4 ms·
Going into university libraries fills me with awe and purpose. Seeing a shelf of curated textbooks on a topic (eg non Newtonian fluid flow), gives me a feeling
by j7ake 2y ago
Going into university libraries fills me with awe and purpose.
Seeing a shelf of curated textbooks on a topic (eg non Newtonian fluid flow), gives me a feeling of depth. Each book represents years or decades of an authors life. And they condensed that wisdom into a textbook that could be consumed in a semester.
I would love to be a Knuth type character working in library and writing textbooks.
- musicale 2y agoUnfortunately many universities are storing or downsizing their collections. On one hand it seems logical that public domain books can readily be kept in digital form without taking up shelf space. On the other hand, the experience of browsing and serendipity that many find beneficial will be lost.
- timr 2y agoYeah, there's a physical copy of my dissertation somewhere in the library system of my old school [1]. On a whim, I went to find it a few years after graduating, and it was (is?) in a special section of the library where there's nothing but shelves and shelves of old dissertations, going back for ~30 years (older than that, and they only have microfilm, IIRC). Thousands of black-bound volumes, with obscure titles on every possible subject. Being in that space gave me exactly the feeling you describe. Each one is an artifact of years of a person's life, in book form. I guess that's true of any book, really, but it feels particularly acute for something like a dissertation. Every one of those unread volumes was a moment of long-awaited celebration (literally commencement) for a person. Humbling. [1] I had to pay for that copy, but I digress. It doesn't kill the romance. I'm a sucker.