Libraries are now providing a lot more services than in the past. Michael Maziekien, the director of Cranford Public Library, who has been a full-time librarian for 15 years, said, “We’ve always had to be jacks-of-all-trades, to some degree. But the actual trades have changed. Fifteen years ago, you didn’t necessarily have people saying ‘I need to create a website for my business.’ Or ‘I need to help my children navigate this entirely new online system that my school is offering.’ To be able to help people develop those skills, we have to develop them ourselves,” said Maziekien.
Demand for those extra skills increased greatly during the COVID-19 pandemic. Ewa Dziedzic-Elliott, president of the New Jersey Association of School Librarians, said, “Librarians became almost IT specialists for the school districts. We were the ones providing resources for our teachers, for our administrators, for the students. We were the ones setting them up with the Zoom calls, and setting them up with other resources as well.”
Librarians have also become key in helping young people learn media literacy, as it becomes harder to decipher what’s news and what’s nonsense on the internet, Dziedzic-Elliott said.
