bibliophibian
Wednesday, 9 May 2012 07:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
freckles_and_doubtI had a weird and slightly horrible experience yesterday, which was to wander into the university library in order to dig books out of their stacks. The nice library assistant person who checked my record (and to whom I have definitely given curriculum advice in the last year or so) revealed that I last took books out over a year ago. This is not quite as sad as it sounds: it's not that I'm not doing Serious Academic Stuff, it's just that these days I seem to do the Serious Academic Stuff either from online versions of journal articles, or (given the peripheral and non-pc-in-the-SA-context nature of my interests), by simply ordering copies of the books for myself. The academic landscape has been radically transformed both by the contemporary movement into virtual idea-exchange, and by my still rather new and bizarre possession of disposable income.
What it did mean, though, was that I haven't tried to use the library for actual research since they did a huge re-arrange of it at the start of last year (bang, may I add, in the middle of my orientation programme's attempt to put 1300 students through library tours in two weeks. The confusion was indescribable). It's a very swish space now, all comfy chairs and fancy wall-mounted computer monitors, and filled with studious students umbilically attached to laptops. What you don't see when you first wander in, though, is any particularly striking number of books. The main area has become a reference collection, with no shelves above about waist height (and it's not real L-space until they're over your head) and a lot of computers and info desks. I couldn't find the 800s section where I am wont to hang out. They'd moved it into the subterranean lair that used to hold the older journal issues. I cannot help but find this worryingly significant.
And they're breaking up the Special Collections libraries, including the speculative fiction collection we originated back in the Tolkien Society days, and which has grown in the interim, by the efforts of its wonderful librarian, into a significant chunk of genre material, both primary and secondary. You have to study sf/fantasy in genre, not scattered in isolation across vast tracts of the Dewey. It's about writing in community and context, and particularly in the academic sense, if you don't appreciate that, you're lost. But clearly non-pc-non-South-African collections Take Up Space even more than other categories of books, and are therefore expendable.
I am very much a denizen of the internet, and I couldn't survive academically or intellectually without it, but I also can't help feeling that something has been lost. For a start, I shouldn't be alienated by my own library. I grew up in this library, all the way from a titchy undergrad and right through the rigours of a PhD. It should be my home planet, the warm seas or intellectual air through which I breathe or swim. I should be at home in its most involuted and space-warping corners. If I have become disconnected from it by a process of abstraction, my intellectual pursuits all solitary and virtual, then I am no longer at home among its musty stacks. And anyway, they seem to have shrunk. Does the virtual realm even have L-space? Its own twisty byways, certainly, but not created by the sheer weight of words on paper in the way a proper library does. And I shudder to contemplate the virtual version of a .303 bookworm. You don't want to meet a .404 hollowpoint bitcruncher in a dark corner.
It is deeply significant that enormous piles of books are the one thing in the multiverse I don't mentally classify as cluttery, and therefore undesirable, stuff. And libraries damned well shouldn't, either.
What it did mean, though, was that I haven't tried to use the library for actual research since they did a huge re-arrange of it at the start of last year (bang, may I add, in the middle of my orientation programme's attempt to put 1300 students through library tours in two weeks. The confusion was indescribable). It's a very swish space now, all comfy chairs and fancy wall-mounted computer monitors, and filled with studious students umbilically attached to laptops. What you don't see when you first wander in, though, is any particularly striking number of books. The main area has become a reference collection, with no shelves above about waist height (and it's not real L-space until they're over your head) and a lot of computers and info desks. I couldn't find the 800s section where I am wont to hang out. They'd moved it into the subterranean lair that used to hold the older journal issues. I cannot help but find this worryingly significant.
And they're breaking up the Special Collections libraries, including the speculative fiction collection we originated back in the Tolkien Society days, and which has grown in the interim, by the efforts of its wonderful librarian, into a significant chunk of genre material, both primary and secondary. You have to study sf/fantasy in genre, not scattered in isolation across vast tracts of the Dewey. It's about writing in community and context, and particularly in the academic sense, if you don't appreciate that, you're lost. But clearly non-pc-non-South-African collections Take Up Space even more than other categories of books, and are therefore expendable.
I am very much a denizen of the internet, and I couldn't survive academically or intellectually without it, but I also can't help feeling that something has been lost. For a start, I shouldn't be alienated by my own library. I grew up in this library, all the way from a titchy undergrad and right through the rigours of a PhD. It should be my home planet, the warm seas or intellectual air through which I breathe or swim. I should be at home in its most involuted and space-warping corners. If I have become disconnected from it by a process of abstraction, my intellectual pursuits all solitary and virtual, then I am no longer at home among its musty stacks. And anyway, they seem to have shrunk. Does the virtual realm even have L-space? Its own twisty byways, certainly, but not created by the sheer weight of words on paper in the way a proper library does. And I shudder to contemplate the virtual version of a .303 bookworm. You don't want to meet a .404 hollowpoint bitcruncher in a dark corner.
It is deeply significant that enormous piles of books are the one thing in the multiverse I don't mentally classify as cluttery, and therefore undesirable, stuff. And libraries damned well shouldn't, either.
