“I have always believed children should be in book floods, not book deserts.” For Dr. Annie Norman, the State Librarian and Director of the Delaware Division of Libraries, the goal has always been to help a small state make a large impact.
Norman was born in Maryland, with a family ancestry in the state dating back to the 1600s. She knew Delaware from a young age, spending time at her family’s summer place in Fenwick Island as a teenager. She later moved to Dover in 1982 and commuted to Salisbury State College (now Salisbury University) to get her bachelor’s degree. After three years of college, and throughout her first pregnancy, her husband told her “you’ve gotta get a job closer to home,” so Norman took an entry-level job at Delaware Division of Libraries.
“I started at Libraries for the Blind and Physically handicapped,” Norman said. “It was a very chaotic time there, and they kept promoting me– I had four promotions in four years by four different supervisors.”
Norman knew she would eventually need a master’s degree to become a librarian, but waited for the right opportunity. “I would learn as much as I could and make myself useful. I think I got so many of the promotions because it was clear I was interested in it as a career. I actually made it to administrative librarian before I had my master’s degree.” Norman eventually got her master’s at Drexel University.
It was at this point that Norman started to craft a vision for the future of Delaware Libraries. “One thing unique about Delaware is that we have to wear a lot of hats as part of a smaller agency. Unlike larger states, this helps us see a lot of connections between the different programs we provide, and there is a lot of value to that.”
Norman has been State Librarian and Director of the Delaware Division of Libraries since 2002. She considers the statewide Delaware Library Catalog to be their biggest achievement so far. “In a state this size with limited resources, I wanted to make sure we had the depth and breadth of content to support all of Delaware’s brainpower. So I knew we had to somehow pool our resources.”