Thoughts on five million books

On the surface, librarians are people who venerate books, who understand their value and their power. They wouldn't be librarians if they didn't care. Part of the reason I wanted to be a librarian is that I have always believed that books, and information, have the power to change people's lives--not only believed that but known it, instinctively. But at the same time, I wonder if librarians' daily exposure to books in such large quantities also breeds a kind of apathy about them. That is definitely becoming the case for me. The University of Alberta library, where I work, has one of the largest library collections in Canada: over 5 million books, one and a half million maps, almost 4 million items on microform, subscriptions to almost 50,000 journals and magazines. Every time I arrive at, or leave, my office, I walk through a maze of uncatalogued material--books, magazines, economic reports, maps, novels, many of them in languages I don't recognize--and a part of me wonders, Why are we bothering? Once a librarian pores over these things to catalogue them, what are the chances that another person will look at them, ever? Don't we already have something in the collection that would serve just as well? I could pick up an economic report on Tuvalu and take it with me, and no one would ever be the wiser. (Not that I would ever do such a thing--I am speaking philosophically.)

When I first started working, the way I found my way back to my own office was by watching for the big stack of boxes labelled "German Monos." (As in monographs, not mononucleosis.) It has since disappeared, presumably into the library at large, but some of the romance of spending one's life among such a great, unreadable mass remains. The German Monos represented what is best about libraries to me: information that is mysterious, maybe incomprehensible even, but comforting in its very existence, its accessibility. I will never lose interest in the library's contents: "the translation of every book in all languages, the interpolations of every book in all books," as Borges says. But that sense of romance has become tempered a bit, weakened by apathy, by the knowledge that an infinite library can contain one perfectly relevant book, but also infinity minus one irrelevant books. When you have 5 million books, what do you need any particular one for? Of course, that's not productive thinking. Once you head down that path, where do you stop? We have to keep believing that more is always better. Otherwise we're lost.