For the Love of the Library

Friday we broke ground on what is to be a new wing to our library. A great many people were gathered to celebrate with us. Our Scholar in Residence, a Georgia Writer of the Year gave a nice speech about the importance of the library. It was a time to celebrate the place that the library plays in the life of the community. It is easy to forget that we librarians are not the only ones who see the library as crucial to the education of our students and faculty. We often feel taken for granted. We may have faculty status, but not be considered on par with the other faculty. We may be among the first to face budget cuts. Yet we soldier on resisting an inferiority complex. Friday, at the ground breaking, a small multitude turned out to tout the library and librarians. I felt proud to be a librarian. I felt appreciated. The whole campus and much of the community was throwing a party for us.


I remember asking Gwendolyn Brooks once if she thought that poetry was going out of fashion. She said that there have been, and always will be people who are deeply touched by poetry. I think that the same could be said about the library. Beyond the budget cuts, the work to prove our value to the community; beyond the students who still have not been through our doors or have not been to our databases; beyond all of this, there are those who deeply love and are greatly impacted by the library. This is what I felt on that day as we broke ground.

A Feast in the Famine

Let’s face it, times are tough and libraries often do not get the respect they deserve when it comes to budgets.  At the same time, we are trying to see to it that our library has all the resources that it needs to fulfill the student and faculty needs.  We have a difficult challenge – to keep the library supplied and fully staffed while dealing with, often significantly, less funding.  I can see an increased loss of hair in my near future.

This is where creativity comes in handy.  The other day, I heard that a local used book vendor had bought a collection of art books.  Our art library is in urgent need of art resources.  On a whim, I called the vendor to see if he would be willing to donate some books to the library.  Not only was he willing, but he allowed me to hand pick the books that he would donate.  I found some real treasures.  Granted, some of them were older, but there were some real classics in there as well.   In times like these, it is necessary to be proactive and imaginative.

A disorder of bibliothecal proportions

I have discovered that I have a vice, an addiction or a disorder. I do not remember ever having read about it in a psychological or religious text. I have not found it in medical references, nor have I found a twelve-step treatment for it, if I ever would want treatment for it. Nevertheless, I do most positively suffer from library gluttony.

I work at one library, visit another, and always have more books checked out than I could ever read. I walk the stacks seeing all of the great tomes, and I have to take some of them home with me. In the back of my mind, I know that I am checking out more than I can possible read,  but I cannot resist. I walk up to the circulation desk with an armful of books that will one day throw my back out. In this way, a good part of my life is taken up with binging on checkouts, leading to occasional purging trips to the library with armloads of books. Call me an addict, dysfunctional, or obsessed. Perhaps I am a little of all of these things.

At the moment, sitting on my desk is a stack of musty old books from the mid-nineteenth century. I may take some of them home some time. I will probably never read more than a few pages of them. Still, it feels good having them on my desk. They call to me. I am trying to resist, honestly I am.

Nicholas Basbanes on The Written Word

“Over time, communications across the generations has typically come by way of the written word, carried out in a striking variety of ways and recorded on an astonishingly rich medley of surfaces, the impulse always being to make contact and to give an account of ourselves – which, it turns out is the point of the exercise.”

Nicholas A. Basbanes from a Splendor of Letters: The permanence of Books in an Impermanent World.

Basbanes is a journalist who wrote a nationally syndicated column on books and authors. He also is the author of several books on books and book collecting.

Girolamo Tiraboschi

I first encountered the name Tiraboschi while reading a biographical work about Corregio in the book Among the Gread Masters of Painting: Scenes in the Lives of Famous Painters by Walter Rowlands. Aways eager to learn more about librarians who have made significant contrigbutions to society, I found the following information about him.

Girolamo Tiraboschi was an Italian schollar, Jesuit and librarian. He served for a time as the professor of rhetoric and belles-letters at the Bera in Milan. He was then appointed by Duke of Modena, Francesco III, to take charge of the Biblioteca Estense. During his tenure as the librarian, he added many acquisitions and created a catalog for the collection. His opus magnum is the Storia Della Literature Italiana, a history of arts and letters and many other contributions of his native land. He also wrote a biographical work of writers born in Modena and many other articles on history and criticism.


Ford, Jeremiah. "Girolamo Tiraboschi." The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 14. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1912. 21 Apr. 2010 .

On Redefining Literacy

Many these days are suggesting that there is a need to change how we define literacy. The argument usually goes something like this: since the advent of social networking, computers and gaming, the way students read has changed. They no longer read books, but they do read. We need to change the way we teach or define literacy to fit the way students now read. My response is that this is changing the question to fit the answer.

The reading of larger, more complex works of literature goes back to the beginnings of literature itself (as anyone who has wrestled with the Iliad, or the Epic of Gilgamesh can attest). These stories are as long as they are because it was felt that the story required it. Many of these stories began as long poems that had to be memorized; a lot of work for something that would not be that important. As Robert Bly has pointed out in many of his works, these tales were about more than a story, they are about a way of living.

Many may say that reading and writing are not the only way to gain and to pass on knowledge. That is true. I myself am a consumer of audio books, videos and podcasts. But for thousands of years writing and reading have been the main way of transferring and receiving the most important of information. I doubt that this will change anytime soon; at least not until we have found a way to transplant knowledge. It is more likely that visual and audio formats will continue to grow as supplementary, and in a few cases they will often be the best medium. To tout new media as an end to traditional literacy, however, is to engage in science fiction.

The error in the thinking of the effort to redefine literacy, I think, lies in the postmodern rejection of the metanarrative. In current thinking, all narratives are equal. The working out of this idea is that, if one does not like the narrative of something, say literacy, one can simply exchange it for something that one does like. The problem with this is that not everything is a matter of narrative. “Two plus two makes four” is the same regardless of the particular narrative of a culture.

A friend of mine once said that one should never change a custom until he or she discover why the custom was instituted in the first place. Reading has been around for thousands of years. Much of the wisdom of that time is collected in good sized tomes. Think of religious texts: the Talmud, the Bible, the Koran, etc. Many people of the world consider these texts foundational to their understanding of life. Furthermore, many of these texts require higher levels of literacy to comprehend. This says nothing of the texts which are foundational to a culture’s understanding of itself such as a government’s foundational documents and the great literature of the culture. To turn our back on these would be to devolve intellectually into modern barbarians.

The other day, an instructor stated that many of his students can no longer communicate their thoughts. He suggested that they may understand a thought, but could not verbalize it. I have since had other instructors from more than one college echo this concern. It is as if the thought takes more than a tweet to communicate, they run into a verbal wall. Still, the question arises, can a person understand thoughts that they cannot read in the first place?

We have heard that the new commodity in our country is information, but it is more than that. It is thoughts, especially complex thought with which we have to wrestle. It is possible that, in the future, the great economic divide will not be the have and have nots solely, but between the understands and the understand nots as well as between those who can and cannot communicate what they understand. In other words, it will be between the literate and the non-literate.

Justin Winsor on College Libraries

“I fear we have not discovered what the full functions of the college library should be; we have not reached its ripest effects; we have not organized that instruction that teaches how to work its collections as a placer of treasures. To fulfill its rightful destiny, the library should become the central agency of our college methods, not remain a subordinate one, which it too often is.”

Justin Winsor “The College Library”

Justin Winsor was a librarian, historian and a founder of The American Library Association.

Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org/stream/collegelibrarie00educgoog#page/n5/mode/1up)

An Unexpected Visit

As public service librarians, we never know who we are going to touch. I was reminded of this twice this week, when former students dropped by to say hello. One of these students was a regular in our library whom I got to know to some extent. The other one was a student worker. In both cases, they had been away from the school for a couple of years: the economy had taken its toll and they had entered the workforce. Both said how much they enjoyed our conversations while they were in school.

Two years later, both of these students had moved on with their lives. They worked, played, hopefully enjoyed life, but they found their way to the library again. More than likely, they were here for other business as well, took the extra time to visit us and say hello. What they receive here was more than research assistance, they experienced a real connection.

As for me, I was just doing my job. I am still just doing my job, but I am coming to see my job as more than information assistance. For some, I may just be a friendly face. For others, I may, for a while, be that trusted guide through the murky waters of homework and resources. For those precious few, if I am lucky, I will be an enduring part of their college memories. Sometimes, it when we least expect it, in the ways which we least expect, that we make the biggest impact.