I used to teach at a four-year college. The faculty had a favourite story – which, like all urban legends, was absolutely true, Father Athelgar swore it (this was a Benedictine college). A student was about to graduate, but was told she couldn't pick up her diploma until she paid an outstanding fee: some largeish sum in library fines.

'That's a lie!' she is alleged to have protested. 'I've never been IN that place!'

Now, for all my sympathy with an aversion to that particular library, which my more studious informants told me was really noisy in the evenings (I tended to nip in of an afternoon), I never could understand not wanting to spend time in a library. What's not to like? Books, books, and more books. Comfy chairs. Writing spaces. The public library on Main Street even has a piano, and if there weren't a pandemic on I would be over there now, playing Christmas carols and wishing they would tune the instrument…

According to that reliable source, the internet, a lot of people don't like libraries at all. In fact, they have 'library anxiety'. Here is part of the abstract of a speech given at the 28th Annual Conference on the First Year Experience (they mean first-year university students):

While many first-year college year students have been exposed to a wider gamut of information technology than all previous generations, testing shows little significant
improvement in their information literacy skills. Often their familiarity with computers actually
disguises their ineptness at 'framing research strategies' necessary to accessing information
that is relevant, accurate, and authoritative. Freshmen fear of the library, known as 'library
anxiety,' is examined…

Unsigned, 'Library Fear Deconstructed'

I note several things about this speech/paper:

• It has a nice bibliography at the end.
• The author forgot to sign it, so we don't know who wrote it. The conference is something called National Resource Center for The First-Year Experience and Students in Transition, which sounds like they've just got out of prison. Which, given the usual feelings about high school, may be apt.
• Somewhere in the middle of this relatively short paper, 'Barack Obama' is misspelled. Tsk.
• It ends on a upbeat note:
  

  So, the next time you have a need for information (which occurs to most people daily), take that lifelong learning step across the library anxiety divide and simply ask a librarian, 'Could you help me?' And take your time explaining your information need(s). After all, you are the sum of your decisions, and the more informed they are, the better choices you will make, and the more likely you will succeed in life and academically!

• Gag me with a spoon.

Now, I do not wish to denigrate the library profession. Some librarians (like Elektra and her friends) are sterling characters. Of course, most of them are really cybrarians, people on the cutting edge of the digital revolution, but I've known some absolutely lovely old-time librarians. I spent my junior high- and high school years as a library assistant, stamping, shelving, delivering attendance slips, and showing the other students where the answers were to Mr Sauer's pop research questions in history class. I know what goes into a library, and what can come out of it. But I do know a few librarian stories.

The first thing I learned to do in a library was dodge librarians.

I was twelve. When the real estate lady drove us around our new neighbourhood, she pointed out the public library.

'You mean it's free?' I asked excitedly. 'And you can borrow books and everything?'

My mother looked at the driver in alarm. 'You don't know what you've started.'

No sooner had we moved in than I nagged my mom into taking us to the public library, a lovely place with three big rooms and a desk lobby. Books everywhere, oh boy. The librarian helped my mom sign up for a 'family card'. I insisted on a 'family card' when I found out that the 'family card' borrowing limit was ten. The individual kid's card only allowed you to take out two books at a time – and I knew my mother wasn't going to be up for driving me to the library every other day. I intended to make hay while the sun shone.

I headed to an attractive display of Erle Stanley Gardner novels, but was swiftly steered away by the officious librarian.

'Oh, no, dear, the children's books are in this room.' I politely waited through her gushing introduction to the delights of kiddie lit, while inwardly fuming. I stopped reading kiddie lit when I was eight. There was a traumatic experience when I first encountered AA Milne. After Winnie had poohed at me, I would never touch the stuff again.

I waited until she'd stopped talking and turned to another patron, and slipped away into adult-literature bliss. I came away with Gardners, Buchans, a couple of Helen MacInneses, and some Alexandre Dumas. I didn't say my taste was good, just that it wasn't in the kiddie section. Tears-and-nylon, menacing Nazis, imperialism-and-jolly-hockey-sticks, and swashbuckling Frenchmen.

As time went on, my taste got better. I also found new books, and lovely old ones – such as what was no doubt a rare first edition of Livingstone's travels on the Zambesi. From 1850. Some of the pages were uncut. Nobody had ever read it but me. It had fold-out maps. I was in heaven.

I insisted on going to the library once a week. Since I couldn't drive and it was too far to walk, my mother drove me over.

And sat in the car.

I'd try to cajole her into entering the library, but she never wanted to. Occasionally, I'd bring her a book she asked for. She loved reading, that wasn't the problem. I used to bring her books from the school library, too. She could sit happily with a book of an evening. She just didn't like the atmosphere in the library, somehow. Maybe it was that librarian, the one who showed us around. Or maybe it was a bad memory from another library. I never knew.

My friend Yevgenia's mother was completely different. She spent all her Saturdays in Carnegie Library in Oakland (part of Pittsburgh, where the university is). Sometimes, she'd take us along. Yevgenia's mother's hobby was genealogy: she was trying to prove her ancestors came to England with William the Conqueror. (Yevgenia's dad was a White Russian.) I happily romped in the genealogy room, chasing down Gheorghenis. I don't know if she ever found the Conqueror connection, but I wished her well.

That library was a wonder and a half, later much appreciated by me as a university student. It had closed stacks because it was so old. You'd request a book by filling in a request slip. You left the slip at the little desk. Then you waited. The librarian would take the slip and disappear into the stacks. They'd bring the book back and put it on the desk. You could pick it up. You were supposed to do this silently. I found it all strangely ceremonial.

Even better was the St Louis public library. They had closed stacks AND pneumatic tubes. If you've never had a request slip sent by pneumatic tube, you haven't lived.

I think that's what people need to get over this 'library anxiety' thing. They need more interesting libraries. Bring back the pneumatic tubes! Reinstall those card catalogues! Okay, the computer search is faster. I remember spending a lot of time in the local North Carolina public library helping terrified users figure out the new online catalogue. What? No, I wasn't working there. I was just standing there, and if you can ignore a frightened 75-year-old library user fumbling with a computer keyboard that they obviously fear will bite them, then I pity you…

In other words, try to communicate the joy of fact-hunting, if you're a fact-hunting facilitator. If you're the fact-hunter: talk to librarians as a last resort. Ask them useful questions like, 'Can you help me fill out this interlibrary loan slip, please?' Frame those search strategies! Practice online. Start with the Internet Archive. It's free! It has books! It has films! It has music! It even has a huge collection in Yiddish! Give them money, if you're rich. They are lovely people.

Also join the Open Library. Also free. Also full of books. Old books, new books. Books you didn't know you needed, but now can't live without.

Learn about government sources, like the Library of Congress and National Archives and Records Administration. Did you know you could get rid of commercial links in your google searches if you add 'site:.gov' to the search line? That there are 'advanced' options that help you get rid of the chaff? See, that's part of 'framing search strategies'. They ought to teach courses in that. At libraries. Hey, wait. Maybe they do.

A note to those people who invariably whine, 'But I prefer real books!' By which they mean, books that trees have died for. To which I reply, 'Oh, yeah. It's all gone downhill after they stopped using papyrus. You can't beat that true reed smell and the crackling feel of plant pulp beneath your fingers. The colours are so vibrant, too.'

I suspect that fear of running into people like that may contribute to 'library anxiety'. That and the smell of floor wax. Persevere, friends. You can find what you're looking for when the librarian's back is turned.

Dmitri Gheorgheni

28.12.20 Front Page

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