What I Am

"Librarians are centered on the human record that vast assemblage of texts, moving and still images, symbolic representations, recorded sound, and other fruits of the human mind. They select, acquire, organise, give access to, and preserve sub-sets of that human record and give advice and instruction on its use. They share core values stewardship, intellectual freedom, service, etc. and work cooperatively with other librarians locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally through such methods as inter-library lending, cataloguing standards, etc., to ensure coordination of library efforts and strive for total access to the human record. These words apply to the librarians of yesterday and tomorrow as much as to the librarians of today. They also, in my view, apply to librarians of all kinds in all countries. There is a golden thread that connects a school librarian in California to an academic librarian in Mumbai and a public librarian in Nairobi to a government librarian in Sydney."
Exciting, grand and inspiring scope part

"That being so, it follows that there are subjects in which all librarians should be educated and a core of such subjects that apply to all librarians and that should be included in the curricula of all library education programs. I have proposed elsewhere that we should work internationally on identifying that global core and work nationally and within linguistic groups to expand on that core as it applies in a particular country or grouping of countries". 
Practical, more nerdy librarian part

Michael Gorman, past president of ALA at the Forum on International Library Education

Is it REALLY about reading?

Max forwarded me this article entitled "Two-Make that Three cheers for the Chain Bookstores!"and here is a particularly interesting part:

Although there is some reality in the image of the chains as predators (ours is a capitalist economy, after all), it is not the whole truth or even, perhaps, the most important part. The emotional drive behind the anti-chain crusade is an understandable mistrust of big corporations allied with the knee-jerk snobbery that is never far from the surface in American cultural life. "I am a reader," the interior litany goes, "therefore I belong to a privileged minority; I patronize exclusive bookstores known only to me and my intellectual peers." With the chains, which target a wider public and make the process of book buying unthreatening to the relatively less educated, the exclusivity factor disappears.[...]

Wonderful though many of the independents were (and are)...the fact is that most of the good ones were clustered in the big cities, leaving a sad gap in America's smaller cities and suburbs—the places, in fact, where most of the American population actually lives. Books-A-Million's 202 stores, for instance, are almost all located in the Southeast. Borders has from the beginning targeted another underserved market, the suburbs, and as a result the quality of life in American suburbia has radically changed over the past decade. This is a point that the urban intelligentsia, which loves to characterize the suburbs as a cultural wasteland, seems to have missed, or at least to have taken no interest in.

I love a cozy bookstore as much as anyone, but if I really care about improving the reading habits of the general public, and the dissemination of knowledge as i so fervently claim to, doesn't this make sense?