EdBoard: Where’s the love for libraries?

By The Tartan Editorial Board

Editorials featured in the Forum section are solely the opinions of their individual authors.

*Courtesy of Wikimedia Creative Commons via Dllu*

Though we go to his namesake university, Andrew Carnegie was never really a school guy. The magnate funded the construction of one measly technical college while using the rest of his fortune to build a couple thousand libraries everywhere from New Zealand to North Dakota. Our campus is just across the train tracks from the flagship Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, but how often do we really utilize this resource?

The conversation of the Editorial Board this week was tending toward libraries, both Carnegie and regular. Publisher Hailey Cohen, who works at Sorrells library, taught us all a thing or two about our school libraries. We thought we should disseminate this information further. For instance, did you know that every major has both a specific librarian and an online guide to help with research? And that you can check out not only chargers from the libraries, but also iPads? We sure as heck don’t, something that made us realize how relatively little we know about actually using the tools our libraries offer.

Because even though many of us are library enthusiasts, we tend to use them as study areas and nothing more. Most of us had never even checked out a book from a school library. And honestly, why would you need to? Everybody effectively carries a library around in their backpack these days, and with a quick Google search most resources are pretty quickly indexable.

This, of course, is not true of all of us. Of note were the humanities majors, who were eager to talk about all the cool books they’ve checked out of the library recently (some for classes, some for fun). Some of us also have used the resources offered by the library (did you know they carry CDs and magazines?), and one of us lamented the loss of bookshelf space in the libraries to create more room for study pods and whiteboards.

But even though many of us have had little interaction with our school’s libraries, we felt it was a shortcoming of our own habits more than anything. Have we lost something to the internet? With the vast amount of Quizlet problem sets, lecture notes from professors at other schools, and YouTube videos, it’s almost expected that you can find an online problem set that’s practically the same as your own homework. But in doing this, you’re losing the opportunity to parse through a textbook and piece together the information by yourself. It’s tedious, sure, but sometimes it’s better not to have the answer right away. More critically, we’ve lost the romantic potential of dropping a heavy stack of books in front of your crush and bashfully trying to pick them up in a busy hallway. What ever happened to dramatically flipping through a history text on vampires to learn more about that mysterious classmate of yours in biology?

Maybe that’s not exactly a universal experience, but there’s something classically collegiate about physical books. More generally, there’s something nostalgic and fun about the aesthetic of old academia, and it’s something we sometimes miss with our school’s STEM tendencies. One member of the EdBoard commented that relative to other universities, parts of ours resemble the corporate campus of a tech company more than anything.

There’s nothing wrong with doing work on a laptop in a fluorescently lit room with floor-to-ceiling whiteboards, and most of us don’t actually need to check out books for our classes. But libraries are far from obsolete. They’re a vital fixture of our pedagogical ecosystem that we all ought to know a thing or two about, even if your homework is mostly code. So next time you feel like taking a study break, check out the stacks in Sorrells, Hunt, or Mellon. It may have been a while since someone checked up on them, and maybe you’ll find something you didn’t even know you were looking for.