This weekend Linda was awarded the Tomberlin Scholarship — congratulations again, Linda! Here’s her winning essay, which I said in a comment is far better than mine. And it is, for the simple reason that it was what the committee wanted. Well, that and she didn’t climb up on a soapbox. Something about short deadlines seems to induce in me a need to rant.

Anyway, just so Linda can see what I meant about the relative quality of our essays, here’s mine:

“Thank you for considering me for the Irma Rayne Tomberlin Scholarship Award. It was a pleasure to be nominated

“A converted dorm room full of dog-eared paperbacks was the setting for my first library job. Serving 600 liberal arts students looking for an escape from their studies, we specialized in genre fiction and lax due dates. Ten years later, after a small side-track into teaching, copy editing, and bookselling, I returned to libraries — this time in the active atmosphere of a well-used small town public library. I owe my decision to become a librarian to the people there, both patrons and staff.

“Soon after applying for library school I was given the opportunity to begin working in acquisitions at a medium-sized academic library and quickly realized that my niche had found me. Prior experience with vendors and invoices, budgets and databases gave me the grounding necessary to not just do the job, but to consider it in the wider context of the library. What I discovered was simple: we facilitate access to information. No matter what the format or who the patron, whatever larger institution of which we’re a part, people who work in libraries do their best to ensure that information gets into the hands of those who require it.

“Why did I not say ‘librarians do their best…’? Because it takes every library employee to ensure that information is accessible. From the copy cataloger to the students at the circulation desk to the IT guy sitting across campus, ensuring that the proxy server and the firewall continue to play nice, it takes us all. And I wanted to get that statement down on paper now, before my professional career officially starts, while I’m still clearly remembering the realities of the day-to-day life of a paraprofessional library employee, because one day I will read a job ad with the word ‘director’ or ‘dean’ in the title and think that it could conceivably apply to me. I don’t want to reach that point having forgotten what it’s like to be the acquisitions assistant.

“There is still a lot for me to learn before I will be a capable library director. I am a generalist at heart. That’s why my bachelor’s degree is from a liberal arts university; I didn’t really want to pick a major. That’s why I love the smaller academic libraries; I’ll get to wear multiple hats, no matter what the actual job description says. That’s also why it is tempting to just leave the administration to someone else. But if I truly believe that what we do is important — and I do — then I cannot be content to watch our administrative positions be given to people who may or may not understand the importance of our basic function: facilitating access to information.”