”Do you have any Raffi tapes?”
That question is put to librarian assistant Nanette Barber by a 6-year-old girl at the Youth Services Department reference desk on the second floor of the Northbrook Public Library.
(Raffi, a guitar-playing singer who records concerts complete with the audience clapping in rhythm during his numbers, is the darling of the 6- to 8- year-old set.)
”Oh yes,” Barber smiles. ”Come with me. We have Raffi tapes; and we have Ella Jenkins and Hap Palmer too.” She smiles at the girl, who looks puzzled. ”They have a lot of clapping in them too,” Barber explains.
Opening the card catalogue, Barber picks out some cards, then selects corresponding tapes from a tape carousel nearby. In a moment, the girl has left to check the tapes out downstairs at the circulation desk.
”I really love the young patrons,” Barber says. ”They`re appreciative. They`re open to suggestions. I don`t like to send them away disappointed.”
Barber, a full-time employee, spends most of her time at the youth reference desk, where she answers questions and finds books and audio-visual material. One of her favorite memories is of a mother whose son was having trouble with geometry and needed some books to study for a test.
”We don`t have (math textbooks) in the library,” Barber says. ”But I was able to come up with two or three books that reinforced just what he needed to know.”
Days later, when the mother returned, she approached Barber ”with a big African violet in her hand,” Barber says. ”She told me how grateful she was and handed it to me. She said, `I want to thank you so much. He did wonderfully.` ”
Barber says she remembers wondering what she had done to make the woman grateful. ”We help people every day to greater or lesser success,” she says. ”I had probably helped 300 people since that time.”
Another favorite memory is of a mother whose 8-year-old daughter disliked reading so much that her reading skills lagged behind her potential.
Barber agreed to find a good book for the girl. As she thought about it, Barber realized that the child ”always had a doll with her when she came in.” So Barber gave her ”Baby Island” by Carol Brink.
”It had to do with a shipwreck and a couple of little girls who had to take care of babies,” Barber says. ”This was a wonderful situation for a little girl who had a mothering instinct.”
When Barber found out the child read the book three or four times, she was gratified.
”It taught her that reading could be a pleasure, not a task,” she says. Susan Reisner, who is in charge of youth services, says that being a good reference librarian comes naturally to Barber. ”She`s a self-starter; she just sees a need and fills it.” For example, Barber created a cataloguing system for the dozens of series books now on the market, Reisner says.
Each series has so many titles that children know the books only by number, Reisner says. When a child asks for No. 49 in the Babysitter`s Club series, it would take an impossible amount of time to access it on the library computer, which has them listed by title. ”But the child often doesn`t know the title; he just knows the number,” she says.
Reisner says Barber painstakingly copied out each series in a notebook, listing the titles consecutively along with the numbers and that she adds to the lists whenever a book arrives.
”It saves us hours,” Reisner says. ”All we have to do is look it up.” Barber, who orders some of the children`s fiction books, reads trade journal reviews before she buys. ”If the book is on a subject of great interest to young children, such as a new baby in the family, we usually order two,” she says. ”Or if the author is well-known, we may order five.”
Barber also hosts one of the four storytime activities the library holds each year, each lasting a month and meeting weekly.
”I read simple stories to 2-year-olds, using big books with large pictures of animals like bears or farm animals,” she says. She draws and cuts out the paper characters, displaying them on a large felt board as they appear in the story.
Amy Busch, 16, who attended Barber`s storytime sessions, says Barber has helped her with school assignments many times. Barber recently helped her with an assignment for a HERO competition sponsored by the Future Homemakers of America. (HERO stands for Home Economics Related Occupations, some of which include clothing, fashion merchandising, interior design and child care.)
Amy, a student at Glenbrook North High School, chose child care as her occupation and competed against other area students in a storytelling contest. Amy says Barber helped her choose ”The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs” by Jon Scieszka, which tells the old story in altered fashion, using the wolf`s perspective.
”I didn`t know how to create the wolf, and she suggested a sock puppet,” Amy says. ”It worked out perfectly.”
Amy, who won a first-place ribbon, says Barber helped her to formalize her position regarding violence in children`s literature. ”She suggested I leave out the wolf-eating-the-pig section.
”It didn`t hurt the story to leave it out,” Amy says, explaining that this only minimally was touched upon in this version of the story. ”And after thinking about it, I decided that children get enough violence on TV as it is. They don`t need it coming out of a storybook, too.”
Barber, who grew up in Wilmette, attended New Trier East High School (now New Trier High School) in Winnetka. She earned a bachelor`s degree in art at MacMurray College in Jacksonville, Ill.
”I wanted to be an artist, but my father insisted I go to secretarial school,” Barber says. She then attended Winnetka Secretarial School (now closed) and studied shorthand and typing for eight months. After working for two years as secretary to an account executive at a Chicago advertising firm, she became author Ben Hecht`s secretary for five years.
(Ben Hecht was a journalist turned author. Perhaps best known for collaborating with Charles MacArthur on the play ”The Front Page,” he also worked on several film scripts, including ”Gunga Din,” ”Wuthering Heights” and ”Notorious.”)
Tired of traveling from coast to coast, Barber moved to Evanston, where she spent six months painting scenery as a volunteer for The Evanston Theater, a small community-theater company (now closed).
In 1955 she began painting scenery for WMAQ-Ch. 5, where her jobs included painting the stage for the ”Kukla, Fran and Ollie” show.
In 1957 she was married and moved to Evanston; the following year she quit working to begin a family. She and her husband, Tom, have four grown children. They moved to Glencoe in 1968.
Barber, a longtime book lover, became interested in library work in 1970 when a friend who worked at the Northbrook library told her about an opening. She was hired as a librarian assistant in the children`s department one night a week, and two months later, increased her time to two nights a week.
”The work was stimulating,” she says. I liked helping young people find answers, and I learned things along with the children.”
A year later she added Sundays to her work load, and in 1979, began working at the library full time.
”I`m not a real librarian,” she says. ”Technically my title is
`librarian assistant.` But everybody here calls me a librarian, probably out of respect. I`ve been here 21 years.”
The Northbrook Public Library has 24,894 cardholders, a yearly circulation of 553,748 and a collection that includes 196,000 volumes, 1,975 videotapes and an audio collection of 11,606.
The library has extensive architecture and science/technology collections, as well as a specialized circus collection, which includes print material for all ages, recordings of circus music and videotapes of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus performances.
