While one of my favourite libraries when I was in grad school at Queen’s University in Kingston in the mid-1990s, was Massey Library at neighbouring Royal Military College of Canada (RMC), no doubt in part because of the sign that reminded patrons “SILENCE,” those days of happy memory, I suspect, are gone almost everywhere, with the exception maybe of some big-city reference libraries or reading rooms.
But even back then at Queen’s, more than two decades ago now, big changes for academic libraries were in the wind. The first time I ever used the World Wide Web (WWW) was in October 1994, as the brand-new Joseph S. Stauffer Library opened at Queen’s during my second year on campus. While I had used the Internet for e-mail since 1991 at Trent University’s Thomas J. Bata Library (on a server wonderfully called “Ivory,” I recall) the web and its HTML pages were going to be a whole other thing again. A very big thing.
This is before browsers such as Netscape Navigator, which wouldn’t be released until December 1994, and Internet Explorer (IE), released in August 1995. One of the few newspapers online in the fall of 1994 was Silicon Valley’s San Jose Mercury News. Queen’s used the Mosaic browser, developed just two years earlier in 1992 by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Queen’s library administrators, presciently anticipating demand for access to the web, made most of the computer stations that had WWW access, aside from some on the fourth floor, stand-up stations for use because they anticipated very heavy traffic and demand, and wanted to keep people moving along, rather than sitting for hours using a very new and still-scarce commodity 22 years ago.
Just like microfilm was in the 1930s at university libraries and microfiche in the 1960s.
In what some consider quaint deference to our book heritage, however, I usually insist on keeping the library open at night here on those infrequent evenings when the IT department shuts down our computers early for routine maintenance. I do this premised on the fact we still have the ability to manually sign-out books and books don’t require IT support to loan out (at least in the short term). We’re somewhat platform-agnostic when it comes to delivering information – so long as we can deliver it. Sometimes the route to books can be a bit circuitous. I remember a time when movies were made after the novel was written and usually consumed in that order by patrons. While the book may still be the original format most of the time, I had a patron come in earlier this week who had seen the 1993 movie Fire in the Sky, based on the alleged extraterrestrial encounter experienced by 22-year-old Travis Walton while working on a lumber crew in Sitgreaves National Forest near Snowflake, Arizona on Nov. 5, 1975.
Somehow the movie had come up in a recent conversation the student had with an instructor at UCN, who suggested the movie might exaggerate in places Walton’s own 1978 book, called The Walton Experience. His novel advice: you’ve seen the movie, now read the book.
We have what may seem to some as a surprisingly strong juvenile section here at the University College of the North’s Wellington & Madeline Spence Memorial Library on the Thompson Campus, and even some colouring paper and crayons for kids. Many of our students are single parents, who in order to study in the library, if they can’t find or afford childcare at night, have little choice but to bring their children with them.
We also have an ever increasing number of what we refer to as “community user” patrons, who are not students, but are often recent immigrants to Canada and Thompson from all over the world, who will visit the UCN library as a family. Sometimes there are teenage kids who are nearing the end of high school and studying hard to get into university next year or the year after. We work to accommodate everyone who wants to use the library, and while children can cause a bit of noise and even pull a book that catches their eye off lower shelves in the stacks occasionally, they’re probably not any more rambunctious as a group than nursing students who work incredibly hard here at UCN, but are known to be a bit noisy at times studying in groups while blowing off a bit of steam just before exams – like right now.
One thing I noticed when I first came to work in the library three academic years ago now was how respectful and appreciative UCN students are to have a new academic library on a still only three-year-old campus. They treat staff, the book collection and physical property and infrastructure of the library with a great deal of respect, and there is none of the sense of entitlement I saw among some Trent and Queen’s students when I was a student myself at those universities years ago. Vandalism and property damage in the UCN library here is almost unheard of. Same for rudeness. It’s almost like people individually and collectively realize what good fortune they have experienced to have a university and library like this here in remote Northern Manitoba, and take pride in the place. Parents committed enough to be working on their university degrees are usually reasonably responsible about their kids.
Certainly our student demographic profile is not too much like the 19-year-old single-kids-living-away from-home-and-their-parents-for-the-first-time norm we presented when my cohort went off to university 40 years ago in 1976. Maintaining a general atmosphere of quiet most times is a reasonable expectation I have, but quiet is not quite synonymous with silence.
Besides, here in the North there is very much a sense of live and left live. I may work in the only library in Canada where I look to the right when I step outside our front entrance into our common foyer with the Vale Regional Community Centre (VRCC), and see the boys from the United Steelworkers (USW) Local 6166 hockey teams, who are nickel miners at Vale, playing for the aptly-named “Refinery Rats” or “T-1 Timberdogs” at the C.A. Nesbitt Arena, which is adjacent to the university.
The rink is a few hundred yards away to the east down the foyer, through a set of glass-topped arena doors, so it has be a pretty amazing slap shot to hear the puck hit the boards, but you can routinely see the guys skating from that distance.
To date, I have never had to either eject a patron, or call security, due to unruly behaviour or noise problems. Could happen, I suppose, but common sense and courtesy have prevailed to date.
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