Newest Koans Older Koans Your Koans

Zen Librarian t-shirts ... at the librarism.com store!

Zen Librarian videos ... on YouTube!

According to Meditating with Koans , by J.C. Cleary (this is a real book; look it up), koans are ancient stories and sayings used in some Zen schools and were "designed to interact with the learner's mind and assist in the unlocking of the inherent human potential for enlightened awareness." Whatever that means, it sounds like these koan thingies could be useful for our professional development, especially if new ones were written to be directly relevant to our work environment. (The application of Zen principles to librarianship isn't a completely new idea; see Terry Ballard's Zen in the Art of Troubleshooting.)

The Librarian of Congress paraphrased, though without proper attribution, one of our koans ("The Zen Librarian searched for nothing on AltaVista and received 27,987,384 hits.") in a speech made to IFLA in 2001. So, we figure we must be onto something. And check out this Unshelved (formerly Overdue) strip:

Unshelved -- by Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum
       

By the way, have you noticed that Buddha is often depicted with his hair done up in a bun?

Newest Koans Older Koans Your Koans

Not in a Zen frame of mind? Perhaps you'd prefer selections from Michael Gorman's book, Our Singular Strengths: Meditations for Librarians (ALA, 1998). Also see the Librarian's Lao Tzu.

"The librarian told us that we were six or seven years too late. The library had removed all the Zen books from circulation because nobody checked them out anymore."  (Daniel M. Pinkwater, Young Adults. Tor, 1985, p. 91)

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Copyright 2005 Brian Smith. Non-commercial distribution of material from The Laughing Librarian is permitted only if the original URL and this copyright notice is included. All commercial distribution is prohibited without written consent of and large cash payments to the author.