"How to Organize a Public Library"
August 8, 2007 8:12 pm librarianshipYesterday I tracked down Umberto Eco's whimsical yet practical essay “On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1.” It was published in How to Travel with a Salmon and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1994). I had forgotten that this collection also includes his “How to Organize a Public Library.” In just four pages and through 18 rules, he turns on its head best practices of library administration, few of which we would abandon as blithely and certainly not as ironically as Eco prescribes them. It is the antithesis of Ranganathan's Five Laws:
Books are for use. Every reader, his book. Every book, its reader. Save the time of the reader. A library is a growing organism.
Many librarary coffee shops currently, and sometimes lucratively, violate Eco's 14th rule:
14. It must be impossible to find any refreshment inside the library, under any circumstances…
Then there is Eco's first rule:
1. The various catalogues must be housed as far apart as possible from one another. All care must be taken to separate the catalogue of books from that of periodicals…
His first rule imposes other incomprehensible, maze-like inconveniences on information seekers. No librarian can read this without seeing glimmers of truth and reality beneath the thick irony. Today we are, of course, struggling to eliminate the need to consult multiple special purpose catalogs, indexes, databases, etc. We want to simplify the search and discovery process for our users. The rallying cry for this quest has been “The OPAC sucks!” We can't violate Eco's first rule soon enough to further the broad vision of the Five laws.
I haven't yet reread “On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1.” My recollections of it from more than a decade ago lead me to believe that it might be a metaphor for certain aspects of the American Library Association. I'll find out soon how well my memory serves me on this.
