Moments

I show a student how to search for their topic in the library's databases and I literally hear a sigh of relief when they see how many articles they can find.

A student stops to tell me that the library is too cold (it is!) and then ends up talking to me for 20 minutes about her children and family. And what it's like to be a mother of four, working full time, and going to school. And how her sister was here but is thankfully ok.

The student who greets me every day in Swahili comes up to ask me a question. He asks the entire thing in Swahili and after processing what he said, I respond in English. And then tell him I don't know enough Swahili. And he laughs, telling me, "You know, you know. Try." As I walk away he is still smiling.

I teach a class and make the students laugh when I say something incorrectly. We laugh together and I hope I have just shown them that librarians are human...and not scary.

I chat with another faculty member about an assessment project we did last year in the library. I tell him how students who reported using Google as their first research (before using the library or anything else), had higher rates of failure in the class. And we laugh; this is not a surprise to us.


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These moments. These are why I became a librarian.

This semester has been crazy. For a lot of reasons both personal and professional. But I choose -- I am choosing -- to slow down and remember these moments. And to treasure them.

I often say in my classes that I became a librarian because I enjoy helping students. And yet, it's easy to get caught up in the lesson planning, meetings, reports, statistics, book buying, and details and forget the people.

So today I'm taking time to remember the moments. The people. What I love about my job.