Library Saga: News Flash!

I found my library card! Yay! It wasn’t in the wallet (which, as careful followers of this odyssey will know, is no longer in my possession). Apparently, at some point before the wallet went missing, I’d taken it out of my wallet and placed it on my dresser under some magazines. Wasn’t that a clever place to put it?

Excited about my find, I went back to the library this afternoon. (If you’re just tuning into this Very Exciting Adventure, all you need to know is that I threw a tantrum at the feet of the librarians at the NYPL Mulberry branch the other day because their selection was lousy and they wouldn’t let me check out a book because I didn’t have my card). This time I went to the Mid-Manhattan Branch. This is the branch I usually go to, and, in the future, it’s the only one I’ll go to. Was it a perfect experience? No. Of the four books I was looking for, all were marked as “available” but only two were actually on the shelves. But, hey, 50 percent is pretty good in my book. They also had many many many Spanish text books.

But here is the really exciting part: I met a really nice librarian! She works on the third floor. After I gagged her and pinned her to the floor with a machete, she told me her name was Cynthia. Then she told me that if I want to learn Spanish (claro que si!) I can use a Spanish database “sort of like Rosetta Stone” through the NYPL website for free! It’s called Mango Languages. What’s more, I can do it from home! And all I need is…drum roll…my library card number. In other words, one doesn’t need to have the actual card. If you have the number memorized—like I do!—you’re golden. Just to summarize the system’s rules: If you have your library card number but don’t have the card (which has nothing more on it than the number and a barcode), you cannot check out a used Spanish textbook that has erased-pencil marks in it—a book with a value of maybe $5. However, sans card, you CAN use your number to access a database which would cost upwards of $300 if you bought it on your own. So why is the bureaucratic archaic whatever-ic library system so hell bent on protecting card-less patrons who know their card number (like me on Saturday) from taking something worth $5 but will let them use something worth $300? I’d probably make $0.50 if I tried to sell a stolen library Spanish book with erased pencil marks in it. But if I were able to sell access to Mango…

Kidding! But you get the point. I hope. 

Anyway, I’m quite excited about this database, and I’m thrilled that Cynthia told me about it. Using an old-fashioned paper and pencil, she wrote out the directions for how to find it the database through the NYPL main page. She admitted that it’s ridiculously hard to find. “You’re lucky you got me today because a lot of other librarians here don’t know about this kind of stuff,” she said. 

I wish more librarians did know about this kind of stuff. I bet a lot of them would if they weren’t so busy dealing with loiterers and the many practical library-care matters of transporting, shelving, organizing, and fixing books. If there are any librarians reading this, please feel free to correct me. I’ve never worked at a library and so I don’t really know what the ones at the smaller city branches do all day, but I am guessing that most of what they do DOES NOT involve helping people find what they need.

Books need to be preserved and organized and cared for in many ways and we need to be able to access them, but I think that much of what goes on at local library branches involves material that could probably be freshly printed if that were possible. Think of the cost per square foot of real estate in downtown Manhattan and then  consider the square footage of the books in the library that are not accessed every day or even every week or month. If all the money going to pay for the physical space could instead go to pay to have lots more librarians like Cynthia helping people like me, that’d be pretty swell. There is more information in the world right now than every before, and there’s so much access to it that it’s overwhelming. There are also lots of books out there that are preserved and babied just because they are books, regardless of what they are about or how often they are used—books that don’t warrant the money they cost in space. We place so much value on physical books when really it’s the information that should count. Librarians, more than physical books, might be our best portals to information these days. Isn’t it possible that what we need is fewer books and more librarians?