We all know college kids are followers; they do what every other kid is doing. I'm not sure why, maybe in high school their parents made them shop at Sears, but as soon as kids get to college they decide that they want to be different, so they make themselves look like everyone else. I don't think they intend to look like everyone else, but they lack a variety of role models, and they're afraid of appearing clueless, so they do what everyone else is doing.
And this is the genius of Mardi Gras. Why else would girls flash their boobs in public for a handful of plastic beads? Because everyone else does it.
So libraries, particularly academic libraries, should use that same formula to get kids inside. Topless babes! (Kidding.)
No, libraries should seek out hip kids and give them library jobs. Every kid needs money for books and most kids get campus jobs if they can. Well, why do libraries continue to hire smart kids when they can hire cool kids?
When some kid tells you during the interview the she knows LC, why don't you ask her: "Sure, but do you know TMZ? Or Pink is the New Blog?" And "Can you shelve and text?"
Libraries need to stop seeking out the geeks, nerds and dorks, and especially the geeknerdorks.
Fill your libraries with hip, clueless kids like Best Buy does, and they can walk around not doing work, but attracting the other slightly less cool kids. There must some law to support this: any given event will populate with increasingly less cool people until it becomes a library (let's call that Effing's law of something).
So we need to turn this law around. Free your thinking. Free your mind and your ass will follow. Break the top-down geeknerdork hierarchy and get those kids in your library.
All right, forget it. Those kids would just mess everything up, anyway. And they wouldn't invite us to their parties.
