quiz
So you’ve read all those articles in People, Vanity Fair and Reference Quarterly about the fabulous lives Lipstick Librarians lead. Want to know if you have L.L. tendencies? Take the quiz below!
- Do you have an MLS or MLIS?
- My degree’s from Southeastern Mississippi Technical Institute and I haven’t touched a mascara wand since 1972. (0 pts.)
- My degree’s from Central Wisconsin State U. and I once thought of purchasing a pair of moderate high-heels at Macys during an ALA conference in New York. (2 pts. for women; 25 pts.for men)
- No degree, but I played a glamourous yet evil librarian for three episodes of All My Children (I died in a mysterious cataloguing accident!) (35 pts.)
- When you see the letters “DKNY” you think:
- A dyslexic colleague with an aversion to vowels is valiantly trying to spell “donkey”. (1 pt.)
- No–not another ALA Rountable!! (2 pts.)
- Could we have even more black this year, Donna, darling?? (10 pts.)
- How many cats do you have?
- 0 (30 pts.)
- 1 – 3 (10 pts.)
- 4 – 10 (1 pt.)
- Do you mean the ones at home AND the ones I feed within my designated U.S. census block? (Give it up now!)
- You fantasize about:
- Harrison Ford and you. (15 pts.)
- Michael Gorman and you. (20 pts.)
- Harrison Ford, Michael Gorman, select LITA members and you stuck in an elevator during an ALA mid-winter conference (100 pts.–you win automatically!!)
- I coordinate my clothing colors by:
- What WWD says will be hot for the upcoming season. (25 pts.)
- Whatever’s on sale at Target. (2 pts.)
- The covers of the National Union Catalog (pre-1956 volumes, of course). (-5 pts.)
- My idea of erotic literature is:
- The Diary of Anais Nin. (10 pts.)
- The newest bodice-ripper in our popular fiction collection. (5 pts.)
- AACR2,especially the section on corporate-added entries. (0.5 pts.)
- I prefer my earrings:
- Sleek, silver and subdued. (15 pts.)
- Very ethnic and very tasteful. (10 pts.)
- Long and dangly enough so that it smacks me in the middle of my nose when I whip my head from side to side. (1 pt.)
- If you could, what would you wear at the reference desk?
- Comfortable separates in cotton knit. (2 pts.)
- Sequins, but my library director won’t let me. (35 pts.)
- Discontinued journals, clear masking tape and scratched CD-ROMS, but my library director won’t let me. (16/100th pts.)
- My idea of spending leisure time is:
- Flying to Prague over the weekend with my lover Gianni to check out the latest gallery opening of my favorite ex-patriate Japanese designer. (10 pts.)
- Seeing yet another independently-made film about a smart woman making a bad choice about career/men/food. (5 pts.)
- Making sure the bar codes in the books in my collection area are placed in a way to ensure efficient wanding. (2 pts.)
100 – 75pts:
Congratulations! You’re a high-flyin’, rouge-smearin’ Lipstick Librarian! You spend countless hours trying to find Post-Its in aubergene and sage. We know you’ve got a little shrine to RuPaul somewhere back in your cubicle. In short: you go girl!!
50 – 74 pts:
Let’s face the facts: you have definite Lipstick Librarian tendencies. You’re probably the kind of person who spends their annual serials budget on Marie Claire and Interview Magazine and you’re a one-person library for hydrologic engineering firm. You’re also the kind of person whereby the word “access” conjures up images of a kind of minimalist Banana-Republic knockoff boutique rather than a service orientation. The cure? Give in and go buy those Vivienne Westwood wedgies and Donna Karan body stocking you’ve been dreaming about!
25 – 49 pts:
By now you’ve realized that upstairs there’s a lonely fashion synapse firing hopelessly in the dark. You *want* to be a Lipstick Librarian, you *need* to be a Lipstick Librarian, but somehow you always wind up in the murky back aisles of K-Mart amongst those granny sweatshirts and ammo supplies. Your idea of sexy shoeware is Birkenstocks with a sling on the back. An erotic evening for you would be trying to wash 10 of your long-haired cats while listening to NPR. Take comfort in knowing you’re not alone–after all, you are a librarian…
1 – 24 pts:
*Sigh*…let’s be blunt, shall we? You’re probably reading this right now over a mound of pathfinders from the 1960s you’ve saved in case of a bibliographic instruction emergency, or (if you’re a cataloger) while you’re building a catalog database of your canned goods. (“does the can shape count as an access point?”) The closest you’ve come to make-up are the perfume samples you rip out of magazines ’cause you have a chemical sensitivity to everything except that strange gritty soap in the ladies room. You must learn to live with your fashion-impaired state–afterall, can you really see yourself standing at the reference desk in a vinyl jumpsuit and 6-inch platforms?