They remember the substitute teacher who ignored the lesson plan and read a book aloud. And those are powerful memories, good and deep. Libraries are the guardians of those memories. We know that we can revisit those memories by walking in the door, and I think that matters to us enough to hang the very modest expense. Way better than your cubicle. Infinitely better than your traffic-stymied car. Better than big-box stores. Much, much better than airports.
With very few exceptions, a library is a calming place. Great libraries—large and small, public and private—wrap you in silence, offer you exactly what you had meant to read if only you had remembered it, and tuck you into a comfortable chair where no one will bother you till closing time. Libraries engender out-of-body experiences—mushroom-free. It just has to have books. Books and a place to sit. You may not get to the library more than once every five years, but you want it to be there.
That matters. Libraries—specifically public libraries—matter because they are one of the widest and best understood manifestations of government as a benign force. It is and will probably always be fashionable to bash government, but public libraries represent to most people the kind of service that government can not only do but should do.
And, except for the dark, dirty details of funding, public libraries are done well. They are, for the most part, near the people who use them. Their employees are helpful. Unlike far too many government employees, public librarians step up and ask what they can do for you.
And then, if it is at all possible, they do it. We live in a world full of phony fun. Theme parks. Face painting. Play dates. Dolls with backstories. Thank goodness—and thanks to the foresight of readers from generations past—we have libraries to show us and the generations we are trying against daunting odds to raise as thinkers, that fun does not necessarily require a rigid grin or manic shrieks.
Fun can be private and absorbing and it does not have to be about spending money. In libraries we can show our children and our grandchildren that there is pleasure to be had in deciding for oneself what story we will sink into, what other worlds there are, how we are like everyone in our needs and minds, and how we are unlike anyone in our needs and minds. We can show them how simple it is to pick up a book from a shelf, a book about anything and anyone, and how simple it is to plop down and read it.
Because how our children turn out matters enormously to us, libraries matter. Libraries are an alternative to mindless noise. There are exceptions, of course.
Public libraries seem to have agreed that there is no point in trying to control the sound level on Saturday mornings when the minivans descend. At some point, public libraries decided that it is better to have chattering families than not, and it is hard to disagree with that.
But most children grow up and understand that the quiet of a library has value. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has been quoted as saying, "There were five exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilization through But that much information is now created every two days, and the pace is increasing.
Some believe that Schmidt was conservative in his estimates. But it's not just about the quantity of information. According to James Gleick's book The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood , sometimes the sheer amount of information compromises wisdom and the trivial overwhelms the meaningful.
Data needs to become information, information needs to become knowledge, and knowledge needs to become wisdom. This is one way in which librarians can help. They can help you figure out the best sources of information, says Jessamyn West, author of the blog Librarian. If you trust people to vote, they need access to unbiased impartial information and public space available for contemplation of those things," West told me in an email interview.
Librarians can also get to know you, says West. They can thus tailor your search according to your personal informational needs, whether based on the job you have, the town or city you live in, or your family situation, and they can do this better than a set of computerized algorithms. Much here has to do with overcoming the mindset that more is better. You can always find more websites, blogs, wikis, online discussion group posts, Twitter tweets, Facebook posts, newspaper and magazine articles, newsletters, white papers, reports, books, and so on.
Using the conscious mind to try to uncover more and more information, according to information scientists, can thwart the involvement of the subconscious mind in decisions about what to do with that information.
The goal shouldn't be sheer information accumulation but making the best possible organizational, family, or personal decisions using that information. Creative thinking and sound judgment are needed.
This necessitates integrating new information you uncover with the existing information you have to discover connections and patterns. Intuition and emotion can be just as important here as reason and logic.
After you find the best sources of information for your purposes, allow for serendipity, for hearing the unheard and seeing the unforeseen. Opening a book randomly can take you to the unexpected, the useful, and the uplifting. Despite its newfangled digital trappings, information overload isn't a new problem.
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