This isn’t going to be one of those posts that bemoans the image of the librarian, because, well, look at me. Cooler people are hard to come by. 
 Instead, I’m going to offer up a couple of examples of representations of libraries in popular culture that demonstrate that even when people think they’re doing libraries a service by portraying them at all, they’re only contributing to their image as stuffy, technology-averse spaces.  First, a still from the 1995 film Party Girl:
Don’t get me wrong: I liked this film, and I love me some Parker Posey, but she’s stamping books with a date stamp. I worked in a library as a circulation assistant my first year of college — 1986 - -and we had computers and barcodes even then. But it was 1995, and I’m (almost) willing to cut the filmmakers a little bit of slack. Â
Next, a still from Questionable Content, a web comic that I read religiously:Â
It’s 2008 and Tai, the red headed girl at the counter, is a library and information science student at mythical “Smif College” in an moderately-sized Northeastern town. What is that that Tai — the future librarian — is holding in her hand? You got it - a date stamp for checking in/out books.
It isn’t hard people. In this day and age you don’t even have to leave your desk and visit a real library to see that libraries have these newfangled things called computers in their buildings, and that we use these computing devices to manage information.Â
Alright, fine. I admit I’ve got a moderately-sized bug up my butt, but I’m the person who gets off on pointing out continuity errors in movies and TV shows.Â
