National Library Week
In honor of National Library Week, some facts about librarians.
• Around 1.3 billion people visit public libraries every year.
• There are about 126,800 librarians in the US. New York has the most, with 12,360 librarians.
• Want to work for the Central Intelligence Agency? A library degree might be your ticket in. At the CIA, you can earn up to six figures working in their library.
• According to a Pew Research Center poll, 78 percent of American adults feel that public libraries help them find reliable sources.
• The New York Public Library contains around 46 million items, though not all of them are books. It houses a 16th-century globe, an original copy of the Bill of Rights and a Honus Wagner baseball card largely considered to be one of the rarest in the world.
• At the end of the 19th century, library work was considered to be too overwhelming for women, and in 1900, the Brooklyn Public Library Association proposed building “a seaside rest home for those who had broken down in library service.” Melvil Dewey, who invented the Dewey Decimal System, also believed women would have a hard time working in libraries because of their supposed poor health. Thankfully, these ideas began to disappear around the 1920s.
