The Value of Libraries

by Jeri Westerson

My library.

Of course I knew this. Libraries are for far more than checking out your library books. They have certainly served as a platform for me to do events and garner more readers. And I spend a great deal of my time--yes, even in this internet age--actually researching for my medieval mysteries in libraries. But lately, libraries have come to mean even more to me: As a place of refuge.

I live in one of those places in southern California that is far from the coastal breezes and cooler air. This region is called the Inland Empire. And like much of Orange County with its Disneyland and Knott's Berry Farm fame, it is land-locked. The IE encompasses some pretty vast desert spaces, too, like the Mojave and Palm Springs. Though I don't technically live in a desert, it is just about considered high desert and as such, can be pretty unbearable weather-wise this time of year.

At least it's a dry heat.

Our household budget has been stretched to the extreme lately, what with sporadic income on my part, and huge bills...also on my part, I'm afraid, due to an author's ridiculous personal expenses for travel and promotion. So we've had to cut back on almost anything we could. In the summer, our air conditioning bills used to top $600 a month at the height of summer, but we can no longer afford to indulge ourselves with air on day and night. We switched to having a window air in the bedroom and in my home office, but even that will run too much.

Enter the library.

In the years following the beginning of the Great Recession, library funding got cut to the bone. Some had to close their doors for part of the week to make ends meet. Ours did. But now they seem to be on healthier fiscal footing (I know that this is in large part to the efforts of their Friends of the Library, that raises a rather hefty sum from their in-library bookstore [alas, this also means that if you donate books to your library, more than likely they won't end up on the shelves but in the library bookstore. It still helps your library, but if you want to help your local author, consider asking the library to order their book instead.]). My local library in Sun City is open every day and so I decided to avail myself of their hospitality...and their air conditioning.

Huntington Beach Library's atrium.

Now, I've been to tons of libraries, both for myself to get information I needed for my books, and to visit the library as a panelist or presenter as an author. I've seen some pretty spectacular libraries, from the Huntington Beach main library with its spiraling atrium and fountain, community theatre, cafe, and enviable gift shop, to the frankly amazing Cerritos Millenium Library with its opera house-like appearance, room with banks and banks of computers, and huge fish tank. Some libraries have cafes inside. Some have spectacular kid's spaces. Some, like Agoura Hill's library, have a relaxing craftsman-style designed interior complete with working fireplace. And some, like Corona's, has a money-making passport office right inside.

Cerritos Library computer banks.

Children's section, Cerritos Library.

These awe-inspiring library of libraries are among many that I haven't mentioned or haven't yet been to. They all offer books, of course, but some offer much more. But what they all have in common are their meeting spaces, working spaces, or restful spaces. And they are full of people! It's still quiet--as it should be--except perhaps immediately before and after storytime--but there are loads of people there. Youngsters, moms with strollers and toddlers, teenagers, young adults who wouldn't look out of place at the local Starbucks, seniors...and the occasional author who just wants to get in out of the heat.

I was surprised, after spending day after day there, like my nine to five job that I used to spend at home (and perhaps less efficiently since I had loads of distractions, especially of the furry kind), I discovered how very efficient and valuable and NEEDED are libraries. Not only does it supply a place out of the heat (or cold, or rain, depending on the time of year) but its computer banks also supply much-needed access to the internet for folks of all stripes. You can't apply for a job anymore without being able to log onto the internet, and some people either can't afford a home computer or can't afford the internet, or both. Shut down libraries

Agoura Hills Library

and you disenfranchise the poor more than they are already disenfranchised.

Mission Viejo Library

I am happy to report that my local library seems to be doing well. It's a very pleasant place to spend my afternoons, working on my manuscripts--or this blog post--and I urge you to support your locals by making donations and supporting local bonds in support of them.

Thank you, libraries, for being there when I needed you! 
   

The James Library

by Sheila Connolly

Last week I wrote about Carnegie libraries, which started me thinking about the libraries in my life.

I was an early reader.  In fact, I can't remember not being able to read.  My mother claims I read street signs to her when she drove me places, not that I remember that.  She too was a reader, so there was always reading material around the house, including the large-format glossy magazines of the day—Life, Look, The Saturday Evening Post.  I still miss those.

My first library experience did not end well.  As I've said here before, when we moved to a new town, the year I was five, my mother took me to get a library card, and I took good care of it.  However, somewhere along the way there was some miscommunication:  I thought that once you took the books out of the library, they were yours to keep.  Which does not explain why I hid them under my bed. My mother confiscated my library card, and I still rankle at the memory.

Later she relented, and I usually had a library card for whatever town we lived in (we moved around a lot).  Of course, my mother had to do the driving then. At least she supported my reading addiction (and probably hers as well). And there were always school libraries, although as I recall they limited the number of books you could take out at one time, which was never enough for me. It wasn't until I was in my teens that I lived close enough to the local library to walk there.

When we moved to Madison, New Jersey, in the 1960s, there was a delightful old library in town, which I used regularly (remember when you had to do real live research for school papers?). However, apart from admiring the architecture now and then (and marveling at the opaque glass floors in the stacks, which I found unsettling), I didn't think much about it.  On a whim I looked it up when I was checking out Andrew Carnegie, and I found something that surprised me.

The James Library opened in 1900, the gift of D. Willis James, who in addition to funding the granite and limestone structure also stocked the library with 5,000 books.  I never even knew the library had a name—it was the The Library.  And I certainly had no idea who D. Willis James was.  What kid or teenager thinks about the history of his or her town? (Well, I did know that Madison was once known as Bottle Hill because of the tavern located there in the 18^th century.)

So I looked up Mr. James, who turns out to have been Daniel Willis James, age 68, iron merchant, living on Madison Avenue (as I did, but not exactly in the same neighborhood) in 1900. He was a corporate mogul with a variety of mining and railroad interests.  When he died in 1907, he was one of the hundred wealthiest men in America.  Maps show that he and his wife owned a nice chunk of land on the north side of town, the site of his summer home, built in 1885.  Anyway, this civic-minded gentleman gave the town a library.

But that's not the whole story.  Mr. James also built a commercial building across the street (called the James Building, no surprise) whose purpose was "to provide income for the Library's maintenance and operation." Funny—I remember the James Building almost as well as I remember the library.  It had a ballroom upstairs, where I attended a couple of meetings; a music store, where I had one of my first jobs, bartering for guitar lessons; and downstairs, a hair salon where I had my hair done for the junior prom. There was a drugstore with a soda fountain on the corner. In short, it was an important part of the town.

What is so lovely is that Mr. James did not just hand a gift to the town and walk away.  He was a smart businessman and made sure that the library's expenses would be covered in the future. Both buildings are still standing, although the library building now houses a small museum; the town built a new library on the other side of town shortly after I left for college.

Like Carnegie, James (who attended school in Scotland) believed in contributing to his community, which he did in many ways.  We were and are lucky that they both thought libraries were important. And what's more, they both created memorable settings for learning and reading.

Libraries Past and Present

by Sheila Connolly

I wanted a new author photo, so I got in touch with the photographer who has done all of mine (not only does she take great pictures, and not just people, but she is also a woman who had made some wild leaps between careers, not unlike I have).  The last batch I had done, a couple of years ago, we took in an orchard near where I live, but at the moment all the trees are bare and we'd have to slog through leftover snow and/or mud, so not the best way to approach a portrait.

For an appropriate setting she suggested a place nearby:  the former library the next town over, now a combination coffee house and used bookstore, with the occasional music performance.  It's a Carnegie library, completed in 1914, so it's a sturdy stone building with some delightful features.  We agreed that it would be perfect.

Much to my embarrassment, I had to admit I didn't know much about Carnegie libraries.  I could have given you a one-line summary, but that was all, and that didn't seem right.  Here's the mid-length version, thanks to a quick Internet search.

Scottish-American businessman and philanthropist Andre Carnegie donated funds for the construction of over 2500 libraries between 1883 and 1929, some public, some part of university systems.  Nearly 1700 were built in the United States.  When the last grant was made in 1919, there were about 3500 libraries in this country; nearly half of them had been funded by Carnegie.

They were built in a variety of styles (there was no single Carnegie blueprint), but one common feature was a broad and welcoming doorway.  The buildings were usually solidly built and imposing, though they weren't always large, at least not by current standards.

I wasn't thinking about any of this consciously when we trekked over to the place looking for nice backdrops.  The library was converted to a coffee shop when the town built a larger new one across the street—all very nice, shiny and modern.  The old library, on the other hand, has charm.  There's a fireplace straight ahead as you enter, flanked by cozy seating.  There are plenty of windows around the perimeter, over the remaining bookshelves (if you stop to think about it, that was probably hard on the library books, but definitely people-friendly).  It was and is a warm and welcoming place. 

Plus now it combines books and food.  What more can you ask for?  There are tables with chairs scattered around, and plush sofas around the perimeter.  People aren't required to buy anything, but can come in, sit at a table, and read or do a crossword puzzle.  Two or three people can hold a meeting.  Various local vendors display their wares, from pottery to knits and quilts. 

The place is open from six a.m. until four p.m.  My photographer friend tells me that it does a booming breakfast business.

I came away with the feeling that the library, or at least its essential spirit, lives on in its new incarnation.  It's about books, and reading, in a comfortable, welcoming setting.  It's warm and intimate, as well as aesthetically pleasing. Isn't that everything a library should be?

And I think we got some great pictures.

Publishing; The New Paradigm

I'm getting so sick of new paradigms. I mean, I haven't even figured out the old paradigm yet. But new it is. As a matter of fact, by the time you get to the end of this blog post, I'm sure it will have all changed again.

Maybe new authors have it better than "established" authors. Maybe because new authors aren't stuck with the old models and can easily move forward without the old prejudices. I've had to rethink, re-do, and reinvent so often I'm a bit confused these days.

This is my roundabout way of saying that the publishing world is still evolving and welcome to my merry-go-round!

Once upon a time, there was the vanity press, where authors whose work wasn't good enough to be published by big New York publishers could publish it themselves. If you signed with a vanity press, you essentially paid to be published. And it doubly sucked because not only did you pay this money thinking that they would take care of it and you'd start selling like mad, but you didn't sell anything because bookstores certainly wouldn't look twice at you, and you could forget about reviews. There was no such thing as ebooks and Amazon yet.

Then Amazon took the book world by storm, and pretty much opened the door to ebooks (because they had this Kindle Kontraption to sell and needed content) and suddenly it didn't really cost you anything to get published. Except it cost the rest of us, because there was still the problem of lousy books getting "published" that wouldn't ordinarily have seen the light of day. And a LOT of them. Some 250,000 self-pubbed ebooks published each year now. But then more changes happened. Print on demand or POD technology became a viable way for authors to also get print copies of their work out there. (Because POD is just what it says. No need to warehouse books when you just wait for orders to come in and print them when...well, demanded.) And authors with a following, with an established record of publishing with big and small publishers, started to self-publish their out-of-print backlist as ebooks and then print books. Suddenly, it wasn't such a bad thing to self-publish, a formerly dirty word.

But as always, promotion is the bugaboo. A big publisher will at least have your book in their catalog from which libraries and bookstores could order. They'd send your books to reviewers. They'd get you your ISBNs and offer a way for bookstores to connect with distributors. They'd edit, proofread, and design your book, at no small expense. Of course that was all they'd do. No tours, no ads, no placement in endcaps or on tables in the bookstores. Not even a freakin' bookmark. Not for Ms. Midlist, anyway.

And if this last year has taught me anything, it's where promotion is good and where it is lacking.

It wasn't too long ago that if you couldn't get placement in a bookstore, couldn't get your book noticed there, then at least Amazon was another spot where sales could rise. After all, you simply went to your social media "Friends" and asked them to review your book or even "Like" it. Those mysterious algorithms on Amazon would catch those reviews and likes and creep your title up the chain of "if you liked this, then you'll like this" right into the faces of prospective buyers. But then the floor fell out from under all that with the emergence of the "Sock Puppet." A sock puppet is when an author not only pays people/companies to write glowing reviews of their own books, but to write scathing reviews for that of their rivals, whatever that means. (Authors don't really have rivals, not like, say, detergent companies have rivals. When a reader gets done with the latest medieval mystery, for instance, they don't just sit on their hands, feeling loyal to one writer and doggedly waiting a whole year until the next one comes out, forsaking the efforts of all other medieval mystery authors. No, they just go to the next author and buy theirs, and buy the next. And when that first author releases a new book the next year then of course there the reader is buying the latest. And the cycle goes on.)

Amazon got wind of these sock puppets and started deleting "suspect" reviews. Mostly by other authors. The problem was they weren't sock puppets. Authors do read books, you know, and are actually fans of other authors. I know I am. But that didn't matter. And so now the whole paradigm of getting lots of reviews doesn't seem to work anymore. So now what?

I've discovered over the years that tours really aren't worth it either. There is the meeting of bookstore owners and librarians, and those are worth a lot to establish those relationships, because a bookstore seller will hand sell the book of a writer they like, and similarly, so will a librarian when a customer doesn't know what to read next. But it's too expensive to run a hit and miss tour for oneself. After all, I'm the one footing the bill.

GoodReads? I find it hard to get the word out about my books there. Twitter? Some swear by it. Facebook? I found that social media might be a bit deceptive as to how popular you might actually be. The number of "Friends" doesn't necessarily reflect the number of people who will buy your books. And as some of you may know, I am now shopping for a new publisher once the latest Crispin Guest book comes out in the fall of 2013 (SHADOW OF THE ALCHEMIST). I'm not done telling Crispin's story but my publisher is. Besides signing with a smaller publisher, my first and most favored option, I do have another option, one that my agent wouldn't be too happy about. That is--dramatic pause--self-publishing them.

Why, after all my disparaging remarks over the years about self-publishing would I even think about the possibility? Sure, Barry Eisler turned down a rumored $500,000 advance from my very publisher (by the way, my advances are not only far from that ballpark, they aren't even in the same state!) in order to self-publish his next thriller, which he did. And he did just fine. I mean, he could afford to hire a publicist, a decent editor, a book designer and cover artist. And he already had a huge following. Self-publishers get a much bigger margin of profit from their ebooks than you'd see from a traditional publisher, something that publishers barely even cared about in their contracts five short years ago.

But I'm not Barry Eisler. And didn't he just sign with a publisher again? Yeah, it's easier with one than without.

Self-publishing wouldn't be free. You do have to hire an editor/proofreader. A decent cover artist. The book must be professionally turned out. Your readers would expect nothing less. But will it be worth the outlay? It's possible I could still get them into bookstores with the POD print editions (in paperback only. They be more expensive because the bookstore needs to make a profit, I need to make a profit, and the book printer/distributor needs to make a profit). It's possible with a little extra marketing on my part, I could get them into some libraries. It's even possible that I might be able to finagle a print review or two. But it seems that I would make a lot less than I'm getting now. Or would I? Is the higher percentage of royalty worth it? Might it turn out being about the same money? I'm already doing the lionshare of promotion myself, but there is more going on behind the scenes that a publisher can do that I can't (like this article in Publisher's Weekly that my St. Martin's publicist placed last year). What are the odds of my doing better? And as a writer, is it better to simply drop a series and write a new one, one that a publisher will want to publish? Is that how writers should roll these days?

The paradigm has shifted yet again and there are no answers.             

A New Library Spurs Optimism in Oklahoma

Marion Moore Hill (Guest Blogger)

Like most writers, and others who love to read, I adore libraries. Lately I’ve been hearing about such facilities shutting their doors, or reducing hours and services for lack of funds, and that saddens me.

But I’m feeling much more upbeat about the future—for readers, for writers, and for libraries—than I was a year ago.

What’s different? My town has a brand new $8-million library (and community center)! Such “miracles” can happen even in 2011.

I live in Durant, Oklahoma, a town of about 17-18,000. During most of the 40-plus years I’ve lived here, the library was in a white stone building, stately and beautiful but “land-locked” (no room to expand) and seriously decrepit (leaky roof; bathrooms outmoded, at times unusable). Obviously a whole new building was needed, but how to get one with the city already strapped paying for day-to-day operations costs?

Fortunately, my fellow citizens refused to settle for the status quo. The librarian and many library patrons kept agitating for a new facility, until finally our state legislators wangled $1 million in earmarked funds from the Oklahoma legislature to buy an appropriate site. The city then hired an architect and drew up plans, but the project languished for lack of construction funds.

Then the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation of Las Vegas, NV, got involved. Reynolds had owned Donrey Media, a chain of media outlets (newspapers, radio and TV stations, and cable entities) in Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Nevada, including at one time the Durant Daily Democrat. The foundation he set up and endowed in 1954 has built many community-focused buildings in those three states since it began.

I was on the publicity committee for the dedication of the Donald W. Reynolds Community Center and Library, so my time for several weeks was taken up with historical research, writing articles for a special newspaper supplement, collecting photos, and scheduling TV interviews for the librarian, all to get the word out about what a special facility the town now had. Like many volunteer jobs, it turned out to be much more time-consuming than I’d expected.

But also like many volunteer jobs, it’s been worth the effort. The library dedication attracted a standing-room-only crowd of citizens nearly bursting with pride. Use of the library is way up, hundreds of new library cards have been issued, and everywhere in town people have been talking with amazed pride about “our new library!” Not even the opening of a new sports complex a few months ago sparked such enthusiasm.

The new facility boasts a computer lab with a rotating schedule of free computer classes, community meeting rooms, special sections for genealogy, children and teens, a black-box theater, and even a café. This truly is a venue that enriches lives in our community.

The book is not dead, folks, nor is the library. Just as e-books haven’t caused the death of printed books—they only offer another choice—libraries are evolving to meet modern patrons’ needs and wants. You can still study or do research in Durant’s library, can still discover a great new author or a fun beach read, but you can also become computer literate, gather in groups, participate in distance learning from a far-off college, do video-conferencing, put on a play, or relax with snacks and a buddy.

To help launch the new venue, I had to put aside the writing of the new mystery in my Scrappy Librarian series. But I’m back at my computer again, with a renewed appreciation of the relationship between libraries and their communities. Our new facility isn’t exactly what a library used to be. But it’s what libraries are coming to be in the 21st century.

Marion Moore Hill is the author of two mystery series, the Scrappy Librarian mysteries, featuring intrepid Oklahoma librarian Juanita Wills, and the Deadly Past series, in which history buff Millie Kirchner investigates crimes involving American history.

Can we save our libraries?

Sandra Parshall

We all know libraries are hurting because of budget cuts, but do you have any idea how bad the situation really is?

Here are some figures presented in a recent issue of Publishers Weekly:

The New York (City) Public Library faces $40 million in budget cuts, which would mean eliminating 650 full-time staff positions, drastically reducing the hours libraries are open, and trimming materials acquisitions by a third. This is a library system that currently has 40 million visitors a year (more than attend all local sports events combined). Estimates are that budget cuts will reduce that number by six million and that a million fewer children and young people will be served.

In Detroit, 20% of library workers have already been laid off and those remaining had their salaries cut 10%. The library system’s 2012 budget will be cut from $35.5 million to $23 million.

The Houston Public Library’s budget was $39.3 million in fiscal year 2010; for FY 2012, it will be $32 million. The Dallas library has lost more than half its materials budget in the past few years.

The same sad story is repeated across the nation in communities large and small. State libraries have also been hit with severe cuts in funding, and the Obama administration has proposed eliminating federal funding for the Department of Education’s Literacy Through School Libraries program, which provides funds for materials, staff, and services in school libraries.

Why does any of this matter? What will happen if our library systems implode?

Millions of children in low-income and rural areas will lose the only place that gives them access to books and the internet. Inner city children will lose the only quiet, safe place where they can go to study. People hoping to start small businesses and unemployed people looking for work will lose the research opportunities libraries provide. Everyone who loves to read will lose that magical doorway into other worlds and lives.

As the scope of the potential loss becomes clear, citizens in many communities are mobilizing to save their libraries and make politicians realize that access to a library is a necessity in today’s world, a basic right in a literate society, not a luxury that can be discarded when times are bad. In Oregon, the Hood River County Library, closed for the past year, is about to reopen after citizens approved the formation of a new tax district to pay for its operation. In Los Angeles, voters approved Measure L, which sets aside a greater amount of property tax revenue for the library system and will reverse the major funding cuts imposed last year.

If they can’t sway the budget-makers, some communities are raising funds on their own. In Seattle, Friends of the Library raised $1 million, including $500,000 from a single anonymous donor.

Writers are also rallying to the cause. Karin Slaughter’s Save the Libraries project, backed up by International Thriller Writers, is helping libraries with fundraising events and auctions of items donated by bestselling authors. Go to www.SaveTheLibraries.com for more information. Sisters in Crime’s We Love Libraries Lottery provides a $1,000 grant to a different library every month, with the stipulation that the money be used only for acquiring books. To find out how your local library can enter the drawing, go to www.sistersincrime.org.

We can’t sit back and wait for big organizations and other people to save our libraries. We can’t assume that the slash-and-burn approach to library budgets will blow over and everything will be okay in the end. What’s happening to libraries throughout this country is nothing short of catastrophic. We have to donate money and materials and support fundraising efforts, but we also have to remain aware and be willing to protest the next time a major cut is proposed.

Libraries are the heart and soul of a civilized society. We can’t afford to lose them. 

What do libraries mean to you? What would you lose if you no longer had a library near you?

In Praise of Libraries

Elizabeth Zelvin

I was very disappointed to learn recently that my local branch of the New York Public Library, the St. Agnes Branch on the Upper West Side, is closed for renovation for the next two years. I had gotten out of the library habit—ordering books online is so easy, and schmoozing with booksellers, especially mystery booksellers, so much fun—but I’d planned to get back in. I not only have a new library card, complete with bar code and pin number, but I’ve even been carrying the mini version of my library card on my key chain. I had a date with myself to try the 21st century method of ordering the books I want online and picking them up at my local branch. So now I’ll have to work a little harder than I hoped at getting library books home.

When I was a kid, my father used to take my sister and me to the library. I lived in Queens, halfway between Flushing and Jamaica. Come to think of it, when I was very young, the nearest branch of the Queensborough Public Library was in Flushing, a bus ride away. Eventually, they built a branch within walking distance, around the back of the bank where I had my very first savings account. But before that, we took the bus. That and going to the movies were my father’s two allotted parenting tasks. We were each allowed to take home seven books. Sometimes, my father went to the library alone. When he came back, if you asked him, “What did you get?” he always said, “Seven books.” They were usually novels. My parents’ house was filled with books, but most of them seemed pretty boring. Some of them sat there for fifty years without once tempting me to read them. Buying novels was considered an extravagance. Why bother, when you could get them from the library?

In those days, as far as I know, libraries didn’t sell off their books. If you’d taken them out and read them, you could count on finding them when you wanted to read them again. The two children’s books I took out most frequently and remember most vividly were a book of Russian fairy tales and a collection of biographies. The fairy tales—folk tales would probably be a more accurate term—always had a hero named Prince Ivan and a princess named Vassilisa. The villain was usually the witch Baba Yaga, who had a magic cauldron and lived in the woods in a hut that stood on giant chicken legs. The legs allowed the hut to move around, and I think it could fly as well.

The biographies were about a different kind of hero (and a heroine or two): Marie and Pierre Curie, Livingston and Stanley, Sun Yat Sen, and Ghandi, among others. I still remember all sorts of details from those biographies. Did you know that Ghandi’s first name was Mohandas? And that he was married, by parental arrangement, at 13? In a discussion of how they don’t make copy editors the way they used to, Ruth Cavin, my editor at St. Martin’s, told me about what she considered the worst copy editorial faux pas that had come her way: a manuscript made a reference to Dr. Sun Yat Sen, and the copy editor didn’t understand why the character needed medical care. (“What kind of doctor was he?”) Thanks to my childhood reading from the library, I got the point.

As of September 2007, the American Library Association had 64,979 members. That’s a lot of librarians. Rosemary Harris, who is organizing an expedition to the January ALA meeting in Philadelphia for members of Mystery Writers of America/ New York, said recently, “You never know where a librarian may be lurking.” I agree. Librarians founded the great mystery e-list DorothyL. There are loads of them on MySpace. My brother-in-law in Ohio is a librarian. Librarians have my enthusiastic vote of thanks for keeping readers reading—and writers writing.

Research Librarians are the Superheroes of the Computer Age

by Julia Buckley
My favorite librarians: Molly Klowden and Sue Tindall.

There's always a time, even when one is writing fiction, that research becomes a necessity. I've had to research things for all of my literate life, and I consider myself relatively capable. But just as the folks in cartoons sometimes need to call on the help of Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman or some other caped crusader, so too do I need to occasionally call my own favorite superhero: the research librarian.

Why do I love them? Let me count the ways.

1. They are always cheerful. I assume that this is because they genuinely love learning and the acquisition of new information; that's why they went into the library game in the first place.

2. Nothing is too weird or obscure. I have asked questions about DNA, inheritance law, incest, conflict of interest, the history of Chicago, forgotten politicians--the list will go on forever (as I keep adding to it). But those wonderful researchers hop right on. Sometimes they say, "Hmmm! That's an interesting question. Let me look into it and I'll call you back."

3. They always call back. And when they do, they have information. Sometimes they'll even mail, fax or e-mail it to me, which is ultra convenient. Why do more people not take advantage of this service? Here are these wonderful people, smart, savvy, with books at the ready, willing to save us from our own ignorance. And it's never been easier.

4. They answer e-mails. Too lazy to use the phone? Research librarians have e-mail addresses, and all of the ones I've worked with will respond to queries sent via e-mail. Computers are changing the world in many ways--generally good ways. The fact that I literally have information help at my fingertips is, to me, something akin to a miracle.

5. They are everywhere! I have utilized the help of reference librarians at my local library, Chicago libraries, my university library, and the library at the school where I teach (see librarians above!) All of them have been quick to help and clever in the extreme.

6. They get it right. Research librarians are painstaking in their research, which is why they often want to call back. They won't toss you an off-the-cuff answer, but will do the proper thing: check and double check, comparing one source against another. In other words, they do what I should do but don't always have the time to do.

There are many more reasons why these librarians are my heroes, and I suppose the biggest one is that THEY SEE THE WISDOM IN SPENDING THEIR TIME IN A ROOM FULL OF BOOKS.

Three cheers for research librarians!