Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Libraries
Ah, home away from home. This article about the Vatican's Library reminded me again about how comfortable I feel in libraries.I have been a user - indeed almost an addict - of libraries for almost as long as I can remember. I'd go the New Buffalo Public Library back home when I was a kid and wander the shelves looking for a new adventure. I still occasionally have dreams that seem to take place in a landscape reminiscent of that place (now long since moved).
Throughout my 22 years in the USAF the base library was always a familiar place to spend time. At a few places I volunteered to work in them - notably Shemya AFS, Alaska and Osan AB, Korea. Even Khobar Towers in Saudi had a small loaning library where I went through a lot of paperbacks.
I even have a room in my house now that's dedicated to my own library.Most volumes have been bought used, some have been bought new and some just kind of showed up. There's only a couple that have never been read,and there are many that have been re-read - some numerous times. I guess in some ways I am addicted to books. There are books and magazines in literally every room of the house in just about every nook and cranny -thankfully I have a wife who doesn't get too upset about them.
There was one paragraph in the Vatican library story that really caught my eye:
I asked him why stacks of old card indexes still fill one of the reading rooms when the library catalogue has been transferred to a digital database.This is the part that really bugs me about libraries modernizing. Wandering through card catalogs let me discover many books I'd never have found otherwise. You riffled through the cards looking for swords and then find yourself getting sidetracked by sugar and swing bands and syndicates and if you were off by one drawer or another maybe ribs and rifles. The online stuff is so much more streamlined and clean and loses a lot of the chances for random discoveries.
"We shall never destroy them because scholars often prefer to use the old library cards, and they are a permanent record which we can always use to check possible mistakes in the database," he explained.
