Last weekend, J and I sought respite from the heat by visiting the main branch of the Boston Public Library at Copley Square, where we toured Torn in Two, an exhibit of maps, photographs, and other items commemorating the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War. The exhibit itself provided much to look at, and as did the library’s historic McKim Building.
I spent a lot of time at the Boston Public Library during my first year of graduate studies at Boston College, when I had an academic scholarship and plenty of time to do research. Whereas the main library’s modern Johnson Building contains the circulating collection and is popular with general readers, families, and folks looking to borrow books, the half of the library I frequented was the non-circulating research library in the historic McKim Building.
During my first year at BC, the McKim Building was undergoing major renovations, so you couldn’t enter the building directly. Instead, you had to enter the Johnson Building then wind your way through several back rooms and corridors until you found yourself in a room with classical murals on the ceiling where you’d search the research library’s catalogue on microfilm: one bank of microfilm readers containing the first half of the alphabet, the other the second.
After you’d written the call numbers of the books you wanted on book request slips, you’d deliver these to a window in the Abbey Room, find a seat in the Bates Hall reading room, and then wait for your books to be delivered from the hidden stacks where only library staff could go.
Now, everything is different from those “old days” when I was in grad school in the early 1990s. Now you can enter the McKim Building directly, where a grand staircase flanked by lions greets you.
Now the research library is included in the main online catalogue, eliminating the need for microfilm searches and paper request slips since you can place a hold online. The Delivery Desk is no longer in the Abbey Room, both the Johnson and McKim Buildings offer free wifi, and even Bates Hall has Ethernet outlets for wired Internet access.
Given all the hours I spent in Bates Hall surrounded by stacks of dusty books taking notes in a paper notebook, it still seems strange–almost sacrilegious–to see people with laptops surfing the Internet as if the McKim Building were just another wifi hotspot.
Although it would be infinitely easier to do research at the BPL these days–how much faster it is to type your searches into a computer rather than scrolling through microfilm!–I’m glad to have experienced the McKim Building back in the “old days” when it felt like a secret storehouse of dusty treasures available only to the patient few willing to do a little digging.
As much as I love my Kindle, laptop, and the ease of online database searches, I still hold a certain nostalgia for dusty stacks, card catalogues, and even microfilm machines. As much as I enjoy new technologies and new ways of doing research, the old ones had a deliberate slowness that forced you to appreciate them. I guess when it comes to libraries and technology, I (like the nation during the Civil War) am Torn in Two.
Click here for more photos from the Boston Public Library’s McKim building, or click here for photos from “Torn in Two: The 150th Anniversary of the Civil War,” which is on view at the Boston Public Library at Copley Square through December, 2011. Enjoy!
Hoarded Ordinaries 
Jul 31, 2011 at 1:04 pm
What a gorgeous and majestic place, sure to inspire studious thoughts.
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Jul 31, 2011 at 2:49 pm
It’s a remarkable building: a gem from an era when public buildings were showcases, not grimly institutional.
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Jul 31, 2011 at 2:12 pm
I’ve been thinking about the way life used to be while reading this entry. My laptop is a tool I use everyday for work and to catch up with emails,news etc..
But there was a time when people gathered at cafes not to work or type out those emails but rather to chat. Chatting at a cafe has become an anomaly nowadays, in my earlier years it was all people did. Cafes, bookstores, supermarkets, art galleries etc.. were all social spaces back then where people gather to meet others.
I often chuckle when I see a couple walking down the street each with a cellphone taped to their ear talking to someone else. Guess I’m nostalgic for those days when people engage with each other, walking together hand in hand, sharing their little corner of the earth as lovers.
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Jul 31, 2011 at 2:55 pm
This reminds me of a realization I had walking through the Public Garden several years ago. Looking around me, I realized I was the only person who was actually alone with my thoughts. Everyone around me was either talking on a cell phone, talking with a companion, or plugged into an iPod. Even a homeless fellow pushing a shopping cart had a radio balanced atop his belongings, blaring music.
Social engagement is a great thing…but why do we now have to be constantly, continuously engaged? Is the span of a public park really too far to travel without calling or texting someone, or without plugging into our favorite music?
The BPL used to be a church-like space where you could tune out the rest of the world in order to study and do research. Now you can check your email, Facebook, and Twitter there. I’m not entirely convinced this is an improvement.
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Jul 31, 2011 at 6:13 pm
Your post reminds me of my favorite desks on floor 4 1/2 at my university’s library. Not that many people went back to those stacks, and when I visited them last year for the first time since 1979, the books appeared to be in the same locations, and I was the only person in the stacks.
I’d come there after dinner and study, fall asleep within a half hour of arrival with my head on my hands, wake up when my hands would lose all feeling, and study thereafter until the library closed. It was a good system. Something about the close surroundings of dusty books and a low ceiling and the humming fluorescent lights — all very comforting and conducive to sleep and, heck, to some reading and studying, too.
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Aug 1, 2011 at 12:39 pm
There’s something about a quiet carrel in a lonely library corner! Maybe, in retrospect, that’s what felt missing at the library this time: it felt too crowded, more like a Starbucks than a library.
On the one hand, it was great to see so many people in Bates Hall on a Saturday afternoon: it was a hot day, and it’s a lovely place to beat the heat. And having relied upon library wifi on family visits to Ohio, I can appreciate the convenience of having Internet access in such a lovely location.
But on the other hand, I remember spending long, lonely hours in Bates Hall, when you probably could get away with sleeping there. So the difference felt strange, like the place I knew had been replaced with something else.
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