When the Multnomah County Library System celebrated 150 years in 2014, librarian Carol Rogers could make the unique claim of being there for nearly a third of that history.

On Oct. 19, Rogers celebrated her 50th anniversary with the library. Her coworkers gave her a crown and purple cape to wear as she walked down the grand staircase of Portland's Central Library, where she's spent 44 of her working years.

She doesn't look old enough to have earned the honor of the longest-serving library employee, and sometimes people ask if she started working there as a kid.

Close, but not quite.

Rogers was 19, a sophomore at then Cascade College, when she took a job at the North Portland branch.

"One of my fellow students was quitting as a page at North Portland so I walked over and talked to the branch manager and got hired as a part-time page," Rogers said. "That summer of 1967, our clerk wanted to take the summer off, so they offered me the temporary clerk position."

When a permanent position opened up three months later, Rogers applied. She'd been taking general studies courses at Cascade and thinking of doing social work. Instead, she dropped out and took a job at the library.

"In a small school, it's hard to get all of your courses lined up," she said. "So I thought, 'OK, I'll do this for a while.'"

"A while" turned into a lifetime.

Years later, when her car battery died near MLK and Killingsworth, she met her future husband.

"I had to walk over to the service station and have them come and jump me," she said. "And he's the guy who came and jumped me."

Rogers finds a good thing and sticks with it.

They've been married 46 years and have four children.

When Rogers returned from a maternity leave in 1972, Multnomah County was in the middle of a hiring freeze and they moved her where she was most needed: Central Library. She stuck with it.

She worked in circulation until 1976 when she applied for the newly created position of "morning computer operator."

For 10 years, she'd get to work by 6:30 a.m. to print the day's overdue book notices.

"It was a mainframe and disk drives, it wasn't a computer as we think of a computer today," she said. "And a big honkin' printer that printed out the overdue notices. That was the reason we had to start work early, because if that was still printing when other people came to work, it was a real lag on the system."

The best years, Rogers said, followed the massive renovation of Central Library, which was completed in 1997.

"The first couple of years after we came back here after the renovation, because of the staircase, the big wreath (on the ceiling) in the outer foyer... people would come in and just be amazed," she said. "People were so excited about seeing what it looked like. It was great to hear that enthusiasm."

Over the decades, Rogers has seen basically every modern advancement in library sciences. She started by processing library cards on a manual typewriter. Today, patrons don't even need to step foot in the library to check out an e-book.

Current library director Vailey Oehlke first met Rogers about 10 years ago.

"I remember thinking at the time that she had been in this library system for longer than I'd been professionally employed, and the beauty of that was she had experienced so many changes," Oehlke said. "For some people, that becomes wearing and difficult. For Carol, I think it was energizing."

Today, Rogers is a supervisor at Central Library, where she oversees clerks and the movement of materials. At 69, she isn't ready to retire. She wants to keep learning.

"I do have some struggles keeping up with all of the new, electronic stuff that comes along," she said. "Now we've got all the different ways you can check out books. You can use the Overdrive application, you've got the ebrary, Hoopla."

Hoopla is the name of a lending app. But it's also a decent description of the disruption that technology and the internet have caused for public libraries.

And it's why when I asked Rogers for a prediction for the next 50 years of libraries, she could only laugh.

"It has changed so rapidly that I have no idea what's coming next," she said.

In today's world, facing the unknown with a smile is perhaps for the best. Oehlke, though, does have a few predictions.

"The shift to digital, in terms of how people want to do their reading and access their information, I expect that will continue," she said. "I think there are some constants, too. I think people trust the public library. I don't think that's going to change. And I think we will continue to take that very seriously in terms of our responsibility to the public and to the community."

I can't help but see parallels between the news industry and the library profession. The mission to be a reliable information source in a world of free-flowing digital lies can be daunting. There's a lot of hoopla out there.

Thank goodness there are people like Rogers who stick with it.

-- Samantha Swindler

@editorswindler / 503-294-4031

sswindler@oregonian.com