Hey Friends!
This week, our unusual librarian is NOT fictional! That doesn’t happen often. Thank you Katy for sending this my way, BTW. Say hello to Andy Burkhardt, who helped bring dogs into his library to help kids during finals! Petting animals has been proven to reduce stress and lower blood pressure, so this was a public service to students everywhere! Many students started posting on Twitter and Facebook about the joys of puppies being in the library. Soon, the small room they had for petting had to be moved to a much larger room to accommodate all the students!
PUPPY!!! OHMYGODSOCUTE.
You can read his article here for all the details. I salute you, Andy! Way to help the patrons! You rock, sir. You rock my socks.
Now let’s all get out there and help those patrons the best we can!
Justin Brasher, Brash Librarian
Justin Brasher, The Brash Librarian 
Thank you all for your comments. This topic is delifiteny something on every librarians mind at the moment with questions of relevancy and with the threat of job cuts.knihovnik2000 and James I think you’re right about it being harder in the corporate world. I think in academic libraries we are lucky that the library is seen to have a central role within the University. The difficulty for us is to convince people that we offer more than just access to resources. In my mind the only way to do that is to develop our services to meet our users needs and to try to get one of our core services, that of information skills training, embedded within the teaching programme.
I quite agree, Daniela. People often see us as a “mortar-and-bricks” operation, a pile of books with a roof on it. Libraries are becoming so much more than that – we’re job sites, after school care, technology services…we’re slowly but surely becoming a community hub and those who don’t see it that way will soon close their doors.