The first thing I noticed was how incredibly small it was. The last time I was in a library that small was when I was a child or teenager - more than ten years ago. The second thing I noticed was that they have a sizable audio book collection. Thirdly, while meandering through the fiction section my eyes cames to rest on the book Catch-22, by Joseph Heller. This wouldn't have been significant, except that Catch-22 is a book I've been wanting to read for several years, and my meager efforts to locate a copy had been unsuccessful. (Probably because the only place I'd tried to obtain a copy is at the college library, whose lone copy was subsequently classified as "Lost" when I reported that I was unable to locate it on the shelves, and my later ILL request apparently vanished into thin air as I never received a response to it.) I don't have a current public library card, but the city library partners with the college library in that they accept current student ID cards as library cards in the same way that the college library does. I decided to see if they would also accept my alumni college library card as well. They did not.
This led to me requesting a new library card from them. The application process was quick and relatively painless. During the course of my interaction with the librarian, she inquired what my major had been, as I had previously told her I had graduated from the college the year before. I told her my major had been Computer Information Systems, and her response was wholly insignificant.
After she handed me my new library card and inquired if I had any questions (I did not), she handed me a copy of some of the library's policies, and then shared one piece of data about the library with me - namely, that they have a decently-sized video and DVD collection, and it's "different stuff than what is at the video store." I found that statement to be mildly curious, but thanked her for this information and returned to the shelves to retrieve the book that I wanted to check out. I didn't really think any more about this part of the conversation until I was in my car driving home a few minutes later.
As I thought about her words some more, they became even more curious. "Does she offer that information to all new library card holders?", I wondered. "Is their video collection a bragging point of the library? If so, what does that say about the popularity of reading in today's society? Nothing very positive; that's for sure." But then I recalled her query about my major, and started to wonder if those words were based on some assumptions she had made about me based on my age and major. I'm not typical college-age, but I'm still relatively young at age 27. Did she perhaps assume that most young computer nerds have no interest in books, but have a huge interest in movies?
I'll probably never know her reasons for offering that lone piece of information about the library, because I'm not the type to seek her out and ask her at some later date (although the idea has certainly crossed my mind). Regardless of what her exact reasons were, though, I still find her words to be rather discouraging and depressing. There's nothing wrong with a library having a good video collection, and nothing wrong with being proud of a good video collection. But shouldn't the video collection play second fiddle to the book collection? I mean, it is a library, is it not? Isn't there some aspect of their book collection that she could be proud of? Is she in fact more proud of their book collection, but she's resorted to only telling people about the video collection because that seems to be primarily what the majority of patrons are interested in? Or perhaps it's only young patrons that she offers this information to, since they specifically show little interest in books? At any rate, I still think it is sad.
You could argue that I'm overthinking such a tiny portion of our brief conversation, and you'd probably be right. But, it bothered me enough to occupy my thoughts on the drive home and then subsequently a few more times throughout the rest of this weekend. So, I decided if it was consuming my thoughts that much I might as well write about it.
The worst part of the story? Upon arriving home I realized that Catch-22 is a book I have read in the past few years, and it is not the book that I had been trying to locate for the last few years. I had gotten it confused with Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury, the actual book that I had been wanting to read for several years. Explaining how and why I got the books confused is more than what I want to delve into right now, but the good news is that today I discovered that the college library apparently eventually located their copy of this book, and I picked it up tonight after they re-opened their doors.
