During a recent budget hearing in our county, someone in the press remarked:

The request of the sheriff’s department for more staff to handle pedophiles is more important than for the library’s request for more staff since they are just rounding up fines.

And now I’m mad. Do people really not know how much we do??? It’s frustrating to work as hard as we do, without hope of monetary return or concrete examples of benefits to our community, but still KNOWING we make a difference and are important, and then someone with the ability to either support us or cut us down with one sentence in the only local paper we have to not understand the fundamental need and strengths of the public library. ARG. Ignorance is the biggest hurdle librarians have to cross. People who are ignorant to what the library offers, who the library is for, and most importantly - what it is that LIBRARIANS DO.