 | A WRITER'S WIT |  J. Borges |
SOUTHWESTERN COLLEGE LIBRARY --
SMALLER DOES NOT MEAN INFERIOR
Reading Room, Southwestern College Library, c1966 | Photo from 1967 Moundbuilder Yearbook 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
I was fascinated with the LC system, how it had a category for every subject in the world. As a pupil, off duty, I would roam the stacks, and once I learned what was what, I would browse, searching for what I needed. Just as often as not, this proved as good a method for research than merely studying the card catalog. If, say, I knew where a certain author’s books or a certain subject’s books were housed, I could go there immediately and find what I needed, searching through the books’ indexes or tables of contents. Even though the library contained only 250,000 volumes (I believe), I never seemed to have any problem locating what I needed to write my papers. The stacks also housed carrels where one could study in silence. Most weekday evenings, to avoid dormitory noise, I would head for one of those spots and spend three or four hours before the building closed at ten p.m. The library wasn’t just a place where I worked and studied. It felt like the heartbeat or perhaps the brain center of my education. I worked there until after graduation early into the summer. I soon missed it and the people I had gotten to know there.
TOMORROW: I Celebrate National Library Week | Texas Tech University Library
TOMORROW: I Celebrate National Library Week | Texas Tech University Library
RSS Feed