Me and Libraries - One More Time
Fri., June 10, 10:02 AM
Have you seen a site called Sine Libellibus, about libraries? The author has been a librarian for nearly thirty years, and her history of school libraries is thoughtful and amusing. She also tells us something about what librarians do, aside from checking out books. (And even that isn’t done the way it was when you got your first library card!)
Despite my own fifty-five years in libraries – public, or elementary school, or university – I am not a librarian. I became a library volunteer when I was about ten, and I began working – for wages! – at the city public library when I was in high school. For the next four years, I was always reminded that “you are not a librarian because you have not graduated from college.”
As a college senior, I worked in the acquisitions department (where they decide which books to buy, along with the actual ordering and receiving and the related bookkeeping) of the university library, adding another facet of experience. In a big library like that, acquisitions is a department; in a smaller establishment (like a high school library), it’s just one more job for the same staff. Knowledge of acquisitions came in handy when I went back to the public library at home, because I wanted to learn about cataloguing. In that library, cataloguing and acquisitions worked side by side.
But I was still reminded that I’m not a librarian because my hard-earned degree is not in library science. (My degree is in science, but even in industrial libraries, it’s the L.S. degree they want.)
No matter, I called myself a librariette – it works better in the song – and learned whatever I could learn. It’s a funny thing, in a place where they have books you can use to learn about all sorts of things, nothing matters if it isn’t written on a sheepskin. And when I volunteered at my kids’ school library, working alongside a “library/media specialist,” I knew a lot more about cataloguing than she did.
When you walk into a library, pick up a book and bring it to the checkout, have you any idea of what went on before that? Someone – possibly a committee – had to decide to buy the book. Politics may have been involved; people have all kinds of reasons for wanting or not wanting a given title. Maybe they used one vendor for everything, but at the university level we had to choose among several. We also had to decide which funds to use; some grants were available only for a special category of material. Incoming books were checked against what had been ordered - and returned if they were the wrong ones. They had to be prepared for circulation, reinforced or, in some cases, rebound. Some books – those with art plates, for example – have to be examined page by page. They had to be classified (so you, the reader, would be able to find it when you wanted it), and all of this identification had to be added to the book itself.
Does your library still keep the card out of the book pocket when you check it out? Now many libraries prepare these cards only because they’re easier to scan than the unwieldy books. But when we retained the card with the user’s ID (whether it was name or number), someone had to put them back into the book when it was returned. Finding lost cards was a specialty unto itself.
Someone has to put the returned item back onto the shelf so the next reader can find it. Someone had to file cards into the public catalogue in the days before the collection was computerized. Heck, someone even had to decide how many subject cards had to be typed (on a typewriter!) for each book. As the junior in the department, I had the unenviable task of filing – for hours on end.
Well, Dewey Jr. will undoubtedly cover a lot of that stuff. What got me started was talk of construction. The original library at our university was the classic building with the golden dome. (Despite additions, the collection outgrew the building, which was replaced by a new modern building – which was usually wrapped in plastic because bits were falling off…)
The year that I worked in acquisitions, a new wing was about to be added at our end of the building. Our offices were on the garden level, which means that we looked up at our windows to see the ground outdoors. There are lots of trees on our campus, and there were some lovely ones right outside the window.
Construction was delayed – of course – and the trees were still there as the year wore on. The ground froze. Then the men with the jackhammers came to move the trees. Not only were they destroying our view, they were rubbing our nerve ends with noise and vibration. It was uncomfortable enough that I remember it well.
If we weren’t skeptical before about the People in Charge, we certainly became cynics then.
