the library in the cloud

As a teenager living in the Connecticut suburbs, I wished to have a secret labyrinth to wander through as does Tenar (called Arha, “the Eaten One”) in The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula K. Le Guin. Hers is underground, “like a great dark city, under the hill. Full of gold, and the swords of old heroes, and old crowns, and bones, and years, and silence.” It was built long before anyone remembers, and only she, a High Priestess reborn again and again for centuries, is permitted to navigate its tunnels. She learns to make her way through the tunnels from Thar, another priestess, whom she herself had taught the ways in her previous incarnation. Her well-trained memory and the practice of counting turnings and passings keep her from getting lost:

She was very careful; and this was her place, her own domain. The powers of the dark, the Nameless Ones, would guide her steps here, just as they would lead astray any other mortal who dared enter the Labyrinth of the Tombs.

The closest I have come to having such a domain was as an undergraduate, when I worked at Manuscripts and Archives at Sterling Memorial Library. Among my several duties was to retrieve materials from where they were stored underground so that researchers could peruse them in the reading room upstairs. There was nothing special about those underground rooms and corridors other than that so few people had access to them. I liked being in on the secret of the tunnels under the library.

It is a pleasure to have hidden knowledge—to understand a code, or to have seen what most people haven’t. I felt that pleasure as an undergraduate, playing my part in guarding the knowledge kept on the underground shelves of Manuscripts and Archives. My memories of that time drew me to a profession as a librarian, for which I am training now, in middle age.

My current library work, however, does not involve walking through labyrinths, or along corridors of any kind. Mostly, I work as I have done for years, even before the pandemic: at my desk. In my two years as a student of library and information studies, I’ve been to campus only six or seven times (once more tonight). I’ve never set foot on either of my workplaces, and I’ve met only one of my colleagues face to face. Because I work entirely with digital resources and I don’t know where any of the data is kept, I say that I work in the library in the cloud.

I like the library in the cloud. I can access its many resources without leaving my bedroom. As a librarian there, my job is not about guarding knowledge, but about spreading and creating it. The resources I have helped to create for this library can be accessed from any of the many campuses of the City University of New York—or, for that matter, from the bedrooms, living rooms, kitchens, and (for the lucky ones) home offices of its thousands upon thousands of faculty, staff, and students. And in fact, even my old library of hidden corridors and dusty stacks is now in part in the cloud. Because of its digital library (mainly of images, it seems), researchers no longer rely entirely on undergraduates to fetch materials for them from the underground storage of Manuscripts and Archives—though actually I have not been able to connect to any of these digital resources.

The fragility of digital resources is among the disadvantages of the library in the cloud. Another is its disembodiment, which constitutes a regular challenge for me now that two or three hours each week in my newer library job, I am the person answering questions via the chat reference service. Where are there study rooms I can use? Where do I return my borrowed laptop? I dread these questions and, having no embodied knowledge of the library, I rely on online searchable lists of FAQs to answer them.

During those hours of chat reference, I feel like the inverse of the students Constance A. Mellon wrote about in her article on library anxiety [PDF]. They feared that “asking questions would lead to a revelation of their incompetence”: “I was scared to ask questions. I didn’t want to bother anyone. I also didn’t want them to think I was stupid.” Whereas I, at my desk in the library in the cloud, am afraid that being asked questions will lead to a revelation of my ignorance—or worse, that I will lead a student to a dead end, which I dread like the many deadly dead ends in Tenar’s labyrinth.

There is an antidote to this dread, which I plan to write about for next time. In the meantime, check out “Building an antilibrary: the power of unread books” by Anne-Laure Le Cunff (H/T Matt Finch & Shea in the Catskills), which for reasons I will eventually write about reminds me of “The Library of Babel” by Jorge Luis Borges. And until next time, xox!!