On Books, Libraries and Knowledge in the Information Age

Let me tell you people something. One of my favorite settings for action in a movie is the library. I think this is because a library is not a neutral setting, like a living room or city street. Libraries are chosen as a setting for a reason. But before I get into all of that, let me tell you about some of my favorite library movie scenes:

1. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade- Dr. Jones and Dr. Elsa Schneider bust through the floor of the European library that has the huge X, revealing the catacombs underneath. The idea of a library holding secrets, (in this case, secrets to finding the Holy Grail), is a good one—good enough for Dan Brown to re-use in The Da Vinci Code. And let us not forget the secret sex manual hidden underneath a shelf in American Pie.
2. Ghostbusters- Who can forget about the opening scene, where that lone after-hours librarian watches the card catalog take flight? Clearly, libraries can be spooky places after dark, as also evidenced in scenes from The Neverending Story.
3. 3 O’Clock High- I like the library scene in this movie, where a row of shelves go down like a line of dominos. There is no better setting for a fight, not even a china shop. Because unlike the china shop, all noises are amplified in a library. Out of order, chaos.
4. Most importantly, though, is The Day After Tomorrow, where people survive pretty much the worst week of weather imaginable in the New York Public Library. While the movie as a whole was kind of average and a little preachy at the end, the library scenes raised some interesting questions. With nothing but spare time, the refugees wax philosophic about whether it’s ok to burn the books for warmth and if so, what subject matter is most or least expendable, poetry vs. science.

Clearly, libraries are more than just interesting settings for movies. A library is much more than four walls and a roof, much more than just a bunch of books. Ever since ancient guys in dusty Mediterranean cities decided to keep track of all of their vegetable sales on stone tablets and papyrus, libraries have been our repositories of information, second only to our large brains. Through the ages, we have had this one basic premise: some information should be preserved.

But as I sit here typing this, staring into my 18” computer monitor, I can’t help but wonder– do we as a species really need libraries any more? Do we really need all of those books and maps and magazines and journals and videos anymore? After all, books take up quite a bit of room. Wasn’t the digital revolution supposed to do away with all of that waste? I remember in the early days of CD-ROMs when their capacity was unofficially measured in advertising copy by how many sets of encyclopedia they could hold. Truly, we are in an age when there’s nothing that can’t be neatly transformed into a string of 0s and 1s. The amount of information that is almost instantly retrievable from the computer in front of me is mind-blowing. Other than the odd chance of somebody absent-mindedly unplugging the entire Internet, cyberspace has pretty handily rendered the brick-and-mortar library with books inside…superfluous. (Indeed, most libraries today don’t deny the power and convenience of the Internet, as you can find multiple Internet computers within.)

But as Luddite and backwards as it sounds, I think it would be a shame if we lost books and libraries to hard drives and virtual information. To me, libraries are the last vestige of order and permanence in our world. Building a library and filling it with books is our way of making a contract simultaneously with the past and with the future. For in doing so, we not only show our commitment to yesterday’s knowledge, pain and ecstasy and tomorrow’s learning, but we also make an attempt at creating something of permanence– a dying idea in today’s world, which is always in flux, transitory. (Think, for instance, how often a news website like cnn.com updates. Or how frustrating it is to see that a friend hasn’t updated their blog in over 6 hours!)

A library whispers to us from the past, saying that knowledge is not only important, but is important enough to build walls around. Knowledge is not some amorphous plaything to download when you feel like it. That amorphous plaything would better be defined as information. But knowledge–well, knowledge is something else, requiring a disciplined search and reverence. Knowledge is information with a person attached.

I think that the physical component to knowledge—books, maps, etc. is very important because of the interaction with information they provide. When I open a book, I smell the effects of time on the pages as the glue and the ink and the binding have broken down over the book’s life. I do not choose the word “life” haphazardly, because it is almost as if the information contained within is alive–much more so than a bunch of digital ones and zeroes on a hard drive located somewhere halfway around the world.

When holding a book, you can’t help but be reminded that those pages collected in front of you were somebody’s intellectual baby at one time. Multiple somebodies went to quite a bit of effort and monetary expense to bring that book into existence. This physical interaction with knowledge keeps a person humble. As I walk down aisle upon aisle of books I’ll never read in a library, I’m constantly reminded of all of the things I’ll never know, all of the previous readers I’ll never meet. In contrast, search engines have a way of narrowing the world down to a personalized, manageable set of information. Indeed, that’s their purpose isn’t it? A search engine would lead us to believe that knowledge exists for us, but it’s probably truer that we exist for knowledge.

Physical libraries also go hand in hand with American democracy and freedom, in providing the opportunity for education for anybody who can walk in the doors, which is much more than I can say for the Internet–still largely an advertisement-laden plaything for the rich and upper middle class. Therefore it’s no surprise to actually see the great unwashed homeless inside the library as well.

Another interesting thing about libraries is their almost naïve distance from corporate America. The famous proverb would instruct us to “neither a lender nor a borrower be,” but it seems almost perverse that libraries routinely allow people to borrow their goods at no cost, (as long as the borrower honors the two-week return or renewal agreement.) In a world where nothing is free, libraries operate on this wonderfully archaic “honor code.”

And so, when Indiana Jones takes that metal post to the floor of that library, when all of those bookshelves go tumbling down in the high school library of 3 O’Clock High, they are actions taking place on an active stage, full of hidden assumptions. Libraries are an important reminder of our shared humanity, our shared hunch that some information is worth preserving in the name of knowledge.

So go out there and hug your local librarian.