When I applied to grad school, I had to write a statement of purpose. I was a first generation grad student, the second in my family to go straight to a four year college, after my older brother had done so two years before. Suffice to say I didn't know at all what I was doing.
I knew I wanted to be a librarian. I knew what it meant to feel called to vocation that not only was plagued by vocational awe, but invented the term (Ettarh, 2018). I didn't know how to translate my thoughts to a page in a way that mattered and sounded nice in 500 words or fewer. I didn't know how to summarize what it meant to me, what my purpose was, to be an information professional. I was lucky enough to have people in my corner to help me along and through the path of applications, grad school, and starting my career.
Now, unburdened by a word or character limit and with some years as a Librarian proper under my belt (rather than a library assistant; though my time through libraries as a paraprofessional, from student worker to library assistant, before completing my MLIS, gave me invaluable experience and I will be forever grateful for my time in the trenches of paraprofessional work and deeply indebted to the paraprofessionals in my library now and in the future) I think I can state my purpose much more clearly.
Statement of Purpose (or what it means to fix a printer)
I went to library school to fix printers. That might be a controversial statement, and I've heard once or twice people say the opposite. I knew the job before I took it, and before and after my degree have been elbow deep in my fair share of machines un-jamming stuck print jobs. I knew the work I was called to do, if a calling exists, and I knew to imagine Sisyphus happy, I would have to understand that, at least in part, I was going to library school to fix printers.
Of course, the job is more than that. Day in and day out, I have measured my professional life in PubMed searches, in Springshare statistics, in ephemera from students past and present hung on my office wall, in treasures collected from the learning commons, left behind and forgotten drawings and scraps. I have tasted just about every flavor of Oreo and collected the data in spreadsheets. I have closed my office door to the world, turned my back to the windows I see my students through, and cried from the feeling of helplessly letting them down. I have refused to let the despair of information lost, disinformation spread, information manipulated, information barred, battered, locked behind walls stop me for longer than a few minutes. I learned the importance of professional mantra. I went to library school to build ladders.
I have never been a librarian in precedented times. Each day, since I began my job as a librarian at the end of 2024, I face walls. They grow ever taller and ever more complicated. But, if I am shown a 10 foot wall, I will show a 12 foot ladder.
I became a librarian because I was raised to listen to pirate radio. I was raised to know that if something is broken we fix it. If someone is hurt, we help them. If someone doesn't have enough, we share. I was raised to question everything while X Files reruns played in the background, while Coast to Coast played in the garage, while CDs full of old Limewire downloads burned to play on the car stereo. I was raised to know that walls are actually built to be climbed. When I was young, someone taught me what a ladder was, and how to build it.
And as I grew up through adolescence and adulthood, I watched the people who taught me that, who taught me what pirate radio was and meant, who taught me about ladders and walls, who taught me the lyrics of Radio Radio, who I love, became lost to me because of the way fools tried not to anesthetize the way that we feel, but capitalize on it. I became a librarian because I lost people I love to disinformation.
But what about the printers? Don't worry, I haven't forgotten them. How could I? I fell in love with the work of librarianship because of them. But less abstractly, my first library job was as a student worker in access services at the OSU Valley Library, which involved, in large part, fixing the printers. But, obviously, it was more than that. The Valley Library served more than just the OSU community, but many people in the larger Corvallis community.
I learned the ebb and flow of the regular patrons, OSU and larger community alike, I saw the gaps created by information inequity in real time, I spoke to patrons about it while I fixed the printers. I learned about the killer government nanorobots infecting our minds and about term papers due in about 10 minutes, I learned what it meant to be belong somewhere, and what it meant when that somewhere was here, how to diffuse a situation, I learned how to protect my patrons when a situation can't be diffused. Access services is where I learned that being a librarian meant being a person first, and letting others do the same. Yes, I had some skills and knowledge others didn't, I could fix the printers, I could navigate a a database, I could read and find a call number, but I have my own deficits in skill and knowledge that my patrons and students sometimes don't. Access services taught me librarianship doesn't come from a position above the patron, but rather, we are side by side with them; after all, I'm not building this ladder just for myself, climb up with me! There's plenty on the other side, and where there's plenty, there's more than enough to share!
Fixing the printers is a proxy for working in service to others. Maybe in your library, there is another version of fixing printers. A mundane and sometimes tedious task that is necessary, that is not something beneath you, but rather places you beside your community. Concretely, fixing printers taught me the importance of dismantling the barriers to information. Of the power information has and the way disinformation disempowers, often intentionally, those who don't have access to the truth/access to the tools to piece apart the untruth. Information, the act of learning and sharing it, is a process of empowerment, a process of care and of kindness. If we take infodumping/info sharing/ladder building as a love language (and as an autistic person, it is certainly one to me) then being a librarian is my love letter to humanity. Here I am in all my humanness to meet you in all of yours, I am sorry the printer is broken, somehow at every library, every time, it always is, but I can fix it, and just wait until you see what else I can fix. And if you ever need a ladder, well, I guess you know who to call.