One of the first things to stop when I realised we were running out of space in our flat was the purchase of books. There is a definite line that divides book-reading from book-buying, and once you step over that line the process become more of a fetish than a hobby.
The Publishing Revolution
Going through one of many boxes at the weekend with an aim of rationalising our current stock, I pulled out the intriguing “Inside the Publishing Revolution: The Adobe Story” from Peachpit Press. A volume of limited appeal, you might think, and you would be correct. I actually won the book in an online competition a year or two ago, and did read most of the way through the week after it arrived. But I haven’t picked it up since. Why do I still have it? Good question. It’s a beautiful object, and if I were to use the word “lavish” alongside the word “illustrations” I don’t think anyone would complain. It’s a gem, a time capsule of a crazy, creative but still seriously corporate world all the way over there in California in the Seventies and early Eighties. But seriously, how many times am I going to marvel at the picture of a youthful Steve Jobs alongside Adobe founders John Warnock and Chuck Geschke?
Action, not words. Well, action AND words.
So, it’s a two-pronged approach. One, stop buying books. Two, distil our current collection down to the essentials. That may mean throwing everything but a Scrabble dictionary and the Scissors, Paper, Stone Rulebook but I think I’ll tackle that challenge another time. Step one, though, is a lot easier – go to a library.
Inside the library
Wandering into a library these days is a lot different than I remember it – both my local library and the one where I work are buzzing with life – kids reading classes, reading groups, local information desks, health advice. They seem to have become a much more visible hub of information and community since the last time I came, and seem uch more inviting as a result.
The problem
The first time I realised the problem is when I tried to find a book I knew I wanted – Paul Auster’s The Book of Illusions. The library had separated fiction into paperbacks, hardbacks, and then a couple of arbitrary genres such as Romance, Crime and Adventure. Now, I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t find Paul Auster in one of those genre sections, but I also wouldn’t like to argue against it, each of those genres being present to some degree in all of Auster’s work. I ran though a quick calculation on my head and decided that it would be better to search on the library computer to check if the book was available. A search revealed that it was available in that library in hardback. However, it wasn’t on the shelf. The problem is there are so many variables to factor in that any search for a specific book is not guaranteed to find it. Firstly, you’re relying on both the librarian and then the public to put the book in the right place on the shelf and return it to that place at all times. Secondly, the gap between the book being checked-in or out and the library’s database updating is considerable – maybe it’s only done at the end of each day. Third, the book may well be checked in but has not reached the shelf yet – instead it’s stuck in a back room or on one of the many bookshelves on wheels standing at the end of each aisle. all in all, you might have to look in five different places for a book which may or may not be in any of them.
The solution
Back at work I had an idea – find the Surrey libraries website. I did just that, and they’ve got quite a lot going on there, although the site does feel like it’s in its first iteration. There’s no real navigation particular to the library pages, as they are part of the larger Surrey County Council site. The main link I feel everyone will be looking for – the library catalogue – is hidden away on the right without anything to distinguish it from the rest of the links. There are some issues too with the usability of the site – extensive use of images to display text in the top and left navigations, and the text is in Verdana anyway so there’s no reason it can’t be actual text. And they’ve also neglected to use lists where they are obiously needed, instead using tables or just several links seperated by breaks. However they should be congratulated for implementing access keys site-wide – a shortcut such as Alt-0 takes you to the homepage or latest news etc – a great feature for those with limited typing ability or otherwise just a great shortcut to important information, and very easy to add to any website.
Features
They’ve got some good features the site, though, such as the ability to renew your loans, leave a review or just the one I needed – online reservation of a book, where you can specify which library you would like to pick the book up from and how you would like to be notified eg by email or post. This smart service costs a nominal fee, something like 50p, a price I feel is well worth paying for the benefit of being able to walk into the library foyer, go to the reservations desk and collect your stack of books without having to browse the shelves endlessly. But that endless browsing is the main thing that’s missing from this web-based library experience – unlike Amazon or other online bookshops, the Surrey libraries site has no relational database powering it, or at least not one that’s apparent. This means that all your searches are, in effect, linear – you narrow your search criteria until you find the book/author you are looking for. But the site has no way of recommending other books based on your search, or even something as basic as “Most Popular Book Searches This Week”. Until they can implement a search/browse facility along these lines the web-based Surrey library will remain a “bonus feature” of the library itself in all its random, bustling glory.
Elegant
But even in that elegant solution is the dichotomy at the heart of library use – online convenience will save you time and effort every time, but at the expense of leisurely browsing and accidental discoveries which could lead you off into completely unplanned and unexpected directions. The online process was curiously unsatisfactory – for a dedicated book fetishist the complete lack of visual or tactile stimuli was underwhelming. I’ve decided to reserve the books I want from the mental list I keep, and pop in occasionaly to pick up something on the spur of the moment, such as “Salt: A World History” by Mark Kurlanksy, which I thoroughly recommend.