Collection Development for My Random Life.

I was thinking of recent moments in my library which have made me happy. One that gave me a fuzzy good feeling involved a young kid who was throwing a paper airplane over the low stacks in our library to see how far his plane would fly. After every other throw he would swish his arm in the air and make jet airplane noises. I watched him do this for about five minutes from my office window which looks out on the stacks. Obviously the kid was waiting for his mom to finish using the computers. It made me smile thinking how this kid was using his imagination and re-imagining the library space as an airport or maybe something more like the video game Zaxxon.

This made me remember my dad and the paper airplanes he would make me. So I took a scrap of paper and made my dad’s signature squat-nose paper airplane. I proudly walked out and gave it to the kid. At first the kid was scared I was going to tell him to quit it with the airplanes but his eyes lit up when he saw the paper airplane I was giving him. He threw it a couple of times and then made the swishing jet noise with the airplane arm motion to mimic the crazy way the plane I had given him had flown. I went back to my desk happy, thinking this kid was having a good experience in the library.

About a minute later, another library staff came by and shut down the kid’s good time altogether with a stern look and mini-lecture. That made me sad. Wouldn’t it have been great that if instead the library staff person had taken the kid up to the 4th floor and let him throw an airplane down from there? If you were that kid wouldn’t you have been jazzed by that? Wouldn’t you have had a good impression of libraries and librarians after that?

Is our jobs to preserve order or to make people happy?

My friend Colette hipped me to this…

(photo from Canadian House & Home)

The Flybrary Bookshelf » Curbly | DIY Design Community « Keywords: shelf, bookshelf, book, interesting

I like the idea but you can’t really see what books are on the shelf if you put the pretty flowers on top.

How do you build a public library in the age of Google? – By Witold Rybczynski – Slate Magazine

Interesting…  really goes for that “library as monument” feel and not necessarily in a good way. Kind of like the monuments of a fallen analog civilization. I personally don’t think libraries will go away. The internet has changed how we communicate with email but post offices haven’t disappeared. Photographs have moved into the digital medium and thus have become readily accessible both in their production and exchange, yet we still crave the experience of visiting a museum and being in the presence of actual “real” art.  Information is indeed ubiquitous, literature is a cultural cornerstone, and libraries provide tangible spaces where interaction with our cultural information can occur on a human face to face level. I think people will always crave that sort of real intimacy with culture. The monuments we construct are landmarks for culture and history. As such, a library will always remain a constant edifice from which people can physically interact with their own culture.