Laurabelle’s Blog

Today was my second day volunteering up in Mountlake Terrace. Unfortunately I didn't get up there as early as I intended, partly because I kept just missing the time when I thought I should leave in order to catch the bus, and I didn't feel like walking almost a mile and then either waiting in the cold or coming back home again to leave an hour later. I don't think I missed much, since there wasn't a lot to do during the day besides shelve books, and then I spent about an hour and a half putting stickers on new books before catching the bus back home.

David, the librarian, asked me what I'd learned so far about librarianship. I said I'd learned that shelving and putting stickers on books and taking them off was very boring but necessary. Actually, I don't think alphabetizing books is boring at all, and it's lovely to shelve books after I've already alphabetized a section, like the W-Z shelves today, because then I know, rather than guessing, where a book goes. On the other hand, alphabetizing leads to the other thing I learned today...

Volunteers don't always know or care about systematic arrangement of books. I realize I'm probably somewhat unusual, but organized bookshelves have always come naturally to me. I don't assign my books call numbers or anything, but for the past several years my bookshelves have been organized roughly by subject, genre, time/place, etc. Probably my system doesn't make too much sense to anyone but me, but my point is that I have one, and in fact I don't think I could comprehend not having one.

Some of the volunteers at the school library probably wouldn't understand me either. Last week there was a woman who shelved everything (fiction, nonfiction, everything) in the everybody section. She said she didn't read and that she had one book at home (about 9-11, because it intrigued her), but that she hadn't read it. She was uninterested in The Lord of the Rings books and completely oblivious to my irony when I said the special effects were better than in the movies. I am sad but powerless about the fact that her kids will not read either if she doesn't.

This week there was a man shelving non-fiction books who complained about not understanding why books that looked the same all had different call numbers. I said it was because they had different subjects, that it was a subject classification system, but that seemed to make no impression. (He also shelved some books out of order in my nice alphabetized section, which rather annoyed me.) Library organization schemes are not all that hard to use (it's the theory behind creating them that's complicated); I think it's not that he's incapable of understanding, it's that he simply doesn't think it's important or worth understanding.

I talked to the librarian a bit about this, and he said he didn't know what to say to the volunteers, for fear they might quit because they're offended or because they think it's too complicated. I actually had been thinking earlier in the day that I would rather do all the shelving myself if it would assure that all the books were in order; unfortunately there are a lot of books to shelve, and I'm only there once a week, so it's not my decision to make. I'm not sure whether the luxury of having the books stay more or less in order (because the kids generally don't put books back on the shelves) would outweigh the disadvantage of being the only one shelving. It is so much easier to shelve when the books on the shelves are in order. But assuming that one wants to keep the volunteers, what could be done to persuade them that books really do need to be shelved precisely?

In fact, why do books need to be in order? Why am I so hung up on this? Part of the reason is that I enjoy order and hate disorder, but I also believe that physical order is necessary for access to information. One could argue that in a library the size of this school's (one room), it's easy enough to scan the shelves around, but even it is reaching the limits. In fact, the narrowness of most of the books' spines often makes even reading the spines very difficult. More importantly, this library is where these kids are learning about information and how to access it. Last week David taught the first-graders how to use shelf markers to put books back where they came from, and this week he showed them an index at the back of a non-fiction book. If the kids can't rely on books' being in order, they're going to learn that libraries are user-unfriendly and difficult to use, that they can't find the book they're looking for because it's never in the right place. That is an eventuality I would much rather avoid.