What I Learned Today

Imagine a library that has no books. Instead, the stacks have been replaced with computer terminals, e-readers (for circulation and checkout), and “collaboration areas.” That’s the plan for the new BiblioTech library in San Antonio, Texas. It will be an almost 5000 square-foot library, with precisely zero physical books.

Read more: The First Bookless Public Library: Texas to Have BiblioTech

Libraries (especially public ones) continually seek to reinvent themselves to suit patron needs and desires. A publicly funded service must necessarily stay relevant to its funding source, but from what I’ve observed, the people running libraries and working in them also embody an ethic of relevance, benefit, and impact as a matter of course. This move is inspired by the observation that many people today have less need for physical books, or they appreciate the convenience of electronic access, and some can benefit greatly from circulating e-readers if they do not have the resources to purchase one of their own.

However, the move to an all-digital, all-virtual content library is a radical one. It may be risky, since libraries are still engaged in an excruciating wrestling match with publishers who dole out library access to e-books grudgingly or not at all, and often at steep prices when they do. (Consumers currently get far better deals, in terms of selection and price, when purchasing for themselves, than libraries do.) If publishers were to shut libraries out completely from e-books, what would the bookless library have left to offer? Further, if the content is all electronic, why bother having a physical building at all? Will people come to it?

And yet there’s something to be said for a physical-virtual library. People use libraries for a surprisingly diverse array of activities, not simply removing and returning books from a warehouse. They gather to have meetings, to study, to roam the Internet; they form book clubs and attend workshops and fold themselves into cozy armchairs for naps. Children attend storytimes and activities and get involved in volunteer programs. Reference librarians provide a uniquely valuable service in the form of guidance to relevant resources, through an increasingly overgrown jungle of information glut, and they do not charge a consulting fee. Altogether, these areas are where the library manifests as a community resource, above and beyond its store of books. Even with all-virtual content, there will still be value in these face-to-face activities… if people can be persuaded to leave their home and come. Bring on the coffee bar!

In my class on the History of Books and Libraries, we were recently introduced to this fun 9th century Irish poem. My own cat and I are amused.

The cat’s name, Pangur Bán, is a little tricky to decode. “Bán” means “white,” and “Pangur” seems to have been a common name for cats (maybe like Felix) that may mean “Fuller” (as in fulling cloth: beating it to remove dirt and impurities — like how cats knead blankets?).

I and Pangur Bán, my cat
‘Tis a like task we are at;
Hunting mice is his delight
Hunting words I sit all night.

Better far than praise of men
‘Tis to sit with book and pen;
Pangur bears me no ill will,
He too plies his simple skill.

‘Tis a merry thing to see
At our tasks how glad are we,
When at home we sit and find
Entertainment to our mind.

Oftentimes a mouse will stray
In the hero Pangur’s way:
Oftentimes my keen thought set
Takes a meaning in its net.

‘Gainst the wall he sets his eye
Full and fierce and sharp and sly;
‘Gainst the wall of knowledge I
All my little wisdom try.

When a mouse darts from its den,
O how glad is Pangur then!
O what gladness do I prove
When I solve the doubts I love!

So in peace our tasks we ply,
Pangur Bán, my cat, and I;
In our arts we find our bliss,
I have mine and he has his.

Practice every day has made
Pangur perfect in his trade;
I get wisdom day and night
Turning darkness into light.

Translation by Robin Flower

My class on the History of Books and Libraries started off with a tour of ancient writing systems and libraries. We covered a wealth of fascinating content. For example, it had never occurred to me that the Lascaux cave paintings were three-dimensional, since they were painted onto irregular cave walls! I’d only ever seen flat-looking 2D pictures like the one at right. Today you can visit the Lascaux cave paintings in 3D through the magic of the Internet. Do it! I sat there enthralled as I floated through the twisty little passages and came away with an entirely different sense of this early artwork. “Early” is an understatement. The paintings are estimated to be 17,000 years old!

I also learned that cuneiform tables had a 3D aspect not only in their wedge-shaped impressions but because, as chunks of clay, they were rather thick, and scribes took advantage of this to write on all sides, including the edges. Browse all sides of real tablets yourself! (Now I want to make my own, maybe out of Play-doh.)

We discussed various writing systems, and you can browse several historical scripts as well as (quite curiously) constructed scripts, mainly for English, that replace our current alphabet. One of my favorites is Heptal (rendered at right). We also discussed boustrophedon, a word I will never again misspell.

Finally, we covered the ancient libraries at Nippur, Ur, Nineveh, and Alexandria. The library at Nineveh was the creation of Ashurbanipal and grew to contain 30,000 clay tablets, with a complex indexing system and integrated book curses. My assignment for this week was to create a “learning activity” about Ashurbanipal and his library.

Dare you take my quiz? Will you earn yourself Ashurbanipal’s admiration or his scorn?

One of Ranganathan’s Five Laws of Library Science is that every book has its reader, and therefore the library should make it easy for books to be found by their reader. To that end, he advocated open shelving, meaning that patrons can access the books themselves and browse at will, as in a book store. This came as something of a surprise, because I’ve never encountered a library with closed shelving. I understand that in those libraries, the patron issues a request for a book, and a staff member retrieves it. The patron is never able to browse in an anonymous and uncommitted way, but must instead request a specific book, and then probably feels obligated to check it out, even if it turns out not to be to their liking. What a different environment that would be! I can’t imagine that being the standard for a public library. It was interesting to discover such a different potential model for libraries, and I am grateful that we ended up with open shelving as the default instead.

This issue came up not only in “Foundations of Library and Information Science,” the textbook for LIBR 200, but also in another book I’ve been reading, a 1903 text called “A Library Primer.” It is a charming how-to guide for the establishment and operation of libraries, and it also includes commentary related to our ethics discussions. Here is one excerpt showing that the advocacy of open shelving went back at least to 1903:

Give the people at least such liberty with their own collection of books as the bookseller gives them with his. Let the shelves be open, and the public admitted to them, and let the open shelves strike the keynote of the whole administration. (Dana, Chapter IV)

Dana goes on to give advice about the dimensions of the shelves:

Single shelves should not be more than three feet long, on account of the tendency to sag. Ten inches between shelves, and a depth of eight inches, are good dimensions for ordinary cases. (Dana, Chapter VIII)

and even chairs (ouch!):

In many cases simple stools on a single iron standard, without a revolving top, fastened to the floor, are more desirable than chairs. The loafer doesn’t like them; very few serious students object to them. (Dana, Chapter VIII)

I also enjoyed this encapsulation of the ALA core value of Service (which the ALA did not adopt until 1939):

The whole library should be permeated with a cheerful and accommodating atmosphere. Lay this down as the first rule of library management; and for the second, let it be said that librarian and assistants are to treat boy and girl, man and woman, ignorant and learned, courteous and rude, with uniform good-temper without condescension; never pertly. (Dana, Chapter IV)

The shelves are yours, and the librarian’s job is to courteously guide you through them, only when needed.

Woe, Twitter, IM-speak, dumbing down of young brains.

You’ve heard it before, but you probably haven’t heard it like this. Dr. Maryanne Wolf writes about what we’ve learned about the neurobiology of reading, what the brain is doing during the process of learning to read and the act of reading itself. In Our ‘Deep Reading’ Brain: Its Digital Evolution Poses Questions, she shares her worries about how today’s digital push for faster, skimmier reading encourages us to disable our ability to read deeply, reflect, and go beyond what’s in the text.

“We need to understand the value of what we may be losing when we skim text so rapidly that we skip the precious milliseconds of deep reading processes. For it is within these moments—and these processes in our brains—that we might reach our own important insights and breakthroughs.”

We all do this. I bet you skimmed part of this article, which is itself a condensation of her article (which I encourage you to read in full!). But hey, after two or three paragraphs, we’re getting it, we’re agreeing, we want to move on, encounter something new! Right?

“We need to find the ability to pause and pull back from what seems to be developing into an incessant need to fill every millisecond with new information.”

Amen to that. Smartphones are the killer information device. I never need fear downtime or long waits at the doctor’s office again. I have Slashdot and blogs and Kindle books galore. But now I find in any waiting time, no matter how short, I itch to pull out my phone. Unlock the thing and snack at the information buffet, cruising through Slashdot blurbs in search of the one or two items about which I actually want to read more details. What am I doing?!

Asked whether Internet reading might aid speed reading, Dr. Wolf replied, “Yes, but speed and its counterpart—assumed efficiency—are not always desirable for deep thought.”

I think that is one of the reasons I continue to post to this blog. There is a part of me that believes that being forced to slow down and write about what I’ve encountered (often, by reading) will help me to think a bit deeper on what it all means.

What do you think? Did you read this far?