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Jan. 27th, 2011
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Jan. 27th, 2011 06:35 pmLeave the libraries alone. You don't understand their value..
Two things occurred to me while reading this. First, Pullman's arguments against the bidding process sounded very much like arguments that can be made against the current process of obtaining scientific funding. Second, his arguments about the availability of books in the public library is also an argument against libraries not housing their books in closed stacks. Of the many things that bother me about the UvA library system, one of the biggest is that there are so few public stacks for browsing. In Madison, I found so many of my books, for pleasure reading, for onomastic research, for philosophical and mathematical research related to my courses, by serendipity, because they were located next to other books I was interested in. This is one of the benefits of arranging books by topic: You find things that you would otherwise never find because you don't know they exist. If you don't know they exist, the odds that you'll find them in the library catalog are slim (not impossible, but unlikely).
Two things occurred to me while reading this. First, Pullman's arguments against the bidding process sounded very much like arguments that can be made against the current process of obtaining scientific funding. Second, his arguments about the availability of books in the public library is also an argument against libraries not housing their books in closed stacks. Of the many things that bother me about the UvA library system, one of the biggest is that there are so few public stacks for browsing. In Madison, I found so many of my books, for pleasure reading, for onomastic research, for philosophical and mathematical research related to my courses, by serendipity, because they were located next to other books I was interested in. This is one of the benefits of arranging books by topic: You find things that you would otherwise never find because you don't know they exist. If you don't know they exist, the odds that you'll find them in the library catalog are slim (not impossible, but unlikely).