Role of the Library:

Looking around the library you see a goldmine of texts. Rich sources of information and inspiration for anyone. In the Peters reading, he describes archives as “a mausoleum of documents”. Despite the slightly morbid nature of that analogy, I like the idea that the role of a library/archive is to preserve memory, information and inspiration in beautiful dusty permanence.

How will I use the library:

Something Dan said today about needing to engage with a reading in a physical, tactile way really struck a chord with me. He says that he doesn’t feel like he’s read something unless he can hold it and highlight it. I’ve struggled in the past with reading off a computer monitor; it just doesn’t seem to follow the right avenues in my brain.  This semester, I’d like to try borrowing books from the library as opposed to just using the online archives, and see if that helps me to engage with the text on a different level.

Here are two pics and a video that I took in the library:

I just thought this one was kind of funny and ironic because to me it seems the whole point of a library is that it has books, and yet in this particular library the vast majority of the people in there were on the computers. If that doesn’t say something about the changing media then I don’t know what does.

Again, the absence of books from this image kind of paints a picture of a library where no one reads books. Although, it could go the other way and appear to represent a library where all the books are in use.

For me, this video is about the slightly daunting nature of libraries. Just the fact that they contain so many pages of information kind of freaks me out a bit. It gets me thinking about if everything on the internet got written down on paper, how many libraries would it fill up?