Life is always a matter of choosing one’s priorities.
As an individual, you have only twenty-four hours a day, out of which you really need to take time to sleep. You have limited time and energy, and you can’t do everything. A community is no different in this respect from the individual. There’s only so much any community can do with the resources it has. We require sanitation and safety. But we also require potential. And for that, we still need libraries. A community without a library is a dry place, one without much hope. It’s little better than a place to huddle from the cold and dark. Too many communities are slashing library budgets or closing libraries down. This is more than short sighted. It’s an unambiguous surrender, a sign that the community has entered a state of decline and decay. It may be irreversible.
We all face uncertain futures. Children know little of the world and have a natural thirst for knowledge. The young seek to find their place in the world, but have little idea of what is really possible for them. Some of us, the not so young, need or want to start over. And some of us simply want to learn more. Libraries offer a refuge from the uncertainties of the world, a place to explore, to ask questions, to find answers and to be spurred on by the ideas of others. And by offering this service freely to everyone, we make a statement about what we believe: knowledge and learning is a fundamental right and we offer it to everyone.
A library is more than just a building with books in it. Libraries have long been true community centers, more so than the “rec centers” where people go to swim or work out. Our community libraries offer a place where anyone can go, read, research, and learn — or listen to music, or use the computers there, or bring a laptop and use wifi to access the internet. They lend not only books, but DVDs, CDs, and much else; and they cater not only to adults and to kids doing school assignments, but also to younger children with toys, games, story hours, and children’s books, videos, and more. They’re repositories of our local history, a place to sit and read papers or magazines or books, a place for groups to meet, and they hold the seeds of the future for many of us.
In the same fashion, librarians are more than clerks who shelve books and issue fines. The librarian may be seen in the digital world as a dying breed, an unnecessary expense when one can use Google to find what one wants. But this is far from true. The librarian is more skilled than any search engine, an expert at helping you find exactly what you really need in order to complete or further your work, rather than just dumping in your lap the first twenty items to be found on a subject. A good librarian can help you organize your search for knowledge in ways that will pay off in relevance and aptness of materials, both online and printed, and in time saved, in ways a search query cannot match, no matter how speedy your online connection or rapid the search engine you use. The librarian knows sources — that is a librarian’s job: to know the materials in the library or online, how to locate the pertinent ones, or how to find items in other libraries and borrow them for you to use.
This week I’ll write about libraries and how to use them in ways that can help you today. We’ll talk about the very real gaps in your knowledge, how these gaps hurt you and what you can do about them. We’ll explore how print is still absolutely critical, why the library is a critical institution and will be for the imaginable future. We’ll close out the week with a library-based writing assignment. I hope you’ll follow along, as well as comment and share your thoughts and experiences about your libraries.
And a personal note: my friend Penny (who also edits these posts) is a librarian and trainer of librarians, although she’s now honorably retired from active service. Penny sent me a series of recent emails and they inspired this week’s posts.
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Let’s add learning to the phrase: the only things in life that are certain are death and taxes. Libraries are a vital community resource where I can always count on getting a little help from a friend.