National Library Week Library Heroes: Philip Larkin

Although Larkin (August 8, 1922 - December 2, 1985) became a librarian only after his attempts to get into the British civil service failed, he was relatively successful in his job. He began his library career in 1943 at the Wellington urban district council in Shropshire, then acquired his professional accreditation through correspondence courses. He moved on to the post of assistant librarian at the University College of Leicester in 1946, then sublibrarian at Queen's University, Belfast, and in 1955 he became librarian of Brynmore Jones library at the University of Hull, Yorkshire.

In a 1965 interview, Larkin complained that "work encroaches like a weed over the whole of my life... It's all the time absorbing a creative energy that might have gone into poetry." He also said that he "equate[d] librarianship with stoking boilers." By the time he was interviewed in 1979 for the London Observer, however, he had changed his mind: "Librarianship suits me--I love the feel of libraries--and it has just the right blend of academic interest and administration that seems to match my particular talents... I've always thought that a regular job was no bad thing for a poet." On living in Hull, he said that he felt "the need to be on the periphery of things."

National Library Week Library Heroes: Melvil Dewey

Library reformer and creator of the Dewey Decimal System of book classification, Melvil Dewey was born December 10, 1851 at Adams Center, New York into a relatively poor family where thrift was a necessity. He began working in libraries as an undergraduate at Amherst college, visiting many other institutions during his time there in order to see how they ran their libraries.

In 1876, while still at Amherst, he published A Classification and Subject Index for Cataloguing and Arranging the Books and Pamphlets of a Library, which was eventually adopted by libraries all over the U.S. to become the standard American library classification system. Indeed, although it has been supplanted by other systems in academic, specialized, and larger public libraries, the Dewey Decimal Classification and Relative Index is still used in many school and public libraries.

As if that wasn't enough, Dewey went on to become the first secretary of the American Library Association, and twice president of that organization. He edited the first five volumes of the Library Journal, organized the Library Bureau in Boston, and became associated with the American Metric Bureau, the Spelling Reform Association, and other educational reform groups.

Melvil Dewey is also credited with inventing the vertical office file cabinet.

He died on December 26, 1931.

National Library Week Library Heroes: Jorge Luis Borges

Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1899, Borges was one of Latin America's great men of letters. He was best known for his esoteric short fiction, rich in fantasy and metaphysical allegory. More importantly for this post, he also served as the director of the National Library in Buenos Aires from 1955-1973.

Borges took his first library job in 1937 and called it "nine years of solid unhappiness," feeling that the work was menial and dismal. Libraries, nevertheless, crop up from time to time in his work, notably in "The Library of Babel," in which Borges creates a literary cosmos:

Everything is there: the minute history of the future, the autobiographies of the archangels, the faithful catalogue of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, a demonstration of the fallacy of the true catalogue... the truthful account of your death, a version of each book in all languages, the interpolations of every book in all books.

Borges's appointment to the position of director of the National Library came just after the fall of Peron. Around this time he was also appointed to the National Academy, and was made professor of English and North American literature at the University of Buenos Aires. He devoted more time to these duties as his eyesight began to fail. He eventually became blind, and turned back to poetry, which he had neglected since the 1920s.

Jorge Luis Borges died in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1986.

National Library Week Library Heroes: Zenodotus

Born approximately 325 B.C., Zenodotus was a Greek scholarly writer who lived in Alexandria, Egypt under the reign of Ptolemy  Soter and Ptolemy II Philadelphus. He became the first director of the Alexandrian Library around 284 B.C., directing the preliminary classification of its books and becoming the first editor of the Iliad and the Odyssey. 
Zenodotus also prepared editions of Hesiod's Theogony and the poems of Pindar and Anacreon, and produced Foreign Terms, a collection of non-Greek expressions found in literary texts, as well as a Homeric Glossary, which laid the foundation for later scholarly linguistic study. Zenodotus was also the earliest person known (so far) to have employed alphabetical order.
You can find a more detailed version of this profile, originally from Greek and Latin Authors 800 B.C. - A.D. 1000, in Biography Reference Bank, and the picture of the ruins of the Alexandrian Library in Art Museum Image Gallery.