Link to The Laughing Librarian's home page

About The Laughing Librarian

The Laughing Librarian's Mission Statement

The Laughing Librarian just is, okay?

Many library mission statements are full of grand and vague phrases. There are three advantages to having a mission statement worded like that:

  1. It sounds nice and impressive to the taxpayers.
  2. It allows library administrators to argue that pretty much anything they want to do is part of the library's mission.
  3. It allows library administrators to argue that pretty much anything they don't want to do is not part of the library's mission.
Since The Laughing Librarian doesn't have to pander to taxpayers, its mission statement accomplishes pretty much the same thing as a typical fancy-shmancy library mission statement, but with honest brevity. Short. Sweet. To the point.

About The Laughing Librarian

The Laughing Librarian ...

  • was launched in February 1999. 
  •  includes content which, as the local PBS announcer here used to say before an episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus began, "may not be suitable for younger or more sensitive viewers."
  • is owned and operated by Brian Smith.
  • is a one-person operation.
  • is the name of the website, not a nickname/identity of the author.
  • appears to be popular in Scandinavia.
  • doesn't get updated as often as it really ought to be.
  • originally had a much larger, animated logo.
  • has changed URLs and hosts several times.
  • is currently hosted at LISHost.org.
  • contains no calories from carbohydrates.

About the author

Hi. I'm Brian Smith, the creator of The Laughing Librarian website. I don't refer to myself as "The Laughing Librarian." Maybe it's an "I am not Spock" kind of thing.

Here I am, nerding it up in the mid-1980s.

Except for right here, I speak in the first-person plural on The Laughing Librarian. It's just something I started doing at the very beginning, to create the fiction that this is an organizational endeavor. I think this style also gives me more freedom to exaggerate, say "we believe ..." about something I don't believe, and otherwise lie to you for the sake of making a bit work.

I started drawing up ideas for this site a couple years before I actually put it together. The inspiration came when some people on the LAW-LIB mailing list complained about the inclusion of humorous excerpts from The Lipstick Librarian in the AALL Spectrum magazine. "It's unprofessional," they whined. I figured that it's a sign of professional confidence to be able to laugh and joke about one's occupation. I also realized that one of the most unprofessional things one can do is whine about wanting to be respected as a professional. 

For the last few years, I've been working at a public library in the Chicago area, my third PL gig. My employment history also includes a few months as a researcher in the private sector and a lengthy stint managing the Chicago office library of a truly enormous law firm. A long time ago, I worked as an "Auxiliary Operator" at a White Castle, which means it was my job to mop Slider vomit off the floor. I also worked in a tuxedo shop in the 1980s, which means I have horrible images of rainbow weddings burned into my brain. I have a master's degree in public administration, in addition to an ALA-accredited master's and a BA in psychology.

My mother took me to the library regularly when I was a child, and I was especially interested in non-fiction books about animals. During my adolescent and teen years, I consumed quite a bit of "age-inappropriate" comedy, by folks like George Carlin, Cheech & Chong, Woody Allen and Monty Python. I borrowed a lot of this material from the library. My hometown library's record collection also helped feed my appreciation for music, and I grew up listening to some bluegrass, classical, what's now called "world" music, and other styles along with a lot of rock and pop.

I've watched way too much TV in my life, and I suspect that I'm one of the few people in the world who remembers both that Michelle Pfeiffer starred in a very funny cop show (B.A.D. Cats) before she made it in the movies and that Rick Springfield had a Saturday morning cartoon in the early '70s (Mission: Magic). I even recall an old Chips Ahoy commercial which had a horrible pun about a character "reading a dictionary, on-a-bridge." 

In addition to The Laughing Librarian, I operate the librarism.com site, along with the librarism.com CafeShop. I gave up doing my fileReality site after the Supreme Court's horribly wrong decision in the CIPA case. I'm a contributor to LISNews and regularly post to the Library Underground mailing list.