MASTERMIND: Josie Parker

The public library in Josie Parker’s hometown of Laurel, Miss. was in a mansion built for a lumber baron’s son, a grand Georgian Revival building that had been converted into an art museum and library.

Parker, now director of the Ann Arbor District Library, was a dirt-road country girl, but she'd ride her bike to town and sit on a silk sofa in the library's reading room, amid antique tables and fine art from the museum's collection.

And even though she was a kid, no one ever told her she couldn’t be there.

"It was special to me in that it was also a very beautiful space, and I wasn’t exposed to space nearly that beautiful in my everyday life," said Parker, 50.

In that beautiful room she read Nancy Drew Novels and stories about adventures far from Laurel, Mississippi. The library opened the world to her; the people who worked there made her feel welcome and nurtured her love of learning.

"It wasn’t about loving to read," said Parker, although she does love to read.

And it wasn’t about the history of the library (although she’s since become a devoted student of library history). It was about the experience of the library.”

She's never forgotten that.

So it's no coincidence that her previous library positions – in Chelsea, Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor – were in children's services. Now in her seventh year as director of the entire AADL system, Parker approaches every day believing that somewhere within the library, someone else is having that very same experience – and now it's her turn to open the world to them.

"The example set to me was about access," she said. "No one told me what I could or couldn’t read. They didn’t judge my taste, just helped me get to it. My attitude about the public library is that we should try to develop an ethic of graciousness and welcome into our space, because it is the public’s space.

We’re stewards and that’s all. We don’t own it."

In Parker’s tenure as director that space has continued to grow. The AADL replaced one aging branch location with the 14,000 square foot Malletts Creek Branch in 2004, then opened an additional 14,600 square foot branch in Pittsfield Township in 2006. The Northeast branch, having outgrown its old storefront digs in the Plymouth Road Mall, closed June 1. Its replacement, the 16,500 square foot Traverwood Branch, is scheduled to open June 30.

Libraries, of course, are not what they used to be – nor are they what they're going to be. Where once there were books and magazines and storytimes, now there's web 2.0, Guitar Hero tournaments, art exhibits, panel discussions, digital media  and books, magazines and storytimes. The graduate students who are today's public library associates will figure out ways to organize information tomorrow and keep libraries relevant, Parker says.

Meanwhile, she takes very seriously the responsibility of keeping this library on track financially, managing this public resource so that it can keep meeting the myriad needs of the community.

"That's a trick, because people come to the library for very different reasons – but it's worth it," she said.

Parker still likes adventure novels, but she's long since learned the adventure doesn't have to end at the last page.

That world her hometown library opened up? Still out there.

She's stood in the ruins of the library at Ephesus (completed in 135 AD in what is now Turkey) and marveled that for millennia, someone has understood the value of a library. ("It’s a good thing to be a part of that," she says.)

Parker and her husband, Robert, enjoy wilderness camping in the western states and in the South. They've watched nocturnal creatures scramble around the desert in the bluish glow of the moon outside Elko, Nevada, gazed on glaciers in Seward, Alaska and been humbled by the magnitude of Denali.

"That is a place that puts you in your place," she said "We are one organism among many and we're not at the top of the chain. It only takes one grizzly bear coming up to get a good look at you, and you know."

To camp in Denali National Park at the end of the season, Parker said, is to be in a place where there are no human sounds, no manmade light. It's like stepping into a frontier novel.

"I like reading journals, and I really enjoy journals of women who were part of the western expansion in America," Parker said. "Much of what they experienced, if you go far enough out into the middle of nowhere, you can experience that. It creates a sense of responsibility to make sure someone else will get a chance to enjoy it."