ABSTRACT
Personality may be thought of as giving information about a person, her likes and dislikes, and perhaps her positive and negative characteristics. Film makers are skilled depictors of personality, knowing that portraying characters with particular personality characteristics will convey familiar information to viewers who are experienced with stereotypes and with interacting with different kinds of people. This is particularly true of portrayals of librarians in films, in which librarians are given personality characteristics that reinforce positive and negative stereotypes. Examples include the stereotype of the helpful librarian with strong inner values, and that of the restrictive, rule-enforcing librarian. A system of personality typology originated by Swiss psychiatrist Carl G. Jung (1875-1961), and further developed by Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, is useful for classifying the personalities that filmmakers portray. The Jungian/Myers-Briggs system organizes information associated with 16 personality types and makes this information coherent with underlying theory. This paper will briefly describe Jungian/Myers-Briggs personality theory and then give the results of applying the typology to 28 films in which librarians are characters. The results will be compared with actual personality types of librarians as reported in Scherdin (1994), and stereotypes and sex roles will be pointed out.
