Occasionally I have a day at the library where I do something mildly momentous that I can then go home and tell my husband about. The ability to directly impact a patron is one of the things I have come to like best about the service-oriented aspect of librarianship. For example: the other day, I blew a student’s mind with the microform machine. I bless the fact that researching my thesis required a fair number of articles from popular magazines of yore, available only on microfilm. I am generally able to figure out how to work things if left to my own devices, but I will admit that I did at one point need a librarian to get me started on the machine. My initial fumblings eventually turned into a general basic knowledge of how the machine works. This has proven useful in my current position, though of course it comes up very rarely, maybe once every few months or so. In this case, as I showed the student how to load the reel and adjust the picture etc etc, I realized the film had been loaded upside down. Luckily, the strip was not very long, so I unwound it, flipped it over, and rewound it, and when the pages came up in the correct orientation, the student let out an actual “wow,” her eyes wide. It made me realize how people are losing touch with analog tools like microfilm in the growing digital environment. I wonder if that student would’ve been able to figure out how to adjust the film strip herself or if she’d lost (or never had) that comfort with analog machinery, something you can take apart in your hands and put back together. In the days of 1s and 0s and special languages that can create amazing things, the actual physical hands-on qualities of older tools are disappearing, increasing our reliance on people with specialized knowledge (such as librarians, or IT people).
There’s also an increasing sense that all textual information should be digital or it’s “wasted,” an idea mentioned by a couple patrons recently about the library’s copies of student theses as well. Research has to be selective if based solely on what’s available, and it seems like the presence (physical, located in one particular place and nowhere else) of something only on microfilm (or in our theses cage) has made it seem increasingly unavailable, even though it isn’t, it’s actually relatively easy to get to. Plus, for me anyway, I felt like a down-and-dirty researcher when I had to dig through old reels to find what I needed*, looking at film that probably had not been touched in years, and picking off the old gross rubber bands that had rotted away. Finding and printing digital articles is too easy, in a way. Where’s the challenge? Of course, I had a whole summer to do my research and writing, and I know I DEFINITELY didn’t care about the “authenticity” of my research when I had a 15pg paper due in 2 weeks during the semester. At that point it was all about whatever I could get my hands on, especially in the last hours when if I didn’t find what I was looking for digitally, I did without. I wonder how microfilm will fare in the increasingly digital years to come.
*I want to note here the impressive popular periodical microfilm collection of CUNY’s Medgar Evers College in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, which was not only near my apartment but had a LOT of what I needed. Medgar Evers is a small community-type school so it was a nice surprise to find that they actually had a bigger, better and more easily accessible microfilm collection than BPL’s Central branch, where the microfilm is kept in the basement and access is restricted to one box of reels at a time.
referencius victorious 