Libraries have always been there for me. Of course I’ll stand up for them!
Who knows how many people are invisible because their stories don’t fit our categories?
In tough times, a librarian is a terrible thing to waste.
Librarians are essential players in the information revolution because they level that field. They enable those without money or education to read and learn the same things as the billionaire and the PhD.
The vast waterfall of history pours down, and a few obituarists fill teacups with the stories.
We are all living history, and it’s hard to say now what will be important in the future. One thing’s certain, though: if we throw it away, it’s gone.
Good librarians are natural intelligence operatives. They possess all of the skills and characteristics required for that work: curiosity, wide-ranging knowledge, good memories, organization and analytical aptitude, and discretion.
We’ll always need printed books that don’t mutate the way digital books do; we’ll always need places to display books, auditoriums for book talks, circles for story time; we’ll always need brick-and-mortar libraries.
Librarians consider free access to information the foundation of democracy.
They seemed to be quiet types, the women and men in rubber-soled shoes. Their favorite word, after literacy, was privacy – for their patrons and themselves.
This is the greatest and most fraught romance of modern society, the marriage between the IT staff and those who depend on them.
What was archaeology to him? It was the opposite of killing things. It was trying to will life back into stuff that had been forgotten and buried for thousands or millions of years. It was not about shards and pieces of bone or treasure; it was about kneeling down in the elements, paying very close attention, and trying to locate a spark of the human life that had once touched that spot there.
Of course. Ask your librarian. Always the right answer.
It seems there was a custom in Ireland at this time of showing obeisance to your king by sucking his nipples. No nipples, you could not be a king.
You can tell the archaeologists, of course, by their photos. The tourists’ photos feature people in front of mountains, terraces, stone structures, sundials. The archaeologists wait until the people move away to take theirs: they want the terrace, the stone wall, the lintel, the human-made thing, all sans humans.
Though I loved the wired world, the new-wave librarians, the avatars and activists, I turned into a dinosaur in that library. I couldn’t help it; I was an old-fashioned writer who loved the ancient books summoned via pneumatic tubes, the archives, the quiet. I had found something rare there: an inexhaustible wonder.
One graduate student told me, “When the Apocalypse comes, you want to know an archaeologist, because we know how to make fire, catch food, and create hill forts,” and I promptly added her to my address book. Knows how to make hill forts – who can say when that will come in handy?
Some of these tools were ingenious, including sets of playing cards for Iraq, Egypt, and Afghanistan – regular fifty-two-card decks, but with images and information about archaeological practices, famous cultural sites, and notable artifacts; the reverse sides could be pieced together to form a map of the most iconic site for each country.
One of the advantages of living in the Ice Age would be that there are not very many people around. You’re constantly moving, and you have to live by your wits. You can’t just have fifteen different kinds of tools, you can’t carry them. And no villages – no village idiots. Imagine a world free of idiots!” Idiots, he liked to point out, “don’t survive in environments with lions.
Bibliomancy? It’s defined for us a little further down: “Divination by jolly well Looking It Up.