One of the great things about my col­leagues at ALA is that they tend to have very inter­est­ing back­grounds. Some of them do improv com­edy, some are artists, one has a radio show, and one is an honest-to-god-real-live doc­u­men­tary film­maker. Last month I had the plea­sure of see­ing the Chicago pre­mière of Dan Kraus’ sec­ond film, Musi­cian, at the Gene Siskel Film Cen­ter. I enjoyed it very much, and I’m look­ing for­ward to watch­ing Sher­iff on DVD and see­ing future entries in the Work series.

You may already be enjoy­ing some of Dan’s work, as he’s been cre­at­ing and edit­ing videos on AL Focus, the online video arm of Amer­i­can Libraries. Inspired by what he has learned about our pro­fes­sion through his work as an AL edi­tor, he is hop­ing to focus his next entry in the Work series on a librar­ian. If you meet the fol­low­ing descrip­tion, or if you know some­one who does, please email Dan.

“The first movie was called SHERIFF. The sec­ond was MUSICIAN. The fourth will be PROFESSOR, the fifth will be PREACHER, and the sixth should be SOCIAL WORKER.

What’s miss­ing there is the third movie, which I’ve been hav­ing trou­ble with. Because of the demo­graphic spread of the other movies already shot or in-progress, I would really like to pro­file a Latina/Hispanic woman. And I was think­ing (duh), what about LIBRARIAN?

Although I am open to any and all sug­ges­tions, I think it would be fas­ci­nat­ing to pro­file some­one deal­ing with mul­ti­ple cul­tures, lan­guages, and eco­nomic lev­els. I also think it could be good to find some­one who works at a very small library with lim­ited resources, a place where the librar­ian is forced to be every­thing at once: Librar­ian, Teacher, Career Coun­selor, Babysit­ter, IT Spe­cial­ist, Sage, Free­dom Fighter, Fundraiser, and so on. For these rea­sons, I think find­ing a librar­ian in a small town, pos­si­bly one with a heavy immi­grant pop­u­la­tion, could be quite dramatic.

Also (although this is not a hard-and-fast rule) I’d pre­fer to avoid the fol­low­ing states that I’m already shoot­ing movies in: North Car­olina, Illi­nois, Iowa, Vir­ginia, and Florida.”