About

The Library According to Writers

We librarians like to say that we have the power to transform lives, but when we try to evaluate how we do it we often get stuck in a pattern of one-sided professional thinking.  We issue surveys and collect statistics, but in the end we always find that our patrons can't really tell us how to do our jobs.

What patrons can tell us is how they experience the library.

Some time ago I began to notice library-related narratives in books and articles that are not otherwise about libraries. The stories (tautologically all written by writers) tell how libraries and librarians influenced their lives, how they helped (or didn't) and what the experience of going to the library meant on an emotional, life-changing level.

It occurred to me that these kinds of stories are exactly what we librarians are missing.  These writers aren't making assumptions about what we want to hear.  The library or librarian is just an organic part of some experience worth writing about.

As a project of discovery, I am saving these citations as I run across them, adding my own comments from a librarian perspective.  I expect that if I do this for long enough patterns will emerge and I will learn something interesting.  I am developing a list of themes in order to categorize the citations.

The Rules

1) Stories have to mention a specific library interaction (not an opinion about libraries or the value of libraries).
2) Stories have to be from texts that are not specifically about libraries or librarianship.
3) I have to find the stories in situ during the natural course of reading. No fair searching for them deliberately.

--Amy