To-do lists keep us on task and grocery lists ensure we come home with everything we intended to buy. But prioritization is much more daunting when it comes to the Johnson County Library’s vast collection. Enter Matt Imrie.
A native of South Africa who found his way to our region by marrying a woman from Paola, Kansas, Imrie’s official Library role is as a youth services information specialist in Gardner.
But his unofficial title is that of the Library’s king of lists, serving patrons by grouping books, music, and movies around many themes. His lists appear on bibliocommons, the third-party platform the Library uses for its electronic catalog.
Imrie pursues his avocation through the belief that reader’s advisory is one of the library’s core services, making a collection of more than one million items more accessible to users.
“No one can trawl through everything to find everything they want,” he said. He likes introducing users to older works that are sometimes overshadowed by new releases.
Since starting with a Halloween series in October 2019, Imrie has compiled nearly 800 lists around topics as diverse as Kansas history and “The Rocky Horror Show.”
Imrie has also parsed the library’s holdings around jokes, world events, and celebrity deaths. Imrie highlighted U.S. history as he studied to become a U.S. citizen and found material on the loss of a loved one while grieving for his father, who passed away from COVID-19 early on in the pandemic.
His recent handiwork marked the 40th anniversary of a little-known incident that brought the world to the brink of nuclear armageddon and noted the beginning of the Jewish holiday of Sukkot.
BiblioCommons serves libraries throughout the U.S. and internationally, and Imrie presented on the art of list creation and curation at last year’s users conference. He spoke about his father's death as an example of finding inspiration from various places.
If pressed for time, Imrie can compile resources in a matter of minutes, such as finding as much material as he could when musician Jimmy Buffett died in September. But in other instances, Imrie might take hours or days to find the right mix.
“I try to be as thoughtful as I can and make sure that it's balanced for a wide range of readers,” he said.
This year marks 50 years since “The Rocky Horror Show” debuted as a musical, and Imrie counts that list as one of his favorites. The movie version came out in 1975.
Imrie got to thinking about all the movies referenced in the opening song of the production, “Science Fiction/Double Feature.”
He thought, “Hey, these are all movies that I’ve seen and I’ve enjoyed. I wonder if the library has them.” He liked the list because it demonstrated that he himself could learn something from a list he put together.
Imrie is even working on a master list of all the lists compiled for the Library. “It's not the easiest thing to find specific collections,” he said.