No Silence

Mark Kerr wrote an editorial for the EMC, a newspaper in Kingston, Ontario, about how glad he is that libraries are not silent.

On the first night of my introduction to library sciences course, the instructor asked how many people wanted to be librarians because they 'liked quiet'. She looked at those of us who raised our hands with amusement. "Boy," she said, "Are you in for a surprise."

As it turned out, I was not really up to date on what libraries were like. I had the common misconception that they were still quiet areas, places you could only speak in a whisper. The picture my instructor painted for me over the course of the... well, the course, was a far livelier and colourful place. And in the end, it was this new sort of library that made me decide I wanted to be a librarian. It was far less boring than I'd worried.