WHAT LIBRARIANS DO WHEN THEY'RE NOT BEING QUIET

Washington City Paper - When the American Library Association's annual conference kicked off in Chicago, some attendees wanted the world to know that librarian get-togethers aren't all about shushing and stacking: There's a lot of fucking, too.

The nearly week-long librarian meet-up, which began July 9, delivers "over 300 educational programs" to professional bibliophiles each year-including workshops like "Collection Development: Decision Making With Data" and "When Is Nice Too Nice? Strategies For Disengaging From the Talkative Patron." Some attendees, however, haven't been entirely satisfied with the ALA programming. So they launched a "secret" Twitter account for librarians to share more intriguing professional insights.

Some librarians are exhausted by the conference's material ("I have reached the point of the conference where I no longer give a damn about anything anyone is saying any more.") Others are inspired by a perceived lack of cultural acceptance for a librarian's sex life ("I am an adult. I am a librarian. I enjoy good sex. Including at this conference. What is the problem?"). Most of them, for whatever reason, are talking about fucking-that's the "sexy" part. . .

According to the librarian-blogger at 'not all bits', ALA's first anonymous Twitter free-for-all, @alasecrets, was accessible via a username and password circulated among conference-goers. Less than two days into the festivities, however, the account was shut down by a fellow librarian. Writes 'not all bits:' "Well, it saddens me that a member of the library profession took exception to @alasecrets and shut it down by logging in and changing the password. . . You're going to have to pardon my language here but FUCK that. I despise censorship in any form and I especially loathe the idea that a librarian shut down that Twitter account. So I did something about it."

The sexy librarian gossip site has now been re-born in the form of @ALASecrets2009-and re-illustrated with an icon of a Naughty Librarian Halloween costume (pictured). Conference attendees can now only post to the new feed by e-mail, meaning that fun-hating librarians can't tinker with the account details to quiet the masses. For the less horny librarian, the #ala2009 hash tag still offers up plenty of non-sexual ALA chat fare.