What makes a library a library?
OK, other than “having books,” what is one characteristic that is fundamental to the very essence of the library experience?
Hint: the smell!
There’s something comforting and homey about the smell of ink and old paper, and the prime spot for avid sniffers is in the Current Periodicals & Newspapers room on the third floor of Bobst. Scholars who stake our their studies here are rewarded to a quietly muffled atmosphere, perfumed by old newspapers exuding a delicious muskiness. The most fragrant shelf has to be the last one, where rows upon rows of dusty brown folders stuffed with newspapers hang. Just by sitting next to these newspapers, I feel more in tune with current events and social studies as if the information is entering my brain through osmosis.
The overarching impression of the periodical and newspaper room seems to be an inviolability to the experience of the human race. Strolling through the shelves of articles, I begin to get a sense that, yes, there is a useful purpose to storing and preserving things like the Tehran Times newspapers and periodicals only about the opera or Lithic technologies. Unlike Seneca’s ideology that it “doesn’t’ matter how many books you have, but how good they are,” the periodical and newspaper room strives more towards that of a universal library of documented news and historical human perspectives of varying social importance. This approach of storing information seems to embody what a true library should strive to be: a place where someone can find any and all types of knowledge.
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