What Are Your Qualifications?

Common words that form titles are no friend of searchers. Hollywood is rife with them: M, Z, Up, etc. Book titles can be equally sweeping and terse. Desi Arnaz wrote A Book--maybe one should be thankful that he at least included the article "a." That'll narrow the results.

Searching for sweeping titles without resort to qualification by form (movie) or author (Arnaz) or the right database can make for a very long slog.

Library titles share the generic guilt. Just try doing a raw search for journals such as The Library or Searcher.

Books, Bookworms, and Owls (2)

Would a mascot make a library more friendly and approachable? Or would it jeopardize its facade of gravitas and add to a sense of triviality or even juvenility? A library does have an image, and the use of a mascot offers a means of playing with it and re-defining its profile.

Some mascots are probably inadvisable. A dinosaur, for example, might suggest that the library has gone that way.

Whether a library should have a living embodiment of a mascot is debatable. The various types of bookworm would be unwelcome and the majestic owl would be a challenge to maintain. The cat only could be a viable choice, barring the barrier of ailurophobes.