In 2010, during a visit to Washington DC, Ken and I visited the Library of Congress. I wasn’t expecting much, just another bureaucratic governmental building of a nondescript nature. But I was surprised and delighted to discover its Beaux-Arts classical façade and elaborate interior. At that time, I began to wonder if I might organize my own library by way of the LC system. After all, by 2020, I owned over 1,300 volumes. Through the years, I had given away books I knew I would never read or read again. I finally gave away some of the assigned texts I had read at Southwestern College (making sure that the TTU Library had a copy in case I ever wanted to revisit those books).

​In the summer of 2019, I took a short break from writing, about five hours a day over five weeks in order to catalog my collection. I touched every hardback, examining its dust jacket or blurbs on the back of each paperback to see if I wanted to keep it. I touched each book again as I wrote the determined call number in pencil following the copyright page, touched it again as I labeled the spine, and touched it once more as I made a Word document accession list of my holdings. That would be so that in the future I could find what I wanted when I wanted it, something I had not always been able to do with my previous rather free-form mode of organization. (I also found duplicates of books I’d bought, not recalling that I already possessed a copy.)

The undertaking was an awesome (despite the weakening of that word) task to follow that procedure for every book, then reshelve the entire collection in the correct order. But since then, the job has proven valuable because I can quickly locate or reshelve a book and it has a “permanent” place, as do certain bytes in my laptop, as do certain memories in my brain. My collection is an integrated whole yet one that welcomes a new book by reserving a unique place for it.
 
How did I locate or generate all those LC call numbers? one might ask. I checked the copyright page of each book, especially if it was published sometime after the late 1980s. Very often the publisher had already acquired an LC number and all I had to do was copy it out. If the book did not have a call number, I consulted the TTU Library online catalog. I would say that I retrieved at least fifty percent of my numbers from there. Last, I discovered that the Library of Congress (duh) also sported its very own online catalog of vast holdings. That source gave me nearly the rest (or often I could “generate” a number similar to a different book by the same author). What about new books? They are often a bigger problem than old ones. Many publishers now seem to rush a book to publication without waiting to receive a call number from LC, and so it must sit on a separate shelf of mine until one day the LC catalog will list its call number. A librarian’s job is never done. Yay. It means one is always acquiring and reading new books.
 
I’ve enjoyed writing about my lifetime of library experiences this week. I might briefly say that the Lubbock City/County Libraries support one main building and three branches. I’ve used the main Mahon Library from time to time, particularly when reading fiction; my writing group has met in a small room there. If you have a comment or a library experience you would like to share with my readers, please leave it in the Comment section. If you enjoyed any of these posts, please copy the URL and send a link to your friends. Thank you.

TOMORROW: My Book World | Will Fellows's Farm Boys: Lives of Gay Men from the Rural Midwest

​In 1973-74, I earned my state certification in elementary teaching at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas. The University Library building of contemporary architecture had opened in the fall of 1962, and I was impressed with its sheer size, that the multiple floors of stacks would take a long time to fill, such a liberal amount had been accounted for. At that time, because of my having worked in the Southwestern College Library, one organized by the Library of Congress system, I easily procured a student job at the TTU Library (there is also a Law Library, an Architecture Library, and the Southwest Collection/Special Collections building). I worked exclusively for cataloging, which, at the time occupied the sprawling south wing. Again, I reshelved books and “read” the shelves, but I also worked for the cataloging librarian whenever she had projects for me. Perhaps because I was a bit older than most student workers, she trusted me to hunt down information in large Union Catalogs so that she could develop a call number for certain volumes. Once more, I found the library to be sort of a temple to learning, the heart of the university. Among other duties, however, I also ironed on call number labels to new or recataloged books. I strolled out to the large stand of card catalog cabinets and interfiled cards for those new books. Because of my class schedule, I worked an eight-hour day on Tuesdays and Thursdays. One of the younger librarians in the department wasn’t much older than me, and she would invite me to break with her in the faculty lounge over in the student union building. She advanced my LC training by giving me faster ways to recognize the correct order of books. I worked in the library that summer, and even after I had taught one year, I was given a job during the next summer when the extra money came in handy. 

Beginning in 1983, I began working on an MA in English, and the TTU Library once again became a necessary haunt of mine. The books I checked out largely came from the “PQ,” “PR,” or “PS,” sections. Since I retired in 2002, I visit the library infrequently, largely because of access. Oh, I do have circulation privileges as an alumni member. However, if I want to visit the library during the day, I must park off campus (at most a three-block walk) if I can’t garner one of the coveted Visitor spots. If I want to come after hours I can park in the library parking lot free but only after eight p.m. I’ve found the best time for a nonstudent to go is on weekends or during student holidays when the library maintains business hours only. And I learned NOT to go late on a Sunday afternoon because that’s when a lot of students begin thinking about the research paper that’s due Monday. Still, within those parameters, I’ve been able to conduct research projects related to my reading and writing. For example, a few years ago I tackled all works—twenty-four—of author Christopher Isherwood. I was able to check out about half of them from the TTU Library, thus saving me a bit of money. When I study the TTU Web site now, I am astounded at the changes that have taken place over nearly fifty years, for one, the digital experiences students can tap into. It has held onto and continued to add to its traditional core but also added a number of valuable digital sources. In short, the TTU Library is fabulous source for information.

TOMORROW: How the Library of Congress Helped Me Organize My Library

For three years in the late 1960s I worked in the library of my undergraduate school, Southwestern College in Winfield, Kansas. In part, I was trained by a young woman whose husband had just been hired as an instructor. She possessed a quiet, “library” voice, but if you displeased her, she would certainly let you know. She trained me to work circulation, checking in and out books at the front desk, but mostly my work was done in the stacks. The woman taught me that the SC library was catalogued according to the Library of Congress system, and once I learned it, I spent much of my time reshelving books. After a while, I was assigned to “read” the shelves. It was a tedious job in which I checked to make sure that books within an assigned section were arranged in the correct shelf list order. There were signs that asked people NOT to reshelve books, but often I would find books out of place and felt a certain satisfaction in returning them to their proper home. Sometimes the book would be off by a spot or two, a shelf or two, and sometimes it would belong to a shelf on the next floor! Among other things, I may have labeled the spines of new books with call letters. I would inevitably become curious about one and spend a bit of the college’s dime studying its contents. I was often one of the first to check out a book, and I would feel very privileged. Though I was a music major, I sometimes entertained the idea of going to library school or becoming a music librarian after graduation. That's how much I enjoyed my work.

The Deets Library, Southwestern College, Today — Stephen Woodburn, Photos

The city of Wichita, Kansas, where I grew up, has always seemed to put libraries at the top of its list of civic responsibilities. One of the first libraries was completed in 1908 where it was housed on the fourth floor of the City Building. It and the next two iterations of the central library are all located on the same block of Main Street (there are now six branch buildings located throughout the city).
 
I began visiting libraries early. At Wichita’s Longfellow Elementary, where over six hundred students filled a building constructed for fewer pupils than that, there wasn’t much room for a library, but toward the end of my time there, in 1960, I believe two classrooms were combined to form the library.
 
Still, especially in the summer, it was not enough library for me. My mother would load my siblings and me in the car and take us downtown to the Wichita Carnegie Library (opened 1915), about twenty blocks from our home. Later, I would board a public bus and make the trip by myself. I relished the smell of old books, paper thinned by all those fingers turning pages down the path of the next exciting plot. And in those days I mostly read for plot. I mean, I did fall in love with the characters I read about. I loved the settings the authors created. But mostly, I wanted to know where those characters were going, what they were doing or what they were going to do to solve their myriad problems. I adored climbing the stairs to search for books in the stacks, attempting to read all the books of a favored author before moving on to another.

In 1965, with one year left before I went away to college, a new library opened across the street on Main. Note the photograph where public high school students create a chain by which they move books from one building to the next. I didn’t get to use that building much, but I appreciated that it was air conditioned and admired the open architecture, which today still maintains a decidedly twentieth-century if not “contemporary” look. In 2003, even though I had not lived in Wichita for decades I emailed a research librarian to help me find information about the old Miller Theater, as I was in the process of writing a fictional piece around the long defunct building. For a modest fee, I received help from an efficient young woman when she mailed me photocopies of material about the Miller. The story was later published in an online journal, Eclectica, as “Tales of the Millerettes.” And just recently, the 1965 library building was replaced by yet another edifice called the Advanced Learning Library, a building I’ve yet to visit.
 
No matter how small, libraries maintain important places in our lives. They can fill certain voids from which our individual lives may suffer. Today, in honor of National Public Library Week, think about your first library, and what it contributed to your life. Make a donation!

TOMORROW: I Celebrate National Library Week: Southwestern College Library