Indpendence, paranoia, and triumph

A young girl, maybe 11, came to the reference desk looking for information about Lou Gehrig a little bit ago. I found her a book, but the phone was ringing and there was another patron waiting in line, so I asked if she knew "how the numbers on the books work." She smiled and said she did, so I wrote the call number and the first to words of the title for her on a scrap of paper. Maybe two minutes later, as I was walking the stacks with an adult who didn't understand the Dewey decimal system, I saw the girl leaving with the correct book.

It makes sense, I guess, that almost no adult who comes in here can find things, but children can. When I was in elementary school, our librarian drilled into us how to find our own books, and they probably do even more now than they did in the 1980s, and probably did so less before I was in school. Today's kids naturally have a leg up on cataloging, just like they do with computers, by virtue of immersion at a young age. Regardless, it's neat to see kids be independent.

Sure, that same independence will likely manifest itself in a few years as snottiness, and she'll come back in here dressed all in black, accompanied by loud friends who won't get off their cell phones and only want to hang out in the computer lab all day leeching illegally-obtained music from the internet and glaring at the 40-somethings for no reason, but not now. Now she can find her own books, and that understanding won't go away, even if she does turn obnoxious. As long as she wants to read something, she can find it, and be afforded the privacy one has when the library staff don't know your business, don't know what you're reading in the back corner.

As a teenager I spent a lot of time ate the library, but I never interacted with the librarians at all. If I'd had too, I'd have read far less. In junior high at least half of the reading I did was about UFOs, because I was going to uncover the cover-up. If a librarian had been a necessary part of my book search, it would have just made me paranoid, and if they couldn't find what I wanted it would have been nothing less than proof that they were part of the cover-up. Then I'd be afraid of libraries, and I wouldn't have a job today. Also I wouldn't have first crack at the new John Scalzi books, and that would just be sad.