If God actually loved me, I’d be in Boston today attending a workshop on libraries and technology. However, I’m feeling unloved and stuck in my bare-walled, Cape Cod office. Still, I wanted to share my thoughts.
The Media Center
I attended undergraduate school from 1989 – 1994. Back then, the campus library at Marywood University was called the “Media Center.” In fact, the school was very insistent that everyone from faculty to students call it the Media Center, and not “library.” I thought it was silly.
Today, I know they were ahead of their time.
I entered college almost 20 years ago (holy cow!). It was in the Media Center that I first used a computer for something other than idle poking around and first used email (all command line back then!). In fact, Marywood’s Media Cener was able to check the status of books at another local university electronically, and even place reservations. Remember, this was 1989. I was blown away that experience.
Several of my instructors would only communicate with us via email or bulletin boards. The IS department on the 3rd floor became my home-away-from-home, and by the time I graduated I was prolific with computers, the newborn internet and all it had to offer.
All thanks to the Media Center. It was an exciting and fun place to be. There were great conversations with interesting people, cool technology to use freely and so on.
The emphasis was on communication. Both one-way (books, newspapers, etc.) and two-way (people, in person and online). Ideas were exchanged enthusiastically. I loved going to the Media Center, as it was on the forefront of technology.
Somehow, my experience with public libraries has been quite different.
The Public Library
As a child, my mother would walk with us to the library regularly. I loved selecting a book to take home, having my own library card and so on. I also understood that the library was a serious place, where children had to be quiet and polite. We were to pick a book, check out at the desk and walk home.
In jr. high we learned to use a card catalog, the Dewey Decimal System and how to locate a book. Again, use of the library was “…a privilege” and not the place for fooling around. In other words, the sense of excitement I experienced at The Media Center was not there.
A Communication Hub
Today, our public libraries can create that same sense of exitement among their patrons (especially young people). My local library is starting to take some tentative steps in that direction. They’ve hosted educational programs on Flickr, MySpace and Blogger. They’ve got a teen blog and a nice (if not small) room for teens with two brand-new iMacs. They host teen movie and game nights.
That’s great, but we can think even bigger. The Media Center was a communication hub for the university. In the same way, a public library can become a communication hub for its community.
Video conferences with professionals in Hong Kong could be as commonplace as checking out a copy of The Old Man And The Sea. Community calendars that anyone can subscribe to with their home computers. Live blogging local literary events, book signings or special happenings at the local museum. Just off the top of my head.
I’ve even written an article about how independent web workers like myself can get a day’s work done (for free!) at the library. It’s a great place to work, and I think libraries would benefit from advertising this fact to freelancers and independents.
Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, Inc., calls the Mac a “digital hub” which brings together a person’s photos, music, stories, etc. I see the library as doing the same for the people it serves — a community’s “Communication Hub.”
While poo-pooing the Amazon Kindle in January, Mr. Jobs said, “…the fact is that people don’t read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year.”
I read 4 or 5 novels a year, a habit I’ve maintained for the past ten years. In fact, I can tell you where I was living or what my prevailing preoccupation was — other than the book itself — for nearly each one. That’s why I was intreigued by Coudal Partner’s Field Tested Books book. It’s a collection of brief descriptions of time, place and literature that examines the affect of setting on a person’s perception of a given book.
While browsing the book and compiling a reading list, I couldn’t help but remember some of my own experiences in “field testing.” Here are some highlights.
Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson, field tested in Scranton, Pennsylvania
As a student at a Catholic middle school in Scranton, an economically and culturally bankrupt city in the northeastern corner of Pennsylvania, I wasn’t doing much reading. I had developed my very first — and very secret — crush on my best friend’s older sister, Christine.
My world was limited to the distance I could travel on my bike, specifically, my house, the enormous St. Ann’s Church at the top of the hill and Christine’s house at the end of the next block.
In essence, I was the moody 6th grader who kept to himself.
Fr. Bill, a family friend and theology teacher, gave both Christine and me a copy of Bridge to Terabithia, and we saw ourselves in the main characters immediately. She and I would meet on the church grounds, climb a tree and quietly read our books, back-to-back. Later, we’d talk about the passages we had read. Each time, the same tree.
Later that year, her family moved to Detroit. The last time I saw her we were standing in her driveway, a Mayflower moving truck rumbling exhaust into the night air. She hugged me, kissed my cheek (my first kiss) and whispered, just before she pulled away, “See you in Terabithia.” To this day, that book and that moment are inextricable.
The Cider House Rules by John Irving, field tested in Scranton, Pennsylvania
In 1989 I moved to Boston to attend Berklee College of Music. Music was my life throughout high school, and I didn’t do any reading that wasn’t required. That isn’t something I’m proud of, but literature just wasn’t on my radar back then.
The summer after my freshman year I returned to Scranton to work for the summer and catch up with old friends. One night, a buddy of mine introduced me to a writer who had graduated from a local college a year earlier. She and I were inseparable for the next three years.
Horrified by my bookless lifestyle, she handed me The Cider House Rules as a “starting point.” I read it quickly and we talked about it for hours, day after day. As the product of 12 years of Catholic school, I thought I knew where I stood on the abortion issue, which is a major theme of the book.
She was an atheist with a much different perspective. I can say in all confidence that time and location had a significant effect on my perception of and reaction to that book. Had I never left Scranton, I’d have had a very predictible reaction.
However, I had been living in Boston. For the first time in my life, I was not in a parochial school. I befriended people who were far outside the experiences I had up to that point. I was intrigued. I was eager for new perspectives, new experiences, new stories.
She shared with me The Love Poems of May Swensen, John Updike and more.
I owe my love of literature not to my schooling, but to the fact that I moved away from home, to my hunger for experienes other than my own, and to Heather. To this day, I can’t read Cider House without smelling the cheap, head shop incense that she always burned, seeing the record player and stack of LPs in the hallway or hearing the sounds of the plastic Big Wheel that belonged to the kid of the 2nd floor apartment’s tennants rumbling across the wooden porch.
Kafka on the Shoreby Haruki Murakami, field tested en route to Buffalo, New York
Last year my cousin got married in Buffalo. I decided to attend the wedding and bought a copy of Kafka on the Shore from the iTunes Store to listen to on my iPod for the 10 hour drive. Having previously read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and A Wild Sheep Chase, I was eager for more Murakami. At nearly 20 hours, the audiobook would keep me company for the entire journey.
I enjoyed the book immensely, and when I listened to it again, I was surprised at how much of the trip was triggered in my memory. Stopping for lunch just as Kafka’s friend in the library revealed herself to be female; parking at Niagara Falls just after he saw the ghost in his room for the first time; crossing the Sagamore Bridge and looking at flashes of the Cape Cod Canal through the steel girders as Kafka’s mother explains the painting on the shore.
Coudal’s book is the culmination of a great idea. How do one’s experienes affect their reality? I’m glad to have been prompted to consider the answer.
Volvo is racing the C30 with an ethenol engine. With average fuel consumption of 52 m.p.g. and CO2 emissions under 120 grams per kilometre, it’s a very green race car. Cool.
