Library Outreach Quotes

I don't want to see libraries close; I want to find local solutions that will make them sustainable.

Adult librarians are like lazy bakers: their patrons want a jelly doughnut, so they give them a jelly doughnut. Children’s librarians are ambitious bakers: 'You like the jelly doughnut? I’ll get you a jelly doughnut. But you should try my cruller, too. My cruller is gonna blow your mind, kid.

I talk to a lot of librarians, and there's always a steady drumbeat of how libraries are places of community. But a lot of them have also recently - and just in the nick of time - refurbished, because during this economic downturn, people have a tendency to borrow instead of buy.

In the last century, I earned my living as a librarian, and I loved it. I'd have to take some classes to get up to speed with 21st-century librarianship.

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts has liberally provided a way in which every town may have a collection of books free to all. So successfully has the enactment been carried out that only three per cent of the State’s population is unprovided with a free public library, and this remnant will soon be favored with its public stock of standard books.

A drop in younger children visiting libraries is of great concern. As children's laureate, I am passionate about the role of libraries, both in schools and in the wider community. They are unique places where children can begin their journey as readers, as well as being creative hubs.

Librarians in America do something like a couple of billion dollars worth of book business every year.

The librarian must be the librarian militant before he can be the librarian triumphant.

The library world is set up on this model where the library is a physical building and has a number of books and serves a geographical community.

I take every opportunity I can to speak to librarians.

If the library's rarest frequenters are the ones we'd like to see in them the most, then libraries are failing.

My work has taken me from historical research to involvement in electronic publishing ventures to the directorship of the Harvard University Libraries.