Superhero Librarians
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).
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).
Laila El Mugammar (2020) evocatively writing in "An ode to campus libraries", describes the way academic librarians inherit the superhero moniker:
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: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.
The [super]hero narrative is nothing new in librarianship—it's an inheritance of vocational awe reinforced with kitschy dolls, American Library Association (ALA) PR campaign materials, and celebratory accolades that take it up and perpetuate it.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.
Librarians like Dawn Amsberry, above, engage in valuable and meaningful work. They create a pipeline for knowledge, enabling library skills to be passed along to future generations. El Mugammar (2020) likewise sees 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 perpetuate a genre of hero narratives all our own. It also manifests in sincere reporting, like El Mugammar's, which depicts libraries in a positive light. She writes under a bold headline that proposes libraries as an elixir with the potential to keep us safer:
Libraries have your back during a crisis
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, sift through toppled stacks after earthquakes, salvage materials after floods, or as in This Book is Overdue (Johnson 2010), deal with poop in the stacks all under the moniker of "hero."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).
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).
