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Huler Page 1 of 34 NCLA Conference Greetings, Librarians and Library types. I was asked to talk about what writers want from libraries, and I come here as something that people seem to believe is vanishing – a book person – so I’m thrilled to be here to talk to you about what a writer like me wants from a library run by people like you. I really thought about this. And though I’m not a librarian, I do have some actual suggestions for how to stride boldly into this new world of ours, and I hope you find my thoughts helpful. I’m a writer of nonfiction, which means I’m a purveyor of that most 21 st century of commodities, “information,” whatever that is. When I – early: by the time I was four I was already sneaking out behind the garage to write things down – to become a writer, it was easy to know what that looked like. I would smoke a pipe, I would wear a jacket with patches on the elbows, and I would sit at a desk stroking my chin, and every now and then I would say, “Aha!”

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NCLA Conference

Greetings, Librarians and Library types. I was asked to talk about what writers want from

libraries, and I come here as something that people seem to believe is vanishing – a book

person – so I’m thrilled to be here to talk to you about what a writer like me wants from a

library run by people like you. I really thought about this. And though I’m not a librarian,

I do have some actual suggestions for how to stride boldly into this new world of ours,

and I hope you find my thoughts helpful.

I’m a writer of nonfiction, which means I’m a purveyor of that most 21st century of

commodities, “information,” whatever that is. When I – early: by the time I was four I

was already sneaking out behind the garage to write things down – to become a writer, it

was easy to know what that looked like. I would smoke a pipe, I would wear a jacket with

patches on the elbows, and I would sit at a desk stroking my chin, and every now and

then I would say, “Aha!” and then I would write something down, with a fountain pen if

not with an actual quill. Some indeterminate time thereafter – my daydreams have never

been particularly detailed – I would show up at a bookshop, speak in front of a throng of

cheering men and fainting women, sign several hundred books, and then go do the same

thing again in another city. I never thought much further than that, though I suppose I

believed that once a month or so an armored truck would back up to my house and drop

off a big canvas bag with a dollar sign on the side of it, and there you have it: the literary

life.

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So I’m as big a fool as you all are: we all fell for books. Our shared passion, and our

shared and unpredictable future.

Books. Everybody wants to write a book. Everybody knows that writing a book will save

them. Everybody looks at writing books as the answer to their problems – the thing that

will make them feel alive, like they count, fill up that empty place inside, make their

mothers stop telling them they should have gone to law school.

Sure they will. I tell people that they should not write a book to get rich – they won’t;

they should not write books to get famous – they won’t; and they should not write books

to get dates – because how many ways will writing a book NOT get you dates? “Oh,

look, a writer, I hope he asks me out: he’s both poor AND neurotic!”

No – the only reason you should write a book is because you can’t stand not writing it,

because you’re learning about a topic that makes you so insane you cannot live without

talking about it, that you’re at the point of running outside and stopping random people

on the sidewalk, grabbing them by the coat lapels, to tell them about your topic. I just

wrote a book about infrastructure, the grid, and I was, like, “Did you know there are two

electrical grids? Transmission and distribution? Did you? And did you know that

everything on the grids comes in threes, because of phased power generation, which has

been part of AC electrical transmission pretty much from the start? Did you? DID

YOU?”

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And they kind of back away, and think about calling 911.

That’s when you write a book. And if that’s when you write it, you’ll be happy. Because

all you want is for it to exist – for its own sake. When I used to work at B. Dalton

Booksellers in Philadelphia, we were all writers there and we used to open the boxes and

rub the books on our faces: “One day, … one day … this will be me! My book will be in

boxes like this!” And sure enough that day has come, and as crazy as bookmaking and

bookselling and booklending has become, I still wouldn’t be anywhere else. And to be

sure, things are changing and they’re crazy and nobody knows what the future brings, and

that’s good -- but I’m one of those who believes there’s significant overthinking going

on. In some ways I’m like Maurice Sendak, who was just yesterday quoted in the

Guardian in the UK as saying about e-books, “I hate them. It's like making believe there's

another kind of sex. There isn't another kind of sex. There isn't another kind of book! A

book is a book is a book.” John C. Dvorak in PC Magazine reviewed the Kindle Fire in

the context of a “peaking pad market,” as publishers learn that people just kind of like

magazines.

Yay! Yay for books, yay for authors, yay for libraries, yay for librarians.

And then, regrettably, back to reality, which is that everything but your bathroom rug is

going to be digital in about an hour. But there’s truth in what Sendak and Dvorak said,

and to get us there I will tell you about my three most recent books – how libraries helped

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me write them, the role libraries and librarians played in getting them written, and what I

hope for from the library of the future.

My most recent book, “On the Grid,” focused on infrastructure and traced it all over the

place, from my house to reservoir, treatment plant, cable company, nuclear reactor. So, as

you can imagine, a lot of reporting went into this. But a lot of research too – many hours

spent at the NCSU library, where I found histories of most of our current infrastructure

systems, but also stumbled on – in the stacks – the “History of Public Works in the

United States,” by the American Public Works Association. Printed in 1976 in the pebbly

binding reserved for books that look nice but nobody really reads, this 700-page tome

turns out to be filled with exactly what I was looking for – though it never turned up in

any of my online or catalog searches. I found it, low on a shelf, when I milled around an

infrastructure section.

Of course I ended up buying my own copy – yay, AbeBooks! – to draw in and write in

and fold the pages of, but the point is, I found that book, and so many others, by just

milling around the section. Closed stacks will never – never, never, never – equal this

experience. Nor will e-books – or Google Books – ever equal what it is like to have a

dozen books open, spread around your office, with post-its and underscores and

highlighter pens and pencils stuck in between pages for bookmarks.

Allow me to digress: author Seth Godin, who prides himself on knowing how to address

what comes next, is not always right, and he has said this:

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The scarce resource is knowledge and insight, not access to data. The library is

no longer a warehouse for dead books.

I strongly doubt this on two levels. The first is that the library will always be a warehouse

– virtual or otherwise – for the ideas that have come before us and that circulate among

us now. And that the library will always contain books? Look at its name: from libris, the

library has books at its very root. The library will always be a warehouse for books – it

must be.

The second, even more important, is that books are dead. A book is the opposite of dead

– and not just because of marginalia and the pleasures of the flesh I mentioned. But since

the dawn of writing, a written record has been the literary equivalent of immortality – of

the author whispering directly into your ear. And to be sure, electronic sources give the

author that same endless whisper, but surprisingly, they do not – in my opinion – give

you the same opportunity to talk back. That is, despite the wonderful searchability of

digital texts, despite the capacity to annotate the electronic text and then immediately and

forever lose access to that annotation, almost every author I know, once he or she has

chosen the central texts with which he will be working on a project, gets real books.

A real book absorbs underlining, that marginalia, takes post-it notes. Anybody use

onscreen post-it programs? Yep. It’s a different thing entirely. And you can have 15

books open on your desktop – but it’s still just as fast to look something up in one of

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them if you open two more. Plus you might remember – “it was on the left-hand page,

near the bottom, and I think it was italic… was it a red book?” A physical book gives you

more clues to remember what you’re looking for, different neural pathways to search

your memory. This is more than just sentimentality. Just as when you want to remember

something you write it down not just to have the note but because by writing it you bring

a new pathway – a physical, neural one – to trace for the fact. You might say it out loud,

too, bringing hearing in, a third pathway. You may blank on Sheryl Crow’s name, and

then learn a way to remember it by remembering crows landing in your backyard. A silly

example, but the point is this: information “out there” is not just floating, and it doesn’t

get zapped into your skull, at least not yet. There’s still a physical interface: you look at

it, whether on a screen or a book or an iPad. And that’s not an ancillary part of your

relationship to information: that’s fundamental. We will all do well if you all remember

that and keep it holy. A book is not data – a book is knowledge and insight.

Which brings me to an actual piece of advice about the library of the future. I am begging

you – please, please, please, I am begging you – do not allow the believers that digitizing

solves all problems to push you further and further into a closed-stack world. Yes, you

can look up your title online, and all kinds of search techniques can lead you to similar

books. But nothing – nothing in this world – compares to wandering the stacks in the

vicinity of where a likely looking book will be. So many clues: spine, title, wear, color,

size, quality of printing – the book is talking to you while you’re ten feet from it. Can a

screen do that? I should say not.

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And don’t even bother telling me that your “scan the shelves” program gives me the same

experience, because if you tell me that I will slap you. It will not. A library is a place

where you go into the shelves and look around for books – which are manifestly not

dead. They are the voices of the past and those who have interpreted the past. They are

waiting to talk to us.

Yet, for example, the brand new James Hunt Library currently being built by NCSU, has

in my opinion already made the worst possible starting decision by focusing not on books

but on “information,” and by choosing to be a closed stack resource.

To a writer – and I’m convinced to most readers – a closed-stack library is like the

difference between an antiques catalogue and an antiques store. The only job of the

catalogue is to get you into the store. If you remove the store, you’ve missed a vital part

of the point. As bookstores vanish – as they appear to be doing, in any case stores where

people buy new books – libraries only escalate in their importance as repositories of

actual living books, as places where people can interact with books. Fight – fight to the

death, I beg you – those who wish you to forget that foundational part of your purpose.

Digression complete. And if you wish to hear more about infrastructure, read “On the

Grid.” In physical or e-book format.

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The book I wrote before that was “No-Man’s Lands,” about retracing the journey of

Odysseus from Troy to Ithaca – in the Mediterranean, not in Upstate New York, so I’ll

save you making that joke. Obviously I spent a lot of time on ferries and trains and in

crappy hotels, but equally obviously I spent months before and after my travels in the

library. The centuries of discussion about Odysseus and Homer and travel and mythology

can be sought well on websites and Wikipedia, but in the library – in the library I was

among my forebears: Joyce and Frazier, Herodotus and Thucydides, Pausanias and

Strabo. Bringing their books – their books – to my table gave me an intimacy with them

no website or screen can yet equal.

And again – I’m sure you can take an ebook outside, and read it under a tree. And for a

murder mystery or a YA title an ebook serves a vital purpose. But for sincere study? For

interaction? That’s still a whole-person process, long may it be so, and you’re better off

with a real actual book. A book is solar powered; it’s a read-only random-access

information storage system that hasn’t reached the end of its life, not by a long shot.

Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.

And speaking of Odysseus, maps too: How many maps did I consult in the library? How

many ways did I use all the physical resources of the many libraries in the Triangle?

Libraries. I used my computer plenty, but I could have written the book without it.

Without the books I found in libraries? Not possible; as well to try to write it without the

classics professors I spoke with, without the Mediterranean itself.

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And finally I reach my most library-intensive project, “Defining the Wind,” about the

Beaufort Scale of wind force. You’re familiar with that, probably – a 13-step descriptive

scale of the wind, from 0, calm, “smoke rises vertically,” through 2, light breeze, “wind

felt on face; leaves rustle; ordinary vane moved by wind”; through 12, hurricane,

“devastation occurs.”

You can well imagine that what called me, as a writer, to the scale was its miracle of

crisp prose, its sensual language, its strong verbs, its rhythms, its … well, its perfection.

But to understand the people behind its history – Sir Francis Beaufort, among others – I

went to collections of, yes physical books and objects, held by many of the world’s great

libraries. I’ll read you a brief passage from that book in which I describe my experiences

there. Mind you, it’s a short passage – I have two little kids now, and usually when I read

aloud to them one of my goals is that they fall asleep. At the moment I would prefer that

as few of you as possible fall asleep, so I’ll keep this quite brief:

“As my interest in Beaufort and the scale that bears his name expanded, I found myself

corresponding with and visiting researchers and libraries, which was tremendously

exciting. As an undergraduate in college, I definitely envisioned my future as a sort of

New Yorker cartoon of an academic, flitting into and out of the Royal Society and the

library of Congress and such, stroking my chin thoughtfully.

“After a few library trips, even though I was pretty lost in most of them, I thought

that was me. Beaufort’s letters and journals reside at the Huntington Library in Pasadena,

for example. When they finally gave me the okay to come and paw through them, I

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thought I was something – until I arrived at the library and went through an orientation

process so bewildering that it too my most of the week I spent there to get my bearings

and actually find anything like what I was looking for.

“My favorite thing about the Huntington was that fifteen minutes before the end

of the day, when you have to turn in your rare books and manuscripts for safekeeping,

they tap a little brass counter bell – twice, exactly, rapidly – and you must bring the

material back to the counter. At the Clements Library at the University of Michigan, for

the same purpose they tingaling a little bell like the one the old rich lady in a sage farce

would use to summon her French maid. At the Met Office, they simply come around and

sadly tell you they’re terribly sorry, but you just have to leave, though you’re so welcome

to come back again tomorrow.

“This isn’t the only way libraries differ. At the Hunginton, for example, when you

are in the sanctum sanctorum of the manuscript room and you whisper a question across

the counter, the person there is so likely to know the exact answer that you bein to take it

for granted. At the Met Office, the archivists would delight in helping to figure out what I

was trying to find, and would invite me to join them for afternoon tea. They did that at

the Admiralty Archive, too, but there a friendly archivist even drove me to the train

station after I had kept him late by an hour. Perhaps he just wanted to be sure he was rid

of me.

“At the Library of Congress and the British Library, on the other hand, you are

dealing with government employees, and you know it. Both of those libraries are closed-

stack, which means the surprising juxtapositions and miraculous leaps forward that come

from browsing among the shelves are forbidden: you write the book you want on a slip of

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paper and someone supposedly goes to get it for you. In the Library of Congress your

book comes up on a conveyer belt; at the British Library someone just brings it up – if it

ever comes. If it doesn’t, nobody can tell you why.

“In the British Library restaurant I grumbled about this to other researches, and

they tole me horror stories. ‘They say the British Library is the most complete library in

the world,’ one said. ‘They keep it that way by not showing anybody the books,’ and we

tittered self-righteously. You have to get a special reader’s card to use the British Library,

and with my reader’s card and my in-jokes I felt like the effete researcher I had always

imagined myself one day being.”

What follows, of course, is inevitable comeuppance, which you can learn about by

reading Defining the Wind.

Part of that little love letter to libraries is of course sentimental – I’m a sentimental writer.

But part of it is as utilitarian as my love of the physicality of books that helps me

remember where I saw or read something. As I wrote that book I recalled the sources of

whole passages that were otherwise unmoored in memory by remembering which busts

surrounded me when I read them, which type of must – the damp kind or the dusty kind –

characterized the room in which I found them, whether the tables were long and

communal or small, had banker’s lamps or shaded ones.

Again: books and records are physical objects, and we forget this at our great peril. I’m

sure eventually the records of the British Met Office will be digitized, and I’ll be able to

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find the note describing how one of the people responsible for installing wind vanes lost

his nerve while atop a chimney and had to be coaxed down and read it directly at my

desk, but I think that if I hadn’t found it in the Met Office, unfolded it, and held it in my

hand, laughing with the Met Office librarians, I would not have got the same information

from it – my understanding would have been qualitatively different, my writing process

changed – my book, in short, not as good.

I realize, of course, that I have slipped into part two of my remarks here: I am telling you

what I want from a library, and you have perceived that in no uncertain terms I want the

library to be the place full of books. I want it to be the place full of things, physical

objects, actual texts. I don’t think there’s anything more important a library can do. And

from the bottom of my heart I beg you.

You became librarians for the same reason I became a writer: not wisely but for love.

Don’t give up that love. Fight for our books. Fight for our reality.

But that doesn’t mean – not for a second – that I don’t want my library to have every

electronic resource in the world. I want it to have J-Stor and Lexis/Nexis and everything

else, and I’m not in the least offended by the fact that in this electronic world I have to go

to the library to use those services. That’s okay – that’s how those services control their

information, make sure I pay for them, through library fees or taxes, so the companies

can stay in business. That’s fine. I use those services. I love their searchability, their

convenience. But I don’t think they’re books – and I don’t think they replace books.

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And I want your expertise, librarians. I love librarians – deeply, deeply love them, and

not just because they are forever taking off their glasses, shaking out their topknots, and

turning pell-mell into femmes fatales.

I love librarians for what they mean to writers, and the people who become writers. I’m

talking about Mrs. Horn, my librarian in elementary school, who read us Charlotte’s Web

and rocked our world, even if the corners of her mouth collected that weird substance

while she read that always reminded me of the picture of the Tyrannosaurus on the cover

of the Golden Book of Dinosaurs. And I’m talking about my librarian friend Cynthia,

who in my early days as a writer steered me to Gales Encyclopedia of Associations,

which enabled me to fill notebook after notebook with comments from useful experts – to

say nothing of allowing me to entertainingly drop the names of, say, the Pulverized

Limestone Association or the Desert Tortoise Council.

What I’m talking about, that is, is expertise. How much time I spend every day trying to

navigate technological and informational straits that for my predecessors would simply

not have existed. They lived in a world of books, not my world of Information. But I have

to wander the webs, with their famous lack of street signs, their Fibber McGee’s Closet

organizational structure. “Wherever it is, that’s where it is,” a friend of mine once wrote.

I’ll never be on top of that. But that’s okay – you will! You have that job! Do that for me!

I’m glad to pay for it! I need you to do it. I don’t know how the hell my computer works,

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or my car, but I need them both, and I pay for them. I want the same thing from my

library. I want librarians to point me to archives, to online sources, to texts. I want

librarians to show me where to start, to listen when I come up and say, “I found this –

now what?” or, more likely, “I don’t know how to do it.” And I want them to help me. I

want them to help me find my way around this garden of “information.”

Yet information is just a word, a new word for something as old as humankind, and

we’ve depended on it from the very start. Whether it’s in books or databases, information

is something we need – in fact, it’s something we crave, something we lust for. As a

writer my job is to take facts – data, interviews, observations, “information,” – and turn it

into story. Give it an arc, a frame, a structure. Turn it into a narrative. And so story

becomes my world, narrative my tool. If you’re a hammer, everything is a nail: if you’re

a writer, everything is a story. I tell people I’m a narrative junkie.

And junkie is the right word. That’s what we humans are: junkies for story. And libraries

are shooting galleries, and the drug their users need is information. Librarians are

pushers, and for the last 500 years or so the gateway drug has been the book. I’m here to

tell you, from the perspective of an unrepentant user, that we need that drug – we need

the shooting gallery. And we desperately need the pusher. So this next request – and

again, think of me begging – is that you never stop pushing that information on us.

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Now I know, I’m preaching to the converted, and I hear your cries: the world is changing,

tax revenues are disappearing, needs are metamorphosing; we can’t simply do what

we’ve always done.

Okay, who you talking to? Remember – I’m a writer, a journalist: if anybody’s world is

changing as quickly as yours is, it’s mine. I talk to people all the time about those

changes, and how we respond to them. Surely I complain, as most writers do, loudly, and

every single day, about those changes. I used to tell people that as a freelance writer I

spent 40 percent of my time as a salesperson, 30 percent as a dunning agent, 20 percent in

office management, and 10 percent in IT – and in my free time I wrote. And that was

when IT meant learning a bit about a new word processing program or fiddling with a

wonky printer cable.

Now add in Facebook and Twitter and email and Google+ and Wikipedia and ALDaily

and the obligatory two or three blog entries you have to make per week or else according

to one consultant or another you don’t exist, and … well, and now what? Now freaking

what?

Here’s what I tell people: That sucks. It completely sucks that the world now expects

writers to do their work for free. But the other thing is: that’s reality. I don’t want to be a

post-comet dinosaur refusing to participate in the new dusty-atmosphere ecosystem. “I’m

against the comet,” that dinosaur says. “The comet is a terrible idea that makes

dinosauring a pale shadow of what it ought to be.” Well, maybe so – but if that’s your

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attitude, then lay down and die. I agree – I’m against the comet too. But my response?

I’m trying as fast as I can to get small and grow feathers, because like it or not that’s the

future.

But I don’t plan to stop eating, or never move, or refuse to participate in any other way.

It’s a participate or die ecosystem, and I don’t care to die. Just the same with my work: I

spend so much time every week wrestling with new programs and technologies, learning

to shoot and edit audio and video because the world tells me that’s what I need to be able

to do now, learning to tweet and update and respond to comments, to blog – which is just

code for writing quickly, for free, without an editor, which I find abhorrent.

But too bad for me – that’s the world, and if a writer is what I want to be, then I’d better

find a way to fit in. I’m right, certainly – most blogging is sloppy and shallow, most

online video and audio content is little more than timewasting. But if people are turning

to their screens for their stories – if that’s how they get their news – then it doesn’t matter

whether I would prefer them to wait for newspapers to drop on the doorstep at 4 a.m.

That ship has sailed. Same with books. My wife uses a Nook, I’ve read books on that, on

her iPod, online, with Google books, every way you can imagine. To be sure, I love a

nice bound book, and as I’ve said, for purposes of research and true intimate engagement

I think there’s a lot to be said for a bound book that a digital book cannot equal. But

wishing away the digital? It’s pointless – and suicidal. It’s criticizing the comet when

what I need to be doing is getting small and growing feathers.

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But – not so fast. We certainly need to adapt to the digital. But what we must also do –

what it’s utterly vital that libraries do, and here I’m back to my first point – is NOT leave

behind the physical. You don’t need me to point you towards Nicholson Baker and his

ilk, to their paeans to paper, to the physical, the ephemera, the marginalia. Blake’s notes

in the works of Reynolds, Melville’s on the pages of his Emerson. We live in a physical

world, where objects occupy space and have weight: a book has design, and feeling, and

page weight, and coating, all things that help create a good boundary between the

information within the book and the reader getting that information. It smells a certain

way, it feels a certain way. Digital sources can ape that – but they can’t be that. I’ve said

many times something not dissimilar to what I quoted Sendak saying: Online porn, for

example, has its uses, but I prefer women. The one is not the other – and it’s a good thing

to remind ourselves of that. And not just to appreciate the physical, the real, to sing its

praises – but to recognize what it offers that the digital cannot. I beg you: just as you

can’t refuse to move into the digital world, you mustn’t forget that the digital world is

only that – a digital representation. It’s not the thing itself, despite what people tell you.

Don’t give up on a history of thousands of years of gathering physical texts together just

because Google tells you that you must. Let me promise you: you must not.

Which brings me to perhaps my most important belief, and my final actual suggestion to

librarians. Newspapers, publishers, magazines – all live in a capitalist ecosystem where if

they cannot get people to pay for their products, they go out of business. Libraries, for the

most part, do not. I know it’s hard to get tax dollars for anything, that you’re competing

with the sheriff’s office and trash collection and street paving. That our nation has gone

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mad, refusing to pay for the services it needs, but the facts remain: Libraries, supported

by tax money, live in a socialist ecosystem and have the opportunity to lead rather than

react. Which is to say: the money you do get? Do library stuff with it. And I am going to

remind you – remember? Not wisely but for love? – that you didn’t get in this profession

for a nice stable easy life. You got into it to save the world by enabling it to learn about

itself, by managing its information. I must remind you: this is your duty. This is your

obligation. This is why you exist – to help knuckleheads like the public take good care of

their information.

I spoke to librarians as I prepared these remarks and they all told me the same thing. They

didn’t go to graduate school to be underpaid babysitters for adult crazy people. They do

not want the job of helping computer-illiterate people fill out job applications online.

Everyone agrees that libraries need to retain lot of free computer time, especially as

broadband gets more expensive and providers fight against civic broadband and other

ways civic government tries to provide information access to the people inexpensively.

The library is the only place people can fight back.

But the librarian’s job should be helping people find information with that access, not

helping them get jobs or update their Facebook pages. That’s a community center, a job

center, not a library. “But,” one librarian told me, “that’s the only way we can make our

contribution now.”

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Wrong. If that’s what the library is going to be you might as well add a needle exchange

and a food pantry. We’re going to need lots of those in the coming awful years, but I

don’t think the library is the place to go for that.

The library is the place you go for books. For information. For a librarian who knows

how to help you find out more about Aristophanes or Eisenhower or Lady Gaga, about

gay marriage or the strange quark. The library is a cathedral: much more than the Capitol

or the White House, our country stores its life in the Library of Congress. That’s where

the best of us is – and it’s real, and it exists, and all you need is a driver’s license and

you’re allowed to go inside and see it.

I know that idiot county governments measure library effectiveness by idiot door counts,

completely missing that a library does its task when it finds that one piece of information

for that one special researcher, that one engaged citizen. And I know that when door

counts go down, dopes are going to tell you that libraries have to be something else –

they have to be coffee shops, or employment centers, or community centers, or bowling

alleys. But they shouldn’t. They should be libraries – the place with the books – and they

should get better at it. William Greenleaf Elliot, founder of Washington University,

where I went to college, said that it’s nice to educate a thousand people to the usual

standard of scholarship. But the true model of a university is to find that one special

student and help him or her achieve an education above and beyond that standard. Not

surprisingly that university was filled with students who each thought they were that

person.

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Libraries have the same task – to reach for that special connection. While they’re about it

they can easily help the average customer find the average bestseller, the Encyclopedia

Britannica or Wikipedia, the newest search program or the newest incarnation of “Angry

Birds.” But libraries have a great marketing strategy – hey, it’s the place with all the

books! Everybody gets that! Don’t let go of that. Don’t stop being the book place. That’s

where I want to go when I’m looking for help, for information, for understanding. I want

to go to the place with all the books.

Again – I know you’re trying to do not just more with less but fifty new things a day with

less, and at least 48 of those new things are things libraries probably ought not to do, and

they were thought up not by librarians but by politicians. And I know your funding is

vanishing. And I know it makes sense to keep accommodating, to try to keep being

libraries in your spare time while trying to satisfy whatever politician is currently pulling

the strings.

But I also know that libraries are in trouble because as a people we are lost. And when

people are lost, the very few wise ones among them start asking for directions – they turn

to sources of information to learn what to do. When the people come in looking for help,

do you really want to greet them with a job application? Wouldn’t you rather greet them

with – well, with what you know about that I don’t?

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We’re lost; we’re all going down. The energy is vanishing, the sea is rising, the money is

gone. We’re all going down. We can’t pretend otherwise. But I’m going down fighting.

I’m a writer, and I’m going down telling stories, organizing information: being a writer.

Don’t you want to go down protecting the books?

You want to increase door count? Sell beer. You want to be good libraries? Develop

collection. Get new tools. Be smart. Do what libraries have always done.

We’re lost. We don’t know where to turn. Steve Jobs is dead, and he was the last one

who knew what was going on. But maybe, if you keep refusing to let circumstances turn

you into something other than librarians, when the next Steve Jobs comes to you, you’ll

be able to help.