My wife is a librarian and yes, to get hired AS A LIBRARIAN, you need an MLIS degree from a fully accredited university. However there are page and clerk jobs you can get with a high school diploma. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that the person who checks out your books is a librarian btw, usually they are clerks. The people who shelve the books are shelvers and/or pages. The librarians do sometimes check the books out to patrons, but their core function is more research and development. They are the people who develop the collections and the cataloging systems, they are the ones who weed through old books and purchase new ones, they are the ones who answer the questions that people bring to them off the street, the ones who help the people get set up to use the library computers, the people who run the reading programs, kids programs, etc. If you want to shelve books, bring things from place to place and check some books out to patrons, you can do that with almost no education, though depending on how stiff the competition is for jobs, how much education and experience it will take to get hired varies. Basically what I see is even after you get a Master’s Degree (an MLS is a Master of Library Science, and MLIS is a Master of Library and Information Sciences), which is a 5 to 6 year degree, you still need to get about a year experience (which most get by subbing, i.e. just like teachers, a Librarian calls in sick or goes on sub hours, there’s a pool of degreed Librarians to fill the spot) before most places will hire you as a “Librarian”. Anyone older who is not a page and is actually a Librarian may have gotten into the profession at a time when this type of education was not necessary, but you have to realize they have years, probably decades of life experience doing the very things an education would teach them about.