Sitting in the Research Library at the National Museum of Scotland at the moment, and I have to confess to being a little weepy. I hadn't realized how much I missed librairies. It was like being reunited after 40 years with a twin who had been adopted on the other side of the country.
I was a prolific library user at school, but it's been a while since school. We used to have a library at work. And while its scope was limited, it was a real library, with books and journals and monographs and librairians, whose message was "What came before you is important". It was closed as a cost-saving measure, and the collection cast to the four winds, never to be reconstituted again, under the foolish presumption that "You can just find it on the net".
But you can't. You can never duplicate the experience of tilting your head and scanning the spines of all those books, and coming across something you never expected or even knew existed. I feel like I've come home.
I was a prolific library user at school, but it's been a while since school. We used to have a library at work. And while its scope was limited, it was a real library, with books and journals and monographs and librairians, whose message was "What came before you is important". It was closed as a cost-saving measure, and the collection cast to the four winds, never to be reconstituted again, under the foolish presumption that "You can just find it on the net".
But you can't. You can never duplicate the experience of tilting your head and scanning the spines of all those books, and coming across something you never expected or even knew existed. I feel like I've come home.