Library Worklife

Volume 2, No. 5 • May 2005

Spotlight

From Securing the Building to Securing Children’s Futures

A Conversation with Willie Johnson Jr. of the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, Maryland.

“The paradox in life is that one must be ambitious to be free from that ambition which corrupts and tempts and distorts.”—Peter J. James

JG: I met Willie Johnson at the 2004 ALA Annual Conference and was immediately impressed by his focused path to librarianship. He’s a young African-American man who developed a desire to become a librarian while working as a library security officer. I asked if he would have a virtual conversation with me for Library Worklife about his path to becoming a youth services librarian. Hi, Willie and thank you for talking with me. Tell us what you do and where you work.

WJ: Hi! My name is Willie J. Johnson Jr. and I’m an Assistant Manager/Young Adult Librarian with the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, MD. My position entails reference assistance, library instruction to students and adult patrons, reader’s advisory, programming, collection development, community outreach and assisting the Branch manager.

JG: What do you like best about your work?

WJ: The thing I enjoy most about my position is working with the public. One of the beautiful things about this profession is the interaction with people. I can’t explain the contentment I feel when I help someone with a reference query or assist a student with his or her homework and they turn around and say "thank you" or come back requesting my assistance because of the service I’ve shown them.

JG: What other positions have you held at EPFL?

WJ: When I first joined Pratt in 1996, I was a Security Officer. From there, in 1998, I became an Office Assistant for one of the subject departments.

JG: When and why did you decide to become a librarian?

WJ: I decided to become a Librarian around 1998. After attending Community College for several years and going nowhere I left Maryland and moved to Atlanta, Georgia. At the time Atlanta was preparing for the 1996 Olympics. A good friend mine, who managed an athletic store, asked me to come work with him. I took him up on the offer and that experience of being in Atlanta during the Olympics changed my life forever.

You may ask how it changed my life. When I was in Atlanta, I met and saw so many affluent African Americans. The city is full of culture, the people were nice and the Olympics brought people from the different nationalities. I mean, it was so cool!! How many people can say they went around town with the Russian swim team or exchanged Olympic pins (traditional custom) with Somalian runners. Come on!!! It was the best, a real eye opener. Baltimore is a beautiful city but like many young males I didn’t see life outside of Baltimore until I left.

I came back home and my uncle helped me get a position as a security officer at the library. As a security officer I noticed that there were few men in the field of librarianship, and even fewer African American men!! So I enrolled in school again, got my GPA to a level where I could attend a four-year college and it took off from there.

JG: What qualities do you have that led you to become a children’s librarian?

WJ: I was led to become a Young Adult Librarian because of my fondness for teens. We pretty much enjoy the same things - music, video games, and gear (clothes). When teens see that there is a common interest and you go out your way to help them, they come back and want to interact with you. So many people are afraid of teens, which is why we need more young librarians like myself to reach these kids before they are lost.

JG: Who inspired/inspires you?

WJ: My grandparents inspired me. As a kid, my grandparents, paternal and maternal, told me about their hardships of being raised in the rural south and all they had to endure. Their stories pushed me to do my best because they didn’t have the opportunity to do it themselves.

JG: How did you prepare yourself for library school?

WJ: I didn’t!

JG: Where did you attend library school? Tell us about your experiences there.

WJ: I attended the University of Pittsburgh School of Information Sciences. The thing I enjoyed most about Graduate school was meeting so many different people, people I probably would never had met if I had stayed in Maryland. I always wanted to go away to school but I didn’t have the right grades or the money when I got out of high school. But through hard work and patience everything worked out well.

What I liked least about graduate school was the papers!!! My undergrad was more like a testing school. I mean, we had to write papers but not as many as I did in grad school. I’m talking fifteen to twenty-five page papers.

JG: Did you intend to return to EPFL?

WJ: Yes!!!!

JG: What are your thoughts on recruiting African-Americans to librarianship?

WJ: I think that if African-American students knew about the career and all that it entails a lot more would come into the profession. I tell students all the time about how beneficial the work is and show them all the different fields of librarianship they could go into, whether it be law, medical, research etc... So we need more African-American women and men like myself in the inner city tackling that digital divide, exposing kids to new things through programs, and being mentors to kids.

JG: What are your thoughts on recruiting men to librarianship?

Again, I think if people knew about the profession more people would inquire about it. We need to get out of that stereotypical librarian image. It’s a new day and librarians are going to be around for a long time.

JG: Do you volunteer in other organizations?

WJ: I’m active at my YMCA and I mentor one young man in my community. I also work as a part-time librarian at Sojourner Douglass, a small independent college in Baltimore.

JG: Why is it important to be involved in your local community? In the library community?

WJ: It’s important because the more we go out into the community and promote the library and ourselves, the more people will come and support our programs and what we do. Furthermore, it’s very beneficial to network with others in the field, whether it is academic librarians, media specialists, teachers or counselors because I feel the more resources and tools that are shared, the better we all are at our jobs.

JG: Willie, what are your future plans in the profession?

WJ: My future plan is to become a Director in a major city someplace similar to Baltimore, where the digital divide clearly separates the have and have-nots. There is a whole group of people who are not informed, who don’t have Internet access, and who are unaware of the resources and benefits available to them.

Furthermore, these people have children who ultimately suffer, these children are the ones who grow up lost and unaware and who are prone to trouble. These are the children I want to reach to show them that there’s much more to life. I had people who came into my life and gave me direction so I want to do the same.

JG: Do you have words of wisdom for support staff who are considering librarianship?

WJ: If you work at the library and do the same thing as librarians, why not go back to school and get the same pay as librarians? Like I said before, there are so many things you can do with that Master’s Degree.

JG: Do you have parting words of wisdom for librarians?

WJ: Recruit, encourage and instruct. Show and tell people what we do.