Stacks' Appeal

Computer technology is an invaluable supplement for research, but it becomes inefficient when it is used as a substitute for the hands-on investigation of the stacks. In any large, old library, there are unknown quantities of printed materials that cannot be found in electronic catalogs. Some of them were missed during the shift from cards to databases; others were never cataloged at all.

Sometimes librarians think a book that hasn’t been checked out in decades is seldom used. But many books are consulted in the stacks without being borrowed; if those books are not there, they will have to be obtained by more labor-intensive and costly methods. Most of my discoveries as a researcher come from the efficiency of being able to spend 10 seconds glancing at the contents of nearby books instead of having to make an elaborate and time-consuming plan to track down tangential leads. —Thomas H. BentonStacks’ Appeal (Chronicle)

Well, of course, if you’re lucky enough to have access to the Harvard Stacks, the internet can’t duplicate all the resources available to you. But for the rest of us, the internet is pretty convenient. Still, Benton’s worries are well-phrased:

Many entering students come from nearly book-free homes. Many have not read a single book all the way through; they are instead trained to surf and skim. Teachers increasingly find it difficult to get students to consult printed materials, and yet we are making those materials even harder to obtain. Online journal articles are suitable for searching and extraction, but how conducive is a computer for reading a novel?

Of course, fretting about ye goode olde dayes won’t help our students, who can’t help it that they were born into a digital generation.

3 thoughts on “Stacks' Appeal

  1. In my cataloging classes, we called what Mike’s talking about “serendipitous discovery,” and were taught to classify books to encourage it by checking to see what books were already shelved in the general area where the book we were classifying would be. We were also taught to add plenty of cross-references, in order to add different access points to a book that only has a single physical location. Modern automated catalogs make this even easier, and I’m pretty sure cataloging has evolved since I last did it 10 years ago; even then, we were adding enhancements in the online catalog to aid access. It’s not like academic librarians are unaware that they’re now serving a digital generation, after all. ;-)

    However, Millennial undergrads aren’t the only population that uses an academic library. With “non-traditional” student enrollment up across the board, not all undergrads are in the digital generation, and might prefer to use the library as something other than a coffee shop and computer lab. And grad students, faculty, and even staff use the library too.

    I grant that most faculty and grad students are using interlibrary loan and visiting other libraries in addition to browsing the stacks, because unless they go to a school that has a specialized library for their field, chances are the library won’t have *every* item they need. But there’s something about seeing a book with others that are somewhat, but not exactly, related. It can inspire ideas and relationships that might not otherwise be noticed, and those relationships can be followed up on, immediately, through indexes and bibliographies that are usually far more comprehensive than what you’re likely to find online. That’s the kind of thing that leads to great research for scholars who can’t just change their topic because there aren’t enough books about it in the library.

    Of course, I’m triply biased in this case because a) I think “Thomas Benton,” whoever he is, is a wonderful writer, and I nearly always agree with him; b) I’m an ex-librarian and still get caught up in library issues; and c) for a couple of years I’ve been working on a personal project related to my paperback-collecting hobby that I just couldn’t pursue if my institution’s library didn’t have a major collection of vintage paperbacks and the hard-to-find reference materials that necessarily accompany such a collection. And I’ve found most of them by browsing, because the access points aren’t always where I would have put them. :-)

    Like Benton, I’m not a Luddite; I work in IT, for Pete’s sake. Like everybody else these days, I go to the Internet for most of my information needs. But I think there are some areas where books have it all over computers, and in-depth research is one of them. Reading in the bathtub is another, but that’s beside the point. ;-)

  2. Yes, Mike, in every class when I talk about research, I make it a point to specify the knowledge-gathering process that involves actually walking to the area of the library that contains books on the subject that interests you, and scanning the tables of contents and the index of books on the shelf one by one, to see whether they’re worth collecting and bringing to a table.

    One of the problems with the materiality of books is that they have only a single physical location, so that limits the number of juxtapositions that can encode meaning. If you don’t happen upon the one specific location of the book, you’re going to miss all the other relationships that that specific position offers. And since most undergraduates don’t really need to find a specific book — they can easily change their thesis statement in order to account for whatever sources they do happen to find — the skill of information tracking (which you and I really didn’t start learning until grad school) becomes that much more remote.

    Still, there is plenty we can do to make sure that they maximize the usefulness of the online information-gathering strategies that most of them developed during high school.

  3. But Benton’s argument isn’t about whether the internet can “duplicate” library resources, or whether the internet is “convenient,” and the class-based swipe at Harvard is unfair: he’s noting that the informational architecture of library stacks offer a way of negotiating textual resources that’s very different from an internet search. My experience at various libraries, though they were hardly Harvard-quality, has been much like Benton’s: looking for one book in the stacks, I’d come across another, or thumb through the works cited at the back of one that looked more recent to find other foundational texts. The materiality — the physicality — of library space lends itself to relationships (juxtapositions, contiguities) that are qualitatively different than what you might find on the internet, and in embracing the vast sweep and laser focus of resources available online, we shouldn’t lose sight of the value of those physical spatial and social relationships.

    Of course, my inclination to agree with Benton might also come out of the fact that my mom was a librarian. :-)

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