Libraries

My life has been affected at several points by libraries.  I looked up “public libraries” and found several different versions and ideas.  My mother took me to the main Enoch Pratt free library in downtown Baltimore when she knew I could write my name.  I don’t know what sort of credentials she had to present, if any.  I didn’t have much to do with libraries until I was in elementary school.  It happened that my house was on a walking route past a Pratt library branch and I remember spending time there.  As a high school senior, I was employed at that same main library branch, reshelving books left out on tables, often to hide poor men drinking behind them.

In college, I invited the person I have been married to for almost 67 years out for the first time in the campus library.  After marriage and children, my wife wanted a job closer to home.  She applied to the local school system and got a job as an elementary school librarian.  She had a minor in school librarianship from college. Later, she was a librarian in the high school library.  Eventually, she attended grad school and got a PhD which led to a teaching job at a college about 120 miles away.  She wrote her dissertation about the problem of cataloging and housing new sorts of materials other than books.  After a year or so of straddling jobs in disconnected places, she switched to working on the local campus and teaching ways to make web sites and web pages, a new possibility then