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[greebsnarf]

I've been thinking about libraries, likely because I've been working at one for the past year.  So I've been trying to figure out what a library is.

Of course my naive assumption has always been that a library is "a place where books are that you can borrow." For various reasons this definition is obviously not sufficient or correct.

A better

Comments

[greebsnarf]

"Interpret" is a new word for me so I'm not confident I'm getting the full impact of your meaning, and I'm not comfortable using it in a sentence myself. But I'll try, and then you can tell me what it means

[greebsnarf]

[1] This is a whole other topic, but I'll mention it because it's incredibly important to me: a lot of people decide that the increasingly many layers of structure afforded by modern tech means that the structure doesn't matter, or that there's no strong paradigm in the structure. This is dangerous bullshit that hand-waves away the fact that we are human, with finite time, imperfect access to information, permeable resolve in our intention, and susceptible to serendipity. If two books are next to each other on a shelf, that matters, no matter how many user-contributed tag clouds and unmoderated comments are attached to them in the online catalog.

[doombird]

I think you are absolutely right here. It's an often-encountered thought that librarians, in their (relatively new) role as information guides (as opposed to information guardians), should be perfectly impartial, helping people along their path to knowledge without influencing their course

[reverendjmg]

I like how, in my mother's mythology, there's a universal library called the Hall of Akashic Records where the stories of every moment of every person's life are stored. This is, by your definition, sort of a museum because each life-story is an object of study itself, and yet it's also necessary to help people learn what things in that life are about. Maybe it's both the archetypal Library and the archetypal Museum.

[greebsnarf]

Hmm, yeah, this seems important. I think the definitions must blur badly when you suppose infinite storage space, infinite time to use the collection, and perfect information access; somewhere in those definitions there's a strong assumption of non-godhood.

[doombird]

I concur. If both had infinite space, access and time, you might find that both museums and libraries were strikingly similar creatures, on account of both of them would pretty much be Everything.

[doombird]

Given infinite space, access and time, I'm pretty sure that everything would be Everything, and we wouldn't need to have this conversation.

Continuing, if everything were Everything, then David Bowie would also be Everything, and therefore we would all be David Bowie. I am liking where this is going.