Anemones

“Sea-Anemones” from The sea and its wonders, by M. and E. Kirby, via Google Book Search

I enjoyed Ryan Deschamps’ post earlier this month, The Crux of the Biscuit: Do I Believe in Libraries?, in which Deschamps asks “Will telling my son to go to the library be more effective for his life-long-learning than telling him to look it up on the net?”

While I think we can all predict that the answer will be “YES!”, I liked the way he broke down the benefits of the library for children, and really for all of us.

Deschamps’ post was sent in motion when his son wanted to know more about the Hoover Dam. Of course they could find stuff on the internets, but instead he told his son that they should look it up at the library. (Maybe a good move; today, I’m getting this (NSFW? naked-yet-covered-dude) as the most “interesting” photo on Flickr tagged “hooverdam”. Educational for a three year old in all kinds of ways, the web is).

We had a similar conversation at our house recently when Luke (almost five years old) wanted to know more about sea anemones, particularly what they eat. My first impulse was to reach for Wikipedia, but then I remembered that Luke and I had talked about dead-tree encyclopedias recently, so I told him that this would be a perfect thing to look up in an encyclopedia.

I had intended to look it up with him in an encyclopedia at our public library, but then Shanon brought him by my library one afternoon, and we took a walk through the reference section.

World Book was disappointing; it may have narrowly answered our question, but it didn’t have a photo. Britannica wasn’t much better (though I think it did have a photo). So we headed off toward the Qs, and did much better with our search there (incidentally, sea anemones eat zooplankton and algae).

After that, Luke, who can’t read yet, was getting a bit excited about finding encyclopedias, and was picking out every multi-volume set in the reference section with index letters or numerals on the spine:

“Let’s look for anemones in this encyclopedia!”

“Luke, that’s the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. It wouldn’t cover anemones. Also, it doesn’t have pictures.”

As Deschamps said of his son in his post,

At this library visit, his learning was not restricted to a specific “information need” but developed into an information haven, where all the neurons in his head would snap, crackle and pop as he went from resource to resource.

Right on. The mere phrase “information need” makes me twitch and remember all the bullshit my library school professors used to spout about “information,” whatever that is. While I don’t know that I would put it the same way Michael Stephens does when he talks about the library and the “heart,” I think Michael is still getting at something important: a good library makes you feel a bit more alive, a bit more connected to people and ideas across time, a bit more aware of how much there is to know.

Another thing that is important to me about taking my kids to the library is the fact that there is nothing to buy there, and no one trying to sell us anything. It’s one place that it is actually difficult to spend money. In the summer, we can always go outside, but in the winter, the library is practically the only free activity available to us outside the house.