When my good colleague Louise Spiteri offered me a chance to be a guest blogger for the School of Information Management, I was quick to accept. It’s not that blogging is foreign to me, since in the Faculty of Graduate Studies we’ve been at it for quite a while. And it’s not just that SIM cross-appointed me to the School because of our shared academic and professional interests in information and knowledge management. The real reason for my willingness to contribute something to this forum is my lifelong engagement with libraries.
In a meaningful way, they shaped my life. Perhaps they even saved it. Growing up in working class Winnipeg in decidedly lower socio-economic status provided a lot of opportunity for mischief, bad choices, and compulsions, some of which led to Stony Mountain Penitentiary, and from there to Kingston’s maximum security penitentiary.
Instead, my life turned in another direction. The Winnipeg Public Library ran a library mobile that stopped near our school once every couple of weeks. It was convenient. But far more important for a family with nothing in the way of discretionary resources, it was free. This simple facility provided a particular kind of escape and an opportunity for a compulsion of a different kind – compulsive reading, which led to modestly good grades, and from there to Kingston’s minimum security facility, a.k.a., the Royal Military College.
Those early connections to the library have produced a lifelong psychological dependency on my part. It is one of the reasons I will always be an urban person. That libraries have turned much of their research collections into digital access of journals readily available from the comfort of my home office has not made the dependency any less acute. It has actually made it worse. I think it means I will have to stay connected to the university in some capacity for the rest of my life to give me the access I “need”.
It’s not that I never have to see the inside of a library anymore. The physical structures continue to be a source of pleasure directly, and indirectly when I see how they are used by so intensely by immigrant populations who may be in the same straightened circumstances of my childhood. I take vicarious pleasure in imagining how the free public library will continue to be there to shape their lives in productive ways that are difficult to achieve in any other way.
I imagine that others will have made similar arguments, probably more cogently and through more prestigious communication vectors.
But no-one will make it with more conviction or with greater gratitude. Whatever its form, technology, or location, God bless the free public library.
Sunny Marche
Acting Dean
Faculty of Graduate Studies
Thank you for your eloquent words, Sunny. While my childhood experiences were, perhaps, a little different from yours, I remember that my trip to the public library every two weeks was something to which I very much looked forward. The first public library to which I belonged was housed in a charming building built by the Knights of Malta. I remember the seemingly-endless marble staircases that I needed to traverse to reach the small and select collection housed in massive wood shelves resting on beautiful mosaic marble floors. Always a lover of architecture, even at a young age, I was captivated. The collection eventually moved to a functional, and far less beautiful building; happily, however, the size and selection of the collection expanded significantly. My trip to the library every two weeks was a major highlight in my life as a teenager, even when it meant braving sweltering public buses, walking across the sun-exposed granaries (considering my aversion to the sun), and forgoing a trip to the beach.
Would it be trite to simply say WOW! And yes Dean Marche, this is with the most conviction and I would say the most cogent expression of a meaningful justification for free libraries. Your words, touching and honest, have stated more with succinctness (read envy here)than any I have seen or heard. I especially love the way you weave the threads between current technologies and library use with other forms or a sense of physical space many of us are more used to through experiences decades before the CD-ROM. The balance you point to is wonderful and poetic; psychological dependency is a turn of a phrase I had not come across before and it works and speaks to me, deeply. And how your life experiences and benefits can be seen today in new ways, with different people and still with the same opportunities for lifelong engagement and change. Wow indeed!
Thank you, James, for your thoughtful response. Writing a blog is like writing letters on behalf of Amnesty International. You know it’s the right thing to do, but it’s not at all clear whether they ever get read and digested.
I’ll take a WOW any day!!
Sunny
I echo the comments of Louise and James. In addition to thanking you for such a personal and passionate endorsement of public libraries, I thank you as a SIM faculty member for so clearly illustrating the value of what we do, for our students.
As I teach the first year course on Information Sources and Retrieval we emphasize the role of reference librarians in society – connecting people and information, regardless of the format. But beneath the theory and practice is the human story. I can talk (and I do), but you have shown how role of “connecting” can be transformative. Thank you!
As the Outreach Services Librarian who staffs WPL’s current incarnation of mobile library service I really appreciated this post Sunny!
Greetings from Winnipeg – where we are headed to the North End this afternoon to hopefully create some similar memories.
How nice to hear from the ‘Peg! Quite amazing this Internet thing turns out to be. Chatting here among colleagues, they used the right nomenclature – Bookmobile. Key in my life.
Thanks for the shout-out.
Sunny Marche