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“How do you make a library sexy?” Um? People. Forget this alphabet stuff. The answer is right in front of your wee beady eyes. You put librarians in it. (And make them dance in tight blouses and short wool skirts to “Unchained Melody“.) Duh!
How do you sell something as dull-sounding as the centenary of a public library to today’s fad-obsessed, attention-challenged youth?
How can you convince someone who last went to a reading room in a desperate effort to swot for exams that, really, the Mitchell Library is worth another look?
That was the challenge facing a team from one of Sydney’s leading commercial design companies – and the results weren’t encouraging.
”We’d had plenty of ideas,” recalls Catriona Burgess, the general manager of Frost Design. ”But we wanted to get an idea that came out of the library’s own DNA, something that wasn’t just gratuitous.”
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December 7th, 2009 at 12:09 pm
And if they look like Lisa Loeb, so much the better?
December 7th, 2009 at 2:07 pm
Most of the librarians at our local are retired kindergarten teacher types I think, one even looks like a former biker chick turned nun turned mean principal. I don’t want to see them in tight blouses and short skirts. With the exception of an Asian college student who just started there. She is a Zhang Ziyi look alike, and if there were more libarians of her genetic makeup I would suddenly have an issue of my wife being suspicious at me wanting to take the boys to the library every day.
December 7th, 2009 at 5:50 pm
Yes, tight blouses and short wool skirts… but also a dimly lit, dedicated erotica section.
December 8th, 2009 at 1:42 pm
Is it me or is that article implying that being fad obsessed and ADD is a bad thing – so let’s cater to that negative behavior to sell them on libraries??
You want to get more young people in libraries, offer free wireless internet, install a coffee bar/cafe and make it less expensive/time consuming for young people to become librarians. Not sure how it is in the UK, but over here in addition to a high school diploma you need a four years of undergrad plus 4 years masters degree (in an accredited program) in order to become a librarian lvl 1 (base salary $40K and down).
December 8th, 2009 at 4:35 pm
As a librarian-student currently procrastinating while completing her 2nd-last assignment for her first semester of her MLIS, I can say a couple of things: 1) a library degree in Canada is 2 years but it feels like 4; 2) even I didn’t go into the library to research my final 5000-word essay; 3) make online features of libraries sexy–that’s what the kids want 4) the sexiest librarians are the ones you never see ’cause they work in the back. They’re called cataloguers and there are bondage-souls buried deep under all that controlled vocabulary. Rawr.