When’s the last time you visited a library? If you’re a student, maybe it was yesterday, but for too many of us, the library is a forgotten resource. Nowadays the Internet rules. Anything you want to know, along with things you don’t want to know, await you on the web.
I smiled this week after one of our kids, complaining that websites for a school term paper were useless, asked for actual books. Finally, somebody wants to visit a library. And if you plan to do any type of serious research, expect a library visit in your future, too.
In college, I remember visiting the library’s “stacks.” These were multiple, unoccupied floors of shelved books accessed by an elevator, and thankfully, a student I.D because the stacks were—in a word—scary. If I recall correctly, the lights were on timers attached to the end of the bookshelves. That placement only added to the fun of hunting down an ancient resource, especially after you forgot to reset the timer and found yourself in near darkness. But after braving the stacks, locating a particular work of literature from among the nearly two million other books felt like finding a treasure. Library memories (sigh).
How about sharing your library adventures?