While modern school libraries are no longer hushed and are as much about the digital world as print, there is one important role they fill for today's children as much as any generation.
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"There is just a feeling of psychological and physical safety that people experience when they come in to a well-run library," Canberran Holly Godfree said.
"And, also, the people who sometimes gravitate to the school library staff, they might be among the more quirky kids, the kids who are having a hard day or just hard period of life. The library becomes a place where they know they are going to be okay and someone is going to greet them and have a chat.
"It's kind of an intangible but vital part of the role."
Mrs Godfree, the teacher librarian at Lake Tuggeranong College, was named the Australian Teacher Librarian for 2019 by the Australian School Library Association on Monday night.
"The modern teacher librarian has to be really tech-savvy but also you've got to be able to do all the voices when you're reading a story and hook them in," she said, with a laugh.
"You want to spark that passion and that love for reading, that's absolutely part of our role."
Mrs Godfree said school libraries were essential in modern schools, not only for accessing information and resourcing the curriculum, but for wellbeing.
School libraries were not the places they once might have been.
"The stereotype of the library being a quiet place for study only is no longer true in schools. What you are more likely to experience is a really healthy hum, a working hum."
From the United States, Mrs Godfree has been a teacher for 20 years. She started working in the library at Gordon Primary in 2005. She also worked in the libraries at Village Creek and Hughes primary schools . But it wasn't until she earned a masters in school librarianship six years ago that she felt she fully met the role, qualified as both teacher and librarian.
She joined Lake Tuggeranong College four years ago. She does not believe reading among young children is dead in the era of screen time.
"It's about a balance, number one, but certainly I think that most teacher librarians and staff library staff would agree when they're reading for pleasure, or even, reading the textbooks, that they really prefer to have a physical copy," she said.
"Having said that, of course the modern school library has to have a diverse collection so that includes audio books and e-books and digital audio books, you have to have a bit of everything."
Libraries must be about the digital realm. School libraries were foremost about research, which means digital literacy. That meant children must learn to evaluate what they found online and choose the right search terms.
Mrs Godfree said it was by accident she became a teacher librarian when she returned to work part-time after the birth of her first child and the teacher librarian at Gordon Primary wanted to reduce her hours.
"I really had no idea what it would be like. I wasn't one of these people who dreamed of working in a library, I just sort of fell into but found once I got in there, I actually loved it," she said.
Being a teacher librarian was about "solving puzzles and problems".
"People come to me when they are stuck, and that would be students and teachers, and I help them figure it out."
Her award was for encouraging student achievement and information literacy and her role in the "students need school libraries" campaign.
