Scott Douglas

“Plenty of patrons had asked me strange things, but this was the first who asked me where my car was parked. It was almost comical to look at the man, because he actually thought I was going to tell him. I struggled to come up with a reply, but the best I could muster was, "That's personal." What I meant to say was, "Sir, the fact that I work in a public library doesn't make me stupid, it just makes me poor. There's no way I'm going to tell you—a psychotic person who could very well have a knife in his pocket—where I have parked my car.”

“It's a cruel world, and unless you're blessed with some talent people will pay money to see, your friends are the only people who will get you where you need to go.”

“The library—the place in my life that was full of books—beagan to teach me that books weren't everything.”

“We don’t have to destroy the library of the past. We just need to give it a face-lift.”

“A library was nothing without its people. You say library and there’s this iconoclastic image of an old-lady librarian telling people to be quiet and not to run. But the thing was, that lady—that iconoclastic lady—was with us when we cleaned. She wore blue jeans, too. Maybe she was what people thought about when you said library, but she didn’t make the library. People made the library. That’s what made a library. Without them, all the sacredness was gone. It was just a building with books.”

“It took a bit of popcorn and a library snack bar to make me realize that being a librarian was about more than just giving people information. It was about serving a community. And if the community is hungry for more than just knowledge, then maybe it’s about time to open a snack bar.”

“The loudest elderly women always had the quietest elderly husbands.”

“...killing rats wasn’t in my job description.”

“I like to imagine that library school was started because of some sort of silly bar bet where a guy got really plastered and told his buddy that he could convince people that librarians needed to be trained in the art of librarianship. Sadly, this is not the case; its roots are a bit more academic.”

“When I tell people I went to library school, the most common reaction is either “You’re joking, right?” or “They have schools for librarians? Do they teach you how to properly sssh people?”

“There’s something deep in the heart of every person that wantsto protect culture. The only thing about my pending career thatwas changed because of 9/11 was that I began to see it was the community,not the librarian, that was important to the library. Librarianswere only as important as the community they inspired. If Iwas going to continue with this career, my job wouldn’t be to protectinformation, it would be to bring the community together andinspire them to appreciate everything a library stands for.”

“To be great at something, you must look to the great ones of thepast and improve on the ideas and techniques that they started. Iwas motivated to do better—to improve on the ideas of others.”

“It makes logical sense that 168 is a greater number than 17, so why would you shelve 168 first? Because a librarian is always right. To the common man, this looks wrong, but to the librarian, this is right, because a librarian is never wrong.”

“I am convinced that grandkids are inherently evil people who tell their grandparents to "just go to the library and open up an e-mail account - it's free and so simple.”

“There was the smell of old books, a smell that has a way of making all libraries seem the same. Some say that smell is asbestos. ”