The Loon will make a confession that a Good Librarian should not make: unlike Barbara Fister, she hates academic-library stacks, and always has. (It’s all right. The Loon has never been and will never be a Good Librarian.)
The stacks do not awe her. Those yawning caverns annoy, frustrate, and occasionally scare her. (They also make her tear up and occasionally sneeze, which is the reason she’s never applied to Rare Book School, much though she’d like to go.) The annoyance of staring at a table of irregularly-assigned LCC prefixes (Cutters? What the hell is a Cutter, anyway?—yes, the Loon does know, but she didn’t for most of her librarygoing life) to work out which of three possible floors holds the exact call number she needs. Endless elevator trips, even more endless stairs. (How do folk in wheelchairs or using walkers or canes ever manage?) Either too dim or vastly too bright flickery-ugly fluorescent lighting that always seems to flake out exactly on the row she needs. Prisonlike gunmetal grey or institutional beige shelving. Silence—not friendly productive silence, but dead cold fearsome silence broken only by the buzz of a malfunctioning fluorescent, silence that suggests a rapist or murderer behind every massive structural pillar. Slow, irksomely grindy compact shelving, and the (irrational, one hopes) fear she’ll break the raised floor every time she steps on it.
And let’s face it: five out of six trips into the stacks, even for the librarian-trained Loon, land at either no book at all (the Loon seems to gravitate toward lost books) or a book that doesn’t help. Browsing near a book-that-didn’t-help rarely helps either. Neither the card catalog nor the OPAC is nearly good enough at helping her eliminate possibilities.
Give the Loon a website, or a full-text search engine. Please. Any day. Spare her the horrible, horrible stacks!
On hating the stacks by Library Loon, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
The Babel Fish is not a good librarian. She doesn’t like aggravated, er, aggregated databases adding lots of full text titles just because that makes the numbers higher. Good librarians think anything less than everything possible is not good and may even be censorship. Or so the Babel Fish has been told when complaining about white supremacist pseudo-journals being added to a subscription database. (They can put up all the websites they want; I just think slipping those pseudo-articles into a database the library pays for is very bad librarianship. But also a minority position.)
Back to my usual first person. I will admit that I have visited libraries with giant collections that make me cry – not because of allergies, but because they are shabby, tomb-like, and neglected, with a few bashed-up carrels randomly tucked up along the cinder block walls and those energy-saving yet infinitely depressing flickering fluorescent lights that are only on if you wave your hands a lot. (And I’m talking some of the “great libraries” here. Ones I envy, until I actually go there.) The trouble perhaps is that the librarians who work there also do not like stacks, so rarely venture into them. They add less and less that is new to them, so they grow more and more depressing and neglected. And then it seems silly to devote all that space to books nobody uses.
I love well-tended stacks, and a highlight of my week is stealing an hour away from email and meetings to weed the collection. That sounds contradictory, but it’s not. Weeding is a sign of respect for books. It’s also a quick way to become unpopular with faculty, unless you have built up a generous amount of trust. (We have, and so we are entrusted with getting rid of books. We are also not a research library, which makes it less of an issue.) So we don’t have quite the awe that comes with a good million plus collection, but we also don’t have the tomb-like antiquity of a large, neglected collection.