Quarantined in my bedroom, sweating, coughing and nauseated, I felt like Glenn Beck responding to callers demanding a public option. Luckily, I had the prophylactic powers of the Dartmouth library to assuage my swine-induced boredom. After a quick search of the database, I found that the term "Simpsons" yielded 46 results. I could immediately feel my worries dissolving like a sugar lump in warm tea.
But then I realized it was not the "Simpsons" I was looking for. Instead, almost the entire list consisted of driveling, academic literature like "Fur trade and empire;" "George Simpson's journal." My disappointment was matched only by the time when, for my 18th birthday, I learned that my sole present was a generous donation to the United Way made in my name.
I was incredibly disillusioned, like that poor kid who, upon a midnight jaunt to the bathroom, accidently discovers that his mother is the Tooth Fairy and then weeps throughout show and tell the next day. To call Jones Media Center "a free Blockbuster" is the most egregious case of false advertising I've experienced since I tried my first Everlasting Gobstopper.
Indubitably, our facilities here are amazing. The libraries abound in comfortable study space. The entire collection is accessible and precisely catalogued. The staff is exceptionally helpful and warm. And the 2.5 million tomes make the stacks a haven for illicit study breaks.
Yet it is the sad and ironic truth that we actually have too much of this pedagogic piffle. The mandate on bibliographers to use their funding almost exclusively for acquiring scholarly material additions to an evolving curricula, new publications for new courses and esoteric articles for professors' research has resulted in a library brimming with pedantic, esoteric junk which sits collecting dust, but that is otherwise lacking.
The library collection is alarmingly homogeneous. For instance, it doesn't contain "The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind," even though its author, William Kamkwamba, recently spoke at Dartmouth. And although the Dartmouth Film Society just screened a documentary about Jack White, Paddock has only one of his CDs. More egregious, Paddock Music Library is missing classic albums like Led Zeppelin's "Presence." At least we've got Hilary Duff's "Metamorphosis."
Perhaps the uniformity of the College's catalogue, its dogged commitment to pure, scholarly knowledge and little else, is best demonstrated by its dearth of comedic material. There isn't even a single album by the intellectual voice of 1960s counterculture, social critic and martyr for free speech Lenny Bruce. The College does own several books about him just not his autobiography. Clearly the library is so constrained by its academic focus that it has forgotten that purchasing analytical, secondary sources over the primary source itself is like relying on an older friend to explain what sex feels like.
Similarly, while the College's two copies of "Gravity's Rainbow" are constantly on-loan, companion guides like "Approaches to Gravity's Rainbow" perpetually idle on the shelves.
This problem is predicated primarily on the College's fiscal policy. For libraries, size matters, and to expand a collection, it's economical to buy less of each item. There's nothing inherently wrong with this, but it's unreasonable to refuse to triage the collection, to knowingly buy equal numbers of items that will ostensibly be in unequal demand. That Dartmouth students can't read Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five" because the library's two copies are missing, is the intellectual equivalent of Burger King running out of meat.
Of course, the Dartmouth library is, and should be, an "academic" library. But it's irrefutable that people learn as much by listening to meaningful songs or watching intelligent movies as they do by attending a lecture on rudimentary cuneiform in proto-literate Sumer or reading "Wayward Nuns in Medieval Literature."
College President Jim Yong Kim said in his inauguration speech that to "provoke and energize humanity with art" is one of the great challenges our generation faces. Art, far more than scholarly literature, is fundamental in expanding our imaginations and providing shared experiences critical to establishing a better world.
College librarians must acknowledge this truth by using their autonomy to diversify the catalogue. Nonetheless, it's really our responsibility as students to make it clear by speaking to specialists, blitzing librarians and requesting purchases online that we want change. This way, the next time I'm sick I won't be stuck watching reruns of "Yes, Dear" on DarTV.
