Opinion: Whatever happened to going to the library?

One of the big surprises of my freshman week at Creighton University was visiting the campus library and finding out that bags and briefcases were searched at the exit.

Eighteen years old, and it had never occurred to me that someone would steal a library book. I knew people who would check books out and forget to return them. I ran up some late fees myself during the time I was a regular customer at the city library in Chamberlain. That was simple forgetfulness, though, or maybe laziness. It certainly wasn’t criminal intent.

I quickly grew accustomed to the exit checks, because I loved that library. Even if I hadn’t enjoyed it, I’d have been forced to spend long hours there. As I’ve probably said before, the first time I went to literature class at Creighton and people started talking books, everybody but me had read every book in the world. Each time I heard a title, I wrote it down and found it at the library. I’d have been going there if there’d been a full-body search and a fee just to walk in the door.

The place had open stacks, which meant I could wander anywhere in the place looking for reading material. I took advantage of that, and when I wasn’t reading from my selfimprovement list for literature class, I was working through shelf after shelf, as if I might read from one end of the library to the other.

I transferred to South Dakota State the next year. The library there wasn’t as fancy. It was a much older building with much older chairs and reading tables. But it had long shelves of books, and that’s what I wanted. One of the big surprises of my first year at State was that it had closed stacks. I couldn’t just wander through the entire building looking for books. That was a bit off-putting, although I learned to handle the card system and check-out process.

I liked it a lot, though, when I started taking graduate courses and got a stack pass. Down in the stacks a person could find books, quiet and study carrels. That might not appeal to some, but it was like Christmas the first time I descended the stairs into that part of the library. I spent a whole lot of time down there, some of it productively. Curtains of dust always hung in the sunlight that filtered through distant windows, and sometimes the books I wanted weren’t right where they were supposed to be. I usually found them, though, and if I didn’t always find exactly the book I wanted, I always found something that held my interest and met my research needs.

I thought of those library days recently as I read a story, in Time Magazine, I think it was, about the guy who started Apple and the new device he’s marketing to let people read books without actually having books in their hands. Apparently, the device is a competitor for something called a Kindle, which I gather from a cursory read of the magazine story is some sort of electronic book reader.

These things seem to take the place of going to a library and checking out a book, going to a bookstore and buying the latest best-seller or going to a bunch of rummage sales and pawing through cardboard boxes packed with dog-eared paperbacks. That’s pretty amazing.

Right now the younger crowd is thinking they’ve just discovered the last living dinosaur, and they’re right. In my defense, though, where would I run across a Kindle? When I go to a store, it’s to find a brown belt or a pair of blue argyle socks. I don’t even know what store might sell an iPad.

Still, I like the idea that such devices might encourage people to read novels and histories and biographies and such. That would be about the greatest advance I’ve seen in the high-tech age.

If you don’t mind, though, I’ll watch that high-tech advance from a soft chair near a south window in a library, preferably with 50 or 100 pages left to read in a good hard-cover book.

Terry Woster’s column is published Wednesdays and Saturdays in The Daily Republic.

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