy. The University of Waterloo set up a library-themed virtual escape room. The Dalhousie University Library offers curbside pickup for all its materials and a “research bootcamp” workshop for all its eager learners. University of Saskatchewan students can contact a librarian who specializes in their area of study with the click of a button. The University of British Columbia Library offers its students free workshops on how to understand local government. Yukon University empowers its students with collections on frontier life as well as a bibliography of the Nunavik and Inuvialuit settlement regions. These are just a few examples of the meaningful work libraries do to illuminate their communities (El Mugammar 2020).

  These are positive stories of resilience. They are often read alongside stories in which librarians as hero first responders step into the wake of natural disasters, sifting through toppled stacks after earthquakes, salvaging materials after floods, or are required to go in during a literal pandemic to provide access to content under the term "hero."
  
  
  It is a slippery professional slope from hero or rockstar librarian, to martyr librarian, to burn-out. A hero mentality that relies on a vocational identity of self-sacrifice may manifest in library staff endangering themselves and their communities when they should not be or when they cannot effectively say “No”.
  These are the librarians with inadequate PPE working in libraries that remained open during a pandemic and risked their lives so unmasked patrons could have access to library materials, or who used their own cars and time to deliver books to quarantined students stepping out of pandemic isolation wards.
  
  This mindset is not sustainable, especially when library staff find themselves thinking of their work as a matter of life and death (a notion reinforced and celebrated by other colleagues, administrators or local politicians).