Libraries are the original portals.

by Pablo Defendini

Some people wonder: What use are libraries in a future of electronic books? I’m absolutely not one of those people. To dismiss a library as a mere building that houses physical books is to ignore the true soul of the place: the people that transform a library from a place of bricks and codices to a true repository of knowledge and learning, and a vital hotspot on the social heat map for any community—librarians. To wit, one of my fondest memories of the library, from back in my school years, is also probably one of my formative experiences. And there’s nary a printed and bound document in sight (that fetish would come later, oddly enough).

Sometime around 1993 or 1994, I was in high school, Soundgarden‘s Superunknown was busting the speakers out of whatever I used to play music on before iPods came along, and my school library got a computer, some nondescript PC that ran Windows 3.x (those Windows boxen all look the same. However, I vividly remember the sexy sexy Macintosh LC III running System 7 that our chemistry teacher had bought for his classroom with his own cash around the same time). Having come up during elementary playing Oregon Trail on using a Commodore 64, I was perfectly happy to be using the card catalog on the computer to search for titles as opposed to that physical cabinet with its long cumbersome drawers full of cards (yes, I was a clumsy weakling as a teenager. Surprise, surprise, surprise).

Using the computerized card catalog was all well and good: useful, but kinda boring when you’re a kid in study hall. So a couple of us decided to install some computer games on the library machine. I don’t remember which ones, but Myst was probably in the mix somewhere. While we were gathered round the computer fooling with floppies, the head librarian—a normally stern but lovable matron with a penchant for over-enunciating the phrase “Dewey Decimal System”—spied us fooling around with her new, expensive-to-fix, electronimagikal fancy pants punch-card-less wonder of a card catalog. Probably worried that we’d damage the damn thing, she shooed us out of the library, (relatively) loudly berating us for vandalizing school property, or something  to that effect.

Sometime later that week, the assistant librarian walked by as I was once more, uh… searching for a book on the same computer. She stopped, leaned over, and said “Hey, you’re not allowed to install games on this thing, but want to see something really cool?” Intrigued (and possibly rocking a light crush—she was the much younger assistant librarian, and librarians are h4wt, after all), I said “Sure.”

She then proceed to fire up Mosaic and sat down next to me to tell me all about the World Wide Web. She introduced me to search engines (Altavista? Yahoo? ask.com? I barely remember life before Google). She taught me what a boolean search is. To say zomfgwtfbbq is probably an understatement.

I’d been on the Internet before, using BBSes, usenet and such, but on a very casual basis, and at an earlier school library, in middle school. But this was different. Utterly underwhelming by today’s standards, but a brave new world for fifteen-year-old me. Like a country boy on his first visit to the big city, I was enamored, seduced and immediately convinced that I had to go to there. I sometimes quip “the Internet” when people ask me where I’m from, but it’s only half a joke: In 1996 I rented a small pad at Geocities, in 1998 I was part of the neighborhood on ICQ and theglobe.com, and around 2001 I made the leap and put down roots with a place of my own.

To say that that librarian changed my life is an understatement: getting online that early has shaped my career,  my relationships—hell, my understanding of the world. And all it took was a knowledgeable librarian willing to sit down with a kid and drop some of her knowledge on him.