The Library as Myth

I just started reading The Library at Night, by Alberto Manguel.

In this passage (p. 14), Manguel talks about his library at night:

The order decreed by library catalogues is, at night, merely conventional; it holds no prestige in the shadows. Though my own library has no authoritarian catalogue, even such milder ones as alphabetical arrangement by author or division into sections by language find their power diminished. Free from quotidian constraints, unobserved in the late hours, my eyes and hands roam restlessly across the tidy rows, restoring chaos. One book calls to another unexpectedly, creating alliances across different cultures and centuries. A half-remembered line is echoed by another for reasons which, in the light of day, remain unclear. If the library in the morning suggests an echo of the severe and reasonably wishful order of the world, the library at night seems to rejioce in the world’s essential, joyful muddle.

So, is there a place for disorder in the library? Could we create a kind of browsing or discovery library, without a catalogue or a classification system, containing books from different genres and subjects, where library users could go to simply discover new ideas and learn about new things they would never have thought to look for in the library? Would anyone use this type of space? It could be a space designed for browsing and reading, with selected books from the collection that might be of interest.

While libraries often have displays of interesting books or shelves of new acquisitions, I’m envisioning more of an entire room with randomly arranged books from fiction to nonfiction on different topics, with comfortable chairs and windows. Or it could be an entirely separate library with a different purpose from a typical library, the chaotic synthesis of ideas rather than the ordered exploration of knowledge. Could it help those with different learning styles and thought processes?

Filed under: Information Seeking, Libraries, Reading

Articles, Articles, More Articles…

Things have been busy lately. I was just searching for journal articles on LISA when I realized that I had lost track of which assignment I was working on and what I was doing with the article I was looking at. I stared at the screen and thought, It’s time to take a break and make a blog post. At least making a blog post is not searching for articles. I went to my desk and noticed that the articles for my different assignments were dangerously close to mixing together and melting into one big mess. So, like a good future librarian, I sorted them into folders and decided to quit searching for the night.

Right now I’m working on three final assignments, with one more yet to be handed out. I enjoy the research process, especially when I feel like I’m learning about something real in the LIS field rather than just completing an assignment for a class. And I feel like I’m learning more about searching as I go along, trying to understand how things work a little better each time.

Today the research process helped me to rediscover the joy of browsing. I was in the library getting a book for one of my projects and took a few minutes to browse the surrounding shelves. Afterwards, I went to look for ideas in the current (print) journals and really enjoyed having a full journal issue to look through. I felt as though I had more context for the topic and a better understanding of how the ideas could fit together. It was very different from the disjointed, random experience of searching article indexes. I think I’ll either go back again in the future or at least browse the full journals online once in a while. It’s interesting because I was writing about e-publishing and the different journal models in an assignment recently, so now I can actually see how the information format can change the research process and the development of ideas.

Filed under: Information Seeking, Learning, Research

Gliffy and the search for information

I found out about Gliffy today in one of my classes. It’s a free online tool for creating and sharing diagrams on the web. Here’s an initial diagram I created for Carol Kulthau’s Information Search Process.

Filed under: Information Seeking