John Miedema

A Librarian’s Guide to Getting Lost

13 November 2007 3 Comments

The title of this post is the imaginary title of a book, written by some inspired librarian. It could be suffixed with “(in the fiction shelves)” because if the book existed it would be about joyfully losing yourself in the reading of great fiction. So why the imaginary title? Yesterday a similar real title caught my eye: A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit. Anna Mills, a nature writer, posted a review of the book. She says:

Solnit’s title suggests we might also want our schemas to break down and we might not always know how to let go of them and get lost. Can we catalogue the various ways of getting lost as we might catalogue songbirds? The paradox feels whimsical, mocking, alluring. We can tell the book will hover between the urge to know and the urge not to know, between rationality and mystery.

Now what does this have to do with librarians? Most of the time, librarians are interested in helping people find their way. They make prodigious efforts to classify information, develop web technologies to search for information, and anything else humanly possible to increase access to information. Morville, a information architect with library training, recently published a book called Ambient Findability. Like Morville, the passion of many librarians is findability. Did your patron find what he or she was looking for? Thank goodness for librarians.

Still, there is more to librarianship than helping people find their way. You might not find the librarian who authored this book behind a computer terminal, but maybe in the fiction shelves. When it comes to reading fiction, or an inspiring work of non-fiction, the librarian’s job is to help people lose themselves to a good story. Quoting Solnit, “Never to get lost is not to live”.

Have a good day.

3 Comments »

Edward Vielmetti said:

good book! here’s what I wrote about it:

http://vielmetti.typepad.com/vacuum/2005/12/rebecca_solnit_.html

there’s some joy in wandering around without a map of the territory letting the things that you see guide you to where you want to go. walking through an unfamiliar library and not looking at the signs can be very enlightening.

# 13 November 2007 at 9:32 pm

Anna Mills said:

I love the idea of applying libraries to Solnit and Solnit to libraries. Could the librarian have a shadow doppelganger, an antilibrarian who leads people astray in the stacks until they are transformed by the unexpected? I could imagine such a figure in Borges or Kafka or Garcia Marquez. Or Dostoevsky: The Underground Librarian! Actually, such a librarian could be a kind of shamanic figure for slow reading, no? Leading people away from the electronic speed search into the dust and oddities and beauties.

# 14 November 2007 at 1:01 am