So, do you even need a high school diploma to be a librarian? Yes! Yes! The answer is “yes,” you need a high school diploma, a Bachelors degree in any subject, and another degree that adds to our already heaping student loan amounts called the Master of Library Science or MLS. A good portion of us also have what is a called a subject specialist master's or a second master’s although for most of us the second master's came first. Many of us have master degrees in English, history, art history, philosophy, psychology or sociology. The kind of degrees that make you ask: “What the hell, do I do now,” since those cankerous, almost senile tenured professors aren’t being forced to retire and aren’t dying any time soon.
So instead of becoming the grim reaper of the academic world, we go to library school to become trained information professionals. We know information and how to access it. We can find you authoritative information that isn’t on Google and Wikipedia. Librarians are your search engines with a smile, who will also recommend books for you based on your current mood and not your buying habits, like Amazon. We help you track down bus routes, give you lists for accountants three days before tax day, and if you need tax forms, we will help you print them out. We do more than check the catalog and look in Google and that’s why you need more than a high school diploma to do our job.
So just remember: Everyone who works in a hospital isn't a doctor, and not everybody that works in a library is a librarian.
