Life at Library

Growing up, I spent a lot of time in libraries because my mother works as a librarian at the no.1 university in our state. The job seems menial in our community or country but, it’s quite a complicated space. However, I always thought my mother had a cool job.

I remember my early visits to the university library in the early 2000s, rooms piled up with huge books, periodicals, and journals written in many places. I later learned that periodicals were anything released periodically and were journals a collection of research papers in a specific field. In high school, during the holidays I used to go with my mother and just browse through different sections I remember looking through the journals and looking at complicated texts written I vaguely remember reading about research on bacteria used to make cheese, something about immunology, something about space research none of which I could understand but, I’d just look through the pages. And mother used to explain a great deal of library stuff to me—things like OPAC, database organization, university access to journals, etc.

Advancing education through college, I wasn’t that smart or great at academics but, I always wanted to go to med school however, did not get through to any great schools, so I continued studying for the entrance exams throughout my undergrad still trying my luck. I used to spend hours and hours reading medical textbooks in the library (I still didn’t make it tho, lol). I used to source books from different libraries across the city, Slowly I moved to Anna Centenary, a public library that had more books and huge study spaces. I used to go as early as possible to get spots because it used to get crowded. It was a great time.

I never really appreciated my mother and libraries as much until coming to the US. A librarian here is such a huge deal. They are equal to professors and are respected greatly. I had 3 professors last semester who were librarians! Today, I was at the NYU library attending an info session and went to collect a book later on. While walking through the racks of text I see that the lights are sensor operated, books are self-checkout, you can request them online and they would be available to you at the desk, you can even request a scanned copy of the texts. However, when you look at the size of the library it’s almost as big as Anna University and probably smaller than Anna Centenary!

It somehow makes me sad that my mother could not advance so greatly in her career. Apart from the super cool things that she does, she still arranges books on the shelves, deals with so much paperwork (although everything could be made digital) walks around the library, turns off the fans and lights, and lock each study room.

It makes me want to question things as simple as having lights operated through sensors and shifting to more digitized, updated content. There’s so much physical labor and very little knowledge work. It just makes me very sad.