Video shows UI librarians' quest to settle the West in 1908

A timid, hair-wrapped-in-a-bun, pince-nez-wearing spinster.

Is that the image you have of a librarian from 100 years ago?

Try this one on instead:

Gun-toting, horseback-riding, walk-2-miles-to-work-in-a-blizzard type of woman.

Those were the kind of librarians who settled the West.

Around the turn of the 20th century, graduates of the University of Illinois Graduate School of Library and Information Science (then called the Illinois Library School) headed to places like Texas, North Dakota, Idaho and Oregon.

Mission: to bring culture to the West.

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