One of the things I really miss about the last two academic institutions I worked at is the vast library collections in my area of research and teaching. Both institutions are fortunate to be leaders in this particular field, and therefore the administrations have an interest in supporting healthy programs, departments, centers and special library collections. Contrast this with our current institution, which has recently spent a good deal of money to build a spiffy new library expansion, but has cut back on some holdings - particularly in the area of journals - and whose new library resembles a computer lab more than a library sometimes.
In addition to the lack of actual useful volumes - and I do understand the challenges and expenses of maintaining a broad academic library while satisfying the particular specialties of a diverse faculty - I miss the ability to do snowball browsing. That, is, the ability to walk to a general area, and grab a book, then look and see what is around it. Maybe the abstract or introduction that I skim has some keywords that remind me to look in another section, where I can pick up and discard volumes, searching, sorting, surpising myself with sudden bursts of thought I wouldn't have expected. I miss that feeling of indulging my curiousity, of going to the library for one or two books, and coming out with ten or eleven.
This evening I was surfing around, reading this and that, and decided to go through the archives of "Dan Drezner's academia posts, and found this explanation that is much better than mine. Read down to the metaphor about apes swinging through trees. It's very apt.
He doesn't wax nostalgic, however, about the ancient leatherbound books of Portuguese poetry in the University of Florida stacks, which were not quite one story tall. Picking these books off the shelves, creaking them open and sitting in an old leather chair under a bare bulb in the corner...now, that is satisfaction.
Posted by binky at July 28, 2005 07:50 PM | TrackBack | Posted to The Academy