Library Puts Books Out of Reach
In general I really enjoyed my Music Bibliography course at IU. It was termed a “tool subject” and was intended, among other things, to introduce new graduate-level students to all of the heady materials available in the impressive and intimidating William & Gayle Cook Music Library… and beyond.
We studied where to find the reference works, how to use the online research tools, how to conduct more complex searches to locate exactly what we were looking for… all of those things that we’d need to be successful graduate students and researchers.
The early course sessions were devoted to discussion of the theory behind it all: why research was important, the concepts of intellectual property and honesty in scholarship, what a writer’s obligation to his/her audience was, things like that. In one of those sessions our professor conducted a class discussion on the nature of libraries. He asked us to address questions on why they exist, where they got their start, and how it’s necessary for librarians to maintain a balance between materials’ preservation and their availability.
One of the more lively discussions concerned how modern-day Western libraries differ in their organization and intention from the closed, private collections found in Egypt, Greece, and Rome. These libraries, we learned, were largely unavailable to the public. I remember how we students were collectively offended at the idea that knowledge would be sealed away and held apart from the public, preserved in an ivory tower for a select few. The instructor pointed out that our Western democratic sensibilities were outstripping our capacity for historical perspective. He maintained that while it may be desirable to make entire collections available to the public today, the preservationist mindset of those early librarians is exactly the reason that those ancient texts are available to us today.
This morning I read that Oxford University has banned step-ladders from its world famous Bodleian library, supposedly for health and safety concerns. “The ban means students are unable to reach books on the top shelves but dons refuse to bring them lower because it would remove them from their ‘“original historic location.’”
This development puts an interesting spin on the prior class discussion and on the whole topic of accessibility/preservation. I haven’t fully fleshed out what I think about it, but it certainly seems to provide interesting fodder for conversation. Rather than putting volumes out of reach in order to preserve the collection, access has been limited for the supposed preservation of the patrons.
Does this change reflect the values of Western culture? If so, how? What of the Oxford Library’s desire to preserve the “original historic location” of volumes? With regard to libraries, is there perhaps now an “importance of historical place” added to our “importance of historical time?”
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