At the risk of inviting some frank speech, I thought I'd share the 10-minute talk I gave last October at our state's library conference to several hundred people as part of a "lightning round" of four talks on topics of interest to librarians and other library staff. The title was:
Epicurean Librarians and Stoics in the Stacks (click link for PDF)
...and here's the description as it appeared in the conference program: Epicurean Librarians and Stoics in the Stacks. Can we learn anything from ancient philosophy about working in a 21st-century library? This LIBChat will offer food for thought on how to engage your patrons and approach your work from a 2000-year-old perspective. Core Competency: Customer Service
Reading back over it before I posted, I can see multiple things I'd change or revise. I noticed right away my use of "Epicureanism" and have read heated discussions on this forum about the use of that word as opposed to "Epicurean philosophy". I probably would also have limited my quotations to Epicurean ones, but, at the time thought I'd hit a wider audience including Stoics since more people appear to be familiar with Stoics and I could use that as an doorway to ancient Greek philosophy. Oh, and I did actually read the ancient Greek at the end during the talk before giving the translation.
In any case, here's my recent attempt at spreading the word about Epicurus and his philosophy.