Library Memories, University of Oregon

Yes, yesterday's post was set at the University of Oregon, but focused on the Knight Library. Early in my college career, I thought people were going to the "night" library, which I imagined to be a place for evening study. It sounded reasonable enough, but I was mistaken.

As stated in the previous post, people seemed to use the Knight Library more for study space than for its contents, but there was not only the Knight Library. We also had a Math and Science library. I know, because I worked at both of them.

It was part of my financial aid package. Previously, with no financial aid package, the only campus jobs I had been able to get were all in the dining hall. I was grateful for those jobs, but the libraries were better. Both had great supervisory staff, and I still remember them fondly, but the libraries were easier, more interesting work.

The Math Library was in Fenton Hall, and mainly notable for how very quiet it was. I would find a few books to shelve on the average shift, and I might see someone there once in a month of shifts, but that was it. If I was ever going to be murdered during college, that would have been a good place to do it, but the odds of someone thinking of looking for a victim there seemed low, because that would involve knowing where it was.

The Science Library, in Onyx Bridge Hall, was bigger, newer, and livelier. Those materials were being used all the time. I know because there were always things to shelve, and one of the things that we would do when other things were caught up was check shelves to see if things were in order, and they never were.

There were some books, but I would guess 90 percent of the materials were scientific journals. There were fairly traditional things like The Lancet or The Journal of the American Medical Association, but there were also fun things like The Journal of Irreproducible Results and The Worm Runner's Digest. If those last two don't sound familiar, I had not heard of them before either, but just reading a letter correcting faulty reasoning in a previous issue's article on conjoined twins in gummy bears, well, academic journals don't need to be stuffy.

There was never a lot of time to get caught up in anything, but there were always ideas there. It was during this time that I got into Smithsonian and Psychology Today magazines. It wasn't just the library -- that was helped by a Smithsonian found on a train, and a Psychology Today cover in the campus bookstore that looked interesting. However, it was at the Science Library that I saw the Smithsonian with the cover of Vermeer's Girl with a pearl earring, and one of my coworkers told me no matter who saw the painting they thought they girl looked familiar but could not place her. Now we all just think she looks like Scarlett Johannson.

(It was an excellent article too. The description of View of Delft, and how Proust referenced it in Remembrance of Things Past, was the first thing to make me really start noticing portrayal of light in painting.)

Still, there were three things that came to me in about a week's time that probably made the biggest impression. Two were books that came through, one on a cart and one at the desk.

The first was Robert Bakker's The Dinosaur Heresies. Based on the eye-catching headline I read the first part, that all of our ideas of the duck-billed dinosaurs (hadrosaurs) were predicated on a damaged jawbone found for the first specimen, and finding correct specimens did not change that. If Bakker overreached on deciding that dinosaurs were warm-blooded, the ideas on shallow seas patterns of extinction still seemed brilliant to me.

Then on a book cart I found The Encyclopaedia of New and Rediscovered Animals: From the Lost Ark to the New Zoo and Beyond by Karl Shuker, focusing on animals discovered since 1901. I hadn't realized how new some species were. Obviously they existed, but we didn't know about them.

The third book was shown to me, which is why I don't remember the title. An older gentleman showed me a passage that referred to finding archaeological evidence of maize in India before Columbus visited the Americas, where it was commonly believed to have been discovered. After finding this article, I'm pretty sure the man was Carl L. Johannessen:

http://www.econ.ohio-state.edu/jhm/arch/maize.html

Anyway, the way these worked together, coming so close together, was that I concluded that science must be a constant process of learning that you were wrong. Because of that, scientists should be remarkably humble people, though I'm not sure investigation would bear that out.

Bakker may have gotten some things wrong, but he changed the way people were thinking so they could figure it out. Jared Diamond did an amazing job with Guns, Germs and Steel, and he inspired many people with it. The word is that he got some things wrong too, which is not terribly surprising considering how many different disciplines he touched on, but the reason people can point to mistakes is because he took a risk and got them thinking.

Actually, I think one of the people Diamond inspired was Charles Mann, who wrote 1491, and if you think that trying to correct entrenched wrong ideas is easy, especially in anthropology, you need to read his book. You are wading into a pit of vipers, but it's valuable, and inspirational.

All of those things inspire me. There are so many incidents where I remember the time and place of discovering a book so clearly, because it was an important moment and the library made it happen. Libraries bring many books together, and they bring the humans together with the books. Together there is the sharing of knowledge, but it is not static. It can kindle other ideas, lead to new quests for knowledge, and even change us as people.

That's what I will try and drive home tomorrow.