Sex offenders apparently aren't very well read. If they were, they'd know not to mess with a librarian.
When a man grabbed a 20-month-old child and dragged her to the men's room of the downtown Des Moines Public Library earlier this month, police say the library staff conducted a "masterful tactical response," led by 35-year library veteran Dorothy Kelley, hereafter called the "field general."
She barked orders, burst into the men's room and grabbed the child while other staff members kept the convicted sex offender, James Effler, trapped in the john.
Soon after, a plant was delivered to the library's front desk. The attached card read: "To: The Hero Librarians. From: The Des Moines mothers who are greatful."
A kind gesture, to be sure. But people, people. Greatful?
I'm sure they are grateful, but you don't want to mess with a librarian on spelling.
These are tough folks. Forget the shushing, bifocals-and-support-hose librarian. They don't like that image. Librarians are people who endure fickle budget decisions, the Patriot Act, the ever-changing information age and still have time for random arrests.
They may be the most unusual public servant left in our time.
Where else can you pick up a telephone, avoid an enormously lengthy phone tree, talk to a live person with a beating heart, ask a question and get an answer, all in less than five minutes?
I'm not taken to nostalgia, but this is the equivalent of a home-baked meal.
So here's what I wonder: Aren't these heroic reference librarians about to be outdated, outsourced, out-Googled?
We live in an information age full of experts. Call up a couple of Web sites, write a blog and join a long list of blowhards who just repeat the information they found surfing. A person who does the grunt work and finds the original, respected source of information is practically a dinosaur.
The reference librarian digs into dusty old magazines that aren't online, rolls microfilm of newspapers, flips through out-of-print books and ancient city directories and collects tidbits and scraps of a society amazed that everything isn't entirely easy.
Here at the Central Library in Des Moines, reference librarians answered 315,000 reference questions last year.
Every so often, public officials get the idea of cutting budgets. Five librarians were cut two years ago at Central. But with good sense, the positions have been restored.
Statewide, the number of librarians has increased � from 1,263 in 1990 to 1,560 in 2004 � and the number of reference questions answered hit at an all-time high of 2,001,538 in 2003. The American Library Association reports that the number of reference questions to public libraries nationally has increased every year from 1990 to 2002.
"As there gets to be more and more information, people need to be smart about it," said Mary Wegner, the state librarian. "People have to learn to evaluate what they find on the Internet. The librarian does that."
Think you're an expert, Googlehead? The Pew Internet and American Life Project did a survey earlier this year and found only one in six users of search engines can tell the difference between unbiased search results and paid advertisements.
We can enjoy our fancy bookstores, a new $32.5 million downtown Des Moines library opening in April and a complex home computer that promises information at our fingertips.
But the reference librarian cuts through all the information overload like a skilled surgeon.
If there is a tidbit of information on this planet that begs for the light of day, they are there, maybe not wearing a Superman cape, but a cardigan, quickly drawing their "snag file" into action. It's a pile of index cards with common or hard-to-find answers neatly alphabetized.
To give you an idea, one card says only this: "The correct spelling of portobello mushrooms."
Mushroom spellings. The altitude of Des Moines. The corporate address of Ford Motor. In the pursuit of accurate information, they never give up, never surrender.
"The America I loved," wrote Kurt Vonnegut in his new book, "A Man Without a Country," "still exists in the front desks of public libraries."
Say you're sitting there in your pajamas wondering about some names for former President Ronald Reagan's dogs.
Type "Reagan's dogs" into Google and five Web sites are listed. The first is a leasing company. The second is CNN (bingo!), which after two minutes trying to load is a dead end. The next two were personal blogs and the last was a message on a bulletin board. Time elapsed: Five minutes.
In the library snag file here it is: Lucky and Rex.
Say you're at a cocktail party wondering how many words end in "gry." (Answer forthcoming).
These are all questions to be answered by the heroic Des Moines Public Library staff. The 11 staff members with a master's in library science have an average of nearly 19 years of experience.
Deborah Kolb has worked at the Central Library since 1972. She says that young people seem startled that everything can't be found via Google. One student recently had to actually visit the Central Library and be shown a relic � the Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature � to look up old magazine articles on Woodstock for a school report.
Others, she said, don't know that some Internet sites that claim to be online encyclopedias are actually information supplied by users.
Kolb won't let questions just drift away with flimsy sourcing. Librarians tackle the answer as if they're subduing a sex offender.
"My lifelong dream is to be on 'Jeopardy'," she said.
Kolb loves the old building that has housed the library since 1903. It's in her bones.
"You never know who is going to walk in those doors," she said. "Everyone from kindergartners to people who sleep under the bridge."
The librarian is really the headmaster of a great social environment, maybe one of the few places other than Wal-Mart where all socioeconomic classes mix. And it's a rare place for poor people to get information. Librarians are enormously proud of that. Maybe it's the humanity oozing from all the great books that surround them.
Soon they will all move down a few blocks to the new library on the west side of downtown. A modern library must offer more access to computers � the number will jump from five to 35 � and a coffeeshop.
The librarians will still be the library's heart.
People such as Pam Deitrick, a librarian who started working here part-time in high school in 1969. When a parent dies, she helps the grieving caller try to remember the name of the song he wants to play at the funeral. When people get a diagnosis from their doctor, they call her to ask what it is and how long they have. She'll pull out the medical book, careful not to claim an expert status, and help them through it.
Just then the phone rings. A caller wants to find a certain paint and can't remember the name of the manufacturer. Don't ask me how, but Deitrick found it in Pennsylvania.
The library staff gleefully found the answers to the words that end in gry: hungry, angry (OK, those were easy), aggry (a type of ancient, variegated glass beads), meagry (having a meager appearance), puggry (a light scarf wrapped around a head or helmet for sun protection).
I thought this was a dying profession. I was wrong. Librarians are too tough to die out. They have this special force. Information just finds them.
Nikki Hayter, 27, was in her third day of training at the Central Library the day I visited. The older vets were showing her the ropes. Her grandmother had been a librarian there long, long ago. Her dad worked in the boiler room. She practically grew up in the place.
She was told to flip through a roll of microfilm just to see how it works. She grabbed the first one off the stack. 1949. She zoomed through the roll and randomly stopped on a photograph.
It just happened to be the engagement photo of her great aunt.
In the increasingly complex cosmos of information, something tells me she has a great future as a reference librarian.
