Month: September 2014

My First Job

By J P. My very first job was at a library in high school, working as a page, staffing the circulation desk and shelving the history books (920 onward in the Dewey Decimal System). I liked it because it paid better than most of my friends’ jobs, and I didn’t leave smelling like fast food. … Read more

Serendipity is Just Another Example of a Good Librarian

By Rebecca B. My story is one similar to so many working parents these days: my husband and I both work full-time while raising young children. Our parents, our children’s grandparents, live in other states. Since the beginning of storytelling on cave walls, we’ve used written communication to teach our children life lessons, and, now … Read more

More Than Shelves!

By Esther B. 

My college library, the Iwasaki Library at Emerson College, was invaluable both on the physical and digital planes.

Not only was it a place with shelves of books, it was a place to come to study. Yes, you can have quiet study rooms for students. However, they’re much more valuable when you can just reach up and grab a new source. Also, while hunting for one book, or magazine, or article, even just glimpsing the titles of the texts I was passing made me want to stop and grab one and open it–and, when I had more than five minutes, I did.

The library was where we came to do group projects, a place to congregate among the information we needed to complete the assignment. Just being in an atmosphere obviously devoted to thought made us more focused, and maybe even more innovative in our ideas.

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Computing in the Library

By Erin D. I have fond memories of using (even eventually managing) the library computer lab at Notre Dame University, where I was a student in the early ’90s. The lab was one of many services that the Hesburgh Library provided. In those days I used the library to find books I needed for papers; … Read more

A Summer Tradition

By Leah W. After school let out and summer was in swing my mom took me and my sister and brother to the library weekly. She knew how important it was to keep learning, reading, and engaging with new concepts even during summer break. That summer tradition had such an impact on me. I feel … Read more

Through the Library to the Stars

By Jonathan K.

Throughout elementary school, I was a fiend for library books. I was continually at my limit at my school’s library and the local public library branch. I learned about history from biographies, British humor from weird picture books, myself from some great kids’ fiction, and spycraft from anything I could get my hands on.

But one day I stumbled across a book with a big blue planet on the cover: ‘Isaac Asimov’s Library of the Universe: Neptune, the Farthest Giant’. This set me off on a course of discovery that took me through the travels of Voyagers 1 and 2, through the Orion Nebula, beyond the globular clusters orbiting our Milky Way’s center, to the Andromeda Galaxy and beyond.

Read moreThrough the Library to the Stars