Special library is a legitimate term for libraries that are dedicated to specific topics. I worked in a special library at an agricultural experiment station many years ago. The word “special” applied to this library in other ways than as an abbreviated way of saying “specialized.”
I replaced an assistant librarian who had made a career of making the library inaccessible. Librarians like this are usually referred to as “gatekeepers.” This woman made her life easy by intimidating people out of using the library. She spent her life stamping date cards for distributing journals to the faculty.
I was told that she was such a successful dragon that staff and faculty drove four hours to the main library to avoid her. The agricultural experiment station library was a branch of a state university library. According to hearsay, she skewered the graduate students with a fixed stare that made them feel like bugs on a pin.
My philosophy was to make people, all people, welcome in the library. I have this strange attitude that libraries are supposed to be used. My ideas are often better suited to public libraries than academic libraries. Unlike a few librarians I’ve known, I don’t think the books are better off on the shelves where no one will hurt them.
My next task was to computerize and streamline the magazine distribution process. Spending my day stamping date cards was about as interesting as watching the grass grow. Fortunately, I had a computer background and creating a database to make the materials accessible (new and amazing concept) was right up my alley.
I moved my desk so that it no longer functioned as a barricade, blocking anyone entering the door from proceeding to the rest of the library. I alphabetized by title the current magazines (technically journals), which made them findable by non-librarian mortals.
Staff and faculty actually entered the library and (gasp) picked up magazines and newspapers to sit down and read. I was extremely pleased. Graduate students came into the library and worked on research. The library was becoming a library instead of a fortress of solitude.
There was a problem with my desk (we didn’t have the tall circulation desk like in most libraries) being located in the main room of the library. When my computer is especially stubborn, I tend to curse it in French. One day, as I was quietly cursing the computer, I noticed one of the African graduate students smiling.
I asked him tentatively, “Do you speak French?” He nodded and grinned at me. He was from Burkina Faso (formerly Upper Volta) and quite fluent in French. Although I was nonplussed, I had broken the ice. I cannot remember his name any longer, but we got along very well. Between French and English, we managed to communicate.
The original librarian of the special library was an extremely nice man who had died suddenly of a heart attack. I never met him, but I often heard his praises. He had known where everything was. This was both good and bad. The collection was varied and not catalogued in any traditional manner. The librarian had over time memorized the collection and where everything was located.
Although the history of the library was interesting, it wasn’t helpful. The library section of the building had five or six rooms and went all the way back to the boiler room. The boiler room resembled an anteroom to hell and had once had a snake in it.
Finding a needle in a haystack would have been easy in comparison. The secret, sacred truth of libraries is, if a book isn’t in the catalog and shelved, you might as well not have it. To get from point “A” to point “B” was going to take a whole lot of work.
I was going to have to inventory the collection—roughly 10,000 volumes, mostly journals. The books or monographs, to use library terminology, were catalogued and roughly in order. The main library was responsible for cataloging them, for which I was profoundly grateful.
