Ready or not, here I come…

Ray Bradbury once said “You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” As a book nerd, student librarian, and global citizen, I think about that quote almost daily.

And as a student librarian, I’m learning that there is yet another tactic – make the books unfindable.

Which brings to mind another favourite quote of mine, this one from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, where a classic petty bureaucrat is trying to explain to lead character Arthur Dent that he should have known his house was to be torn down…

“But the plans were on display…”
“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
“That’s the display department.”
“With a flashlight.”
“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”

That’s not to say that librarians are hiding books behind fake signs and physical obstacles, but among the issues caused by chronic underfunding of libraries, post-secondary institutions, public schools, and other institutions is a backlog in the cataloguing and processing of materials for accessibility and use.

All that to say that I was pretty happy with the work a colleague and I have done with organizing a collection of print ephemera that includes over 700 items, from business cards to posters.

Together with a finding aid, these materials will soon become available for researchers and artists and print historians… “discoverable” as they say in librarian circles.

Because even though there’s a bit of Indiana Jones with any research project using archives and special collections, we don’t want any active hiding. When a researcher yells the research equivalent of “ready or not, here I come!” the answer we want to be yelling back is “come on in, here I am!”

Happy finding!

– Winston