It is now official that the University of Auckland is consolidating its Music and Dance, Fine Arts, and Architecture libraries into the General Library. In spite of vehement protests from students and staff, budgetary issues won out and we are losing our specialist library spaces and some staff. The consolidation will naturally entail a reduction of physical resources. We are told that less-used books will be moved to remote storage and that they can be called up in 24 hours. In reality it is likely that books that have not circulated in a while will be withdrawn from the collection; anyone who uses libraries frequently will know that weeding is a necessary evil because there is always a finite amount of shelf space, but we all hope that the weeding will be done in a sensitive way. Unfortunately, evidence thus far is to the contrary, as books I have myself used for research or teaching have been withdrawn, but we can try and be optimistic that collection management will be more reasoned in the future. That is not really the point of this little feuilleton, though. Rather, I want to make a case for the continued presence of physical resources (meaning books) in libraries and to argue that ebooks and other electronic resources are far from the panacea to the ills of education that they are often claimed to be.
A big problem comes up every year whenever I assign any kind of research project: students have limited research skills, and they deteriorate further every year. This is in spite of their being savvy digital natives and in spite of having a lot of directed teaching in how to use electronic resources in secondary school and at university. I've racked my brain about why this is the case: why can I find in two minutes the basic scholarly resources for a topic I know little about, while some students cannot find the same resources in two weeks of work? Of course I have spent a lot of time looking for resources; that's a major part of postgraduate work, and having a doctorate means I should have expert research skills. But surely my students' relative ease with using electronic media should give them an advantage that I, who remember the days before the internet was ubiquitous, cannot boat of? It dawned on me that the answer (or at least one answer) to the conundrum is rather simple: experience in library stacks. I spent an awful lot of time in library stacks as a child, both in school libraries and in public libraries. My experiences in the stacks taught me visually how resources are organised, and showed me physically how much knowledge is out there. Seeing the Dewey Decimal system manifested in real objects meant that I became fluent in that system from very early on (and even before this, seeing things in simple alphabetical order set up my brain for more advanced methods of organisation). Browsing the stacks also gave me a sense of the huge variety of books in the world. I learned quickly what scholarly books look like (they have notes and indexes), what different types of musical scores look like, what art books look like. I learned about what publishers to expect to put out what kinds of books. Browsing the university library stacks, first at George Washington University's Gelman Library then at Oxford's Music Faculty Library, taught me about the vast range of musicology and its surrounding subjects. While I may not have been studying a particular topic at the time, I knew where it was in the library and what sorts of books were in the section. I would file away the existence of a few books on Scriabin or on Moroccan music for future reference. Just looking at a library shelf, not even opening any books, is hugely educational. I learned as much browsing the stacks as I did in my classes, dipping into books here and there, honing in on writing styles and methods of scholarly enquiry.
This experiential learning is lost when students do not have stacks to browse. Searching for books online is an activity removed from reality: you miss the chance to see what other things are around the book you are searching for (which might be more useful than the book you were after), the chance to flip through the book to see if it will be useful (unless there is an ebook version, although these are impossible to truly flip through), the chance that a librarian might say, 'ah, but have you also seen book X?' when you take it to the counter to check it out. When you find a book online you find exactly one book. When you find a book in the stacks you find many more. The most advanced search algorithm is no match for human experience. I know what I saw in the stacks last week, but it will only come up in an online search if I use the right terms. Using an ebook engages one sense: sight, or sound if you use a text reader. Using a real book engages sight, sound (of the pages turning and the binding bending), smell (I can sometimes place publishers by the smell of their books), and, most importantly, touch. (Tasting the books is not recommended; remember the legend that turns up in Dumas' La Reine Margot and Eco's The Name of the Rose about the poisoned books, which kill anyone who licks their finger after turning the pages.) So much more is lost than physical objects when books are withdrawn or moved to storage. We risk losing an entire aspect of our cognitive functioning, and the effects are already visible. Students come up with online resources of dubious quality when excellent books are waiting for them to find in the library catalogue. Countless students, even ones who write well, will cite a short programme note of questionable provenance instead of a well written book by an expert in the field. My experiences in the stacks have taught me how to search, so that I can use the online algorithms more effectively. These search tools should be a means to an end, not the end in themselves. When they do become the end, good resources go unused, research loses nuance, and students get low grades because their work is not as thorough as it should be.
Is it too late? It might be for the current generation of university and high school students, who through no fault of their own were deprived of the chance to develop some of the skills that would be most useful to them in their studies. This is due to the criminal negligence of bureaucratic budget-wielders, the same people who advocate that the arts should be removed from schools, people who say that students need 'study spaces', not books. Without books, what on earth do they have to study? I know of no actual librarians who agree that e-resources are the only way forward, or who advocate reducing the number of books in the stacks. But we do have reason to be optimistic: public library use is now on an upswing, bookstores are finally opening again rather than closing, and people are starting to advocate more seriously and publicly for books. Just as school administrators are finding that putting the arts back into the curriculum can actually boost performance in other subjects, they might realise that physical libraries with real books are also beneficial to overall development.
While I doubtless spent more time in the library stacks than was typical for a child in the 90s, that time played a major role in why I have got to where I am, getting paid to research and teach things that interest me. I should also note that I'm not against the expansion of electronic resources. Having access to more material makes an inestimable difference in my own research and that of my colleagues, and I could not have completed my doctoral dissertation, articles, or my book manuscript without them. But they are only useful insofar as I know how to find and use them, and it was the experience of using physical resources in libraries that taught me how to do that. The next step for me as a pedagogue is to come up with ways to patch in some of that experiential knowledge so that our students can be empowered to produce better work. The moral of the story is, take your kids to the library and leave them in the stacks for a while!
