Why the next big pop-culture wave after cupcakes might be libraries

Linda Holmes, who writes the NPR entertainment and pop-culture blog Monkey See, says libraries may be "standing on the edge of their pop culture moment: Librarians prepare."

She writes: "… The very enjoyable Librarians Do Gaga video that everyone sent my way after the debut of the NPR Does Gaga video” captured her attention. And about the fact that a local news story skeptically questioning whether libraries are ‘necessary’ set off a response from Vanity Fair, and a later counterpunch by Chicago's Public Library Commissioner won her support from such diverse, non-library-specific outlets as The A.V. Club and Metafilter, and from as far away as The Guardian."

"Call it a hunch, but it seems to me that the thing is in the air that happens right before something — families with a million kids, cupcakes, wedding coordinators — suddenly becomes the thing everyone wants to do happy-fuzzy pop-culture stories about. Why?"

She cites the impact of libraries on a number of fronts including: "Libraries get into a fight. Everybody likes a scrapper, and between the funding battles they're often found fighting and the body-checking involved in their periodic struggles over sharing information, there's a certain ... pleasantly plucky quality to the current perception of libraries and librarians," Holmes writes. She also highlights the following: "librarians know stuff, librarians are green and local, and libraries will give things for free."

Read Linda Holmes' blog post