After 30 Years, Jill Erickson Retires From Falmouth Public Library
In 1991, Jill Erickson arrived in Falmouth just after Hurricane Bob, ready to start her new job as a reference librarian at Falmouth Public Library. Thirty years later, on the tail end of a worldwide pandemic, Ms. Erickson is preparing for retirement, and the irony of her whirlwind career being bookended by two major events is not lost on her. In fact, it almost feels appropriate that a career spent sharing others’ stories be reminiscent of a great epic story itself.
“I arrived in a hurricane and I’m leaving in a pandemic,” Ms. Erickson said, laughing. “I’ve been really lucky in this job. It will be hard to leave, but it’s been great.”
Ms. Erickson came to Falmouth from the Boston Athenaeum, a private library on Beacon Hill. Having such pleasant memories of public libraries from her time growing up in Plainview, New York, and Norwell, Ms. Erickson knew she wanted to work at one. Some of her earliest memories are of being held by her mother, watching books pass through the scanner at their local library. That sentimentality, coupled with her desire to be out of the city and closer to the ocean, landed her on the doorstep of the Falmouth Public Library.
As head of Reference and Adult Services, Ms. Erickson has filled a crucial role at the library and had a hand in many of the 21st-century enhancements made there over the past three decades. The technological advances have been extensive and have virtually changed the world of the reference librarian entirely—the elimination of card catalogs in favor of digitization, the introduction of the worldwide web, Google—but Ms. Erickson has proven to be a crucial fixture at Falmouth Public Library. She fondly remembers the time where paper catalogs were the norm and research was done by the book, not online.
“One of the things I really liked about it was you knew you had reliable sources,” she said. “You weren’t being thrown into a pool of ads that wanted to sell you something, and that makes a huge difference when you’re doing reference work. I really loved it. It is very different now. I still love my job, but I miss being able to pull an answer out of thin air without using a computer. Because it’s just such a different experience to go ‘I know which book this is in, here you go,’ than ‘eh, Google it.’”
Sitting in her office, now sparse but once jam-packed with 30 years’ worth of collected items—handmade cards, folders stuffed with papers, colorful décor, and many a note of thanks from grateful library members—Ms. Erickson flips through a notebook with pages of questions she has been asked over the years. She mentions a few of her favorites, laughing as she recalls a time when a young student approached her and asked, “Can you forge my mother’s signature? I got in trouble at school.” She didn’t do it, but the memory stuck.
One of Ms. Erickson’s proudest feats was kickstarting the digitization of the Enterprise, which made editions dating from 1896 to 1961 available online. This project, made possible through a grant from the Community Preservation Committee, made it easy for people to search through old articles, find family history and even unearth old memories. For Ms. Erickson, these kinds of personal interactions have been the highlight of her job.
“One of the great things about being a reference librarian is you really get to know people, particularly the ones who call all the time,” she said. “I can remember people asking for recipes, they need some kind of recipe because they were in the middle of cooking for Thanksgiving or something. So you’d go to the shelf, you’d read them the recipe over the phone and they were like, ‘Oh, you saved my life,’ and you felt like you really had because you had made that direct connection. You weren’t going through a machine; you were looking on the shelves and you knew what your collection was.”
Another big part of Ms. Erickson’s legacy is the variety of programs she organized for both the library and the community. The “To Kill A Mockingbird” mock trial in 2003 stands out as one of their most successful programs.
“We weren’t expecting a huge crowd because it was cold and it was February,” she said of the event, which was held at Falmouth District Court. “But, oh my God, the place was so packed. There were so many people waiting. We ended up doing it a second time that evening because so many people had shown up in the courthouse, which could only seat so many people.”
Another largely successful venture Ms. Erickson has taken on was hosting a monthly book show on WCAI’s “The Point” with host Mindy Todd. She has done about 166 episodes, the first of which aired in February 2005. Instead of basing each episode on a single book, each episode has a theme—‘books that make us laugh,’ or ‘books about magic,’ for example—and the hosts interact live with listeners to discuss any relevant titles that come up in conversation. Though she will not be continuing as a regular host—her final episode aired on October 27, her last week at the library—she relishes the community she has built through radio.
“It is amazing how many people listen,” Ms. Erickson said. “It is amazing how they interact with us, it is amazing the emails that we get from the people who listen who just love it and love listening to us talk about books. And I love talking about books; so it all works out.”
For Ms. Erickson, her three-decades-long career at Falmouth Public Library has touched every part of her life, and in turn, every part of her life has informed her career as a reference librarian. This sentiment, first introduced to her by her reference teacher, Allen Smith, at Simmons University, where she got her master’s degree in library science.
“He was the most extraordinary man,” Ms. Erickson said. “He would say this to every one of his reference classes: ‘in order to be really good as a librarian, everything counts toward your work. Every play you go see, every concert you hear, every trip you take, everything you read, everything you know. I don’t know of another occupation like that. The more you know, the better you’re going to be.’ It has always stuck with me.”
Ms. Erickson has embodied this sentiment throughout her career but now that she is looking toward retirement, she is excited to have more free time for non-work-related activities, like swimming, traveling, writing, and reading for pleasure.
“One of the things that I’m really looking forward to in my retirement is being able to read whatever I want to read,” she said. “Not for the radio show, not because I’m trying to learn something for the library, but I am just reading for pleasure. And it’s not that I don’t get any pleasure out of what I read now, but to be able to read full time, as it were, is going to be the gift that keeps giving. [I get to] do all of this stuff I really haven’t had time to do that I’ve loved to do since I was a kid. So I’m like, ‘Oh, I get to be a kid again!’ ”