Confessions of a one-day a week librarian

One of the perks of my work is that I never know what’s coming next. I’m a school coach and, more important, a servant leader. My job is to try to fill whatever need comes along — sometimes on my own, sometimes by finding the right person for the job. This fall, the need in one of our local communities was simple: They needed a librarian — but only one day a week. Their little school library wasn’t being used because there was no one to manage the collection, no one to “do” library for the 55-student, K-6 school.

Being as how our whole theory of action at Antioch University New England (www.antiochne.edu) can best be summarized as, “see the need, meet the need,” there was only one thing I could do (after trying like crazy to find them a library media specialist and creating and launching a master’s degree program for education technology-focused library science to try to keep this problem from coming up again). I became the librarian.

Let’s be clear: The last time I had nongraduate students, the Internet was new. Common Core wasn’t even a twinkle in the eyes of its developers, and I was a much, much younger woman. Also, my students were adolescents.