Thank you.
This the first page of the first book that I ever read by myself.
I was a student at the German School of Guatemala, here in Guatemala City.
And, I had just received a conical cardboard container just like these --it's a tradition at German schools--,
and inside I found a new box of lead pencils, a sharpener, an eraser, some notebooks, and, of course, my book: this book.
Let me show it to you: my first book, which I've kept all these years. So, I loved my book, it smelled nice, it was mine,
it was clean, it was new, it was wow! I loved it. And, very soon we went from reading single names, as in the first page:
to this, and then to this, which is a story. I don't know how we got there so fast but I was fascinated.
The pictures, which I should've understood were actually explained by the words, and it was magical. It was amazing.
I loved it. From there, we moved on to the second book, which probably a lot of you used: this one,
maybe familiar to some of you: Pepe y Polita.
So, this book had more stories, and dialogues, and more text, and some pictures; and I know that by September, twenty-second of September,
I was able to read this. So, I was very happy, and I was very glad that I had moved so fast so far. I was hooked with reading.
Then, they organized, the teachers of the school, organized a reading contest, and we all had to read aloud passages from several books.
The winners of this contest were taken to a room where there was a big table, and on the table they had piled up books.
And, they told us: "as a winner, you have the privilege of picking any book you like and it will be yours."
And, I picked this book of prehistoric beasts, which I still have, of course. It had a different smell from
my previous book, but I loved it, and I can remember the smell, too, so...
Many of you may be familiar with this set, too. My family was great. They gave me books,
they encouraged my reading, and this is a set that had a little bit of everything.
It's my first encyclopedia, written for children. It had everything: science, technology, even magic tricks.
And my favorite of the set was this one.
It talked about submarines and ships, and the Panama Canal. I was fascinated.
I didn't understand maybe what it had meant to build the Panama Canal, but I was impressed that people
were working so long, so hard, to do this. So, this was an important book for me. Unfortunately,
I don't have it any more, but that's another story.
So, my family, they were giving me access to their books; maybe, fifteen hundred books in all:
my grandparents', my uncle's, my aunt's, and my father would also buy books for me.
I remember reading this book and discussing it with my uncle. It was a lot of fun to do that. I loved it.
And, then, a few weeks ago, when I was thinking about this talk,
I was thinking about why my family was encouraging me so much giving me all these books; and I,
just by coincidence I was wondering about that, and I turned on the TV and there was this movie on: The Princess Diaries.
I don't know if any of you have watched it, but the basic argument is that Julie Andrews plays the queen of a little European country,
and she's looking for her lost granddaughter who has to take over the throne. So, her granddaughter till now has been living in the US,
and she doesn't know she's a princess at all.
So, Julie Andrews tells her: "You are the princess of Genovia." And, the girl says: "Me, a princess?
But I've never led anybody. How can I do that?" And, Julie says: "We'll accept the challenge of helping you become
the princess that you are. Oh, I can give you books. You will study languages, history, art, political science."
Notice she didn't say "you will read children's encyclopedia" or "you will read novels for fun." Serious stuff.
What's the reaction of the girl? Hum. Not really convinced.
But what I found with reading was that some of these books were really hard but I liked the challenge.
And, I had to because my family was asking me: Did you read it? My grandfather would said:
Did you read the book I loaned to you? And, there was some discussion and help.
My mother, on the other hand, she was the practical person in the family. Here, she is when she was,
I don't know, three, four years old, with her little unicycle. And, she would tell me: Books? Go.
Take your bicycle, go outside, live in the real world. Don't get stuck with books.
You can read them later when you're older. But now enjoy life.
And, you know, at the time this shocked me, but the more I think about it, the more I realize
there's something important there. So, I've always kept that in mind.
So, in high school we read more serious books, maybe. Lord of the Flies made a deep impression on me.
But, this is the book that I mostly remember from my high-school years. It's a novel,
German novel, from the post-war era. And, it's very dark and sad.
It talks about six characters living in an oppressed village and they're trying to run away from there.
But, at the center of the story is this little statue of a monk. Now, look at the monk, the way he's reading his book.
He's totally immersed in the book. You can see that he's focusing on it. He's trying to understand it,
but at the same time, there's a certain tension in him. You can see that maybe he's not just absorbing;
he's thinking about it.
And, he's trying to decide by himself if this is something he wants to believe or not. So, this is the actual character,
that's at the center of the novel, and the characters in the novel try to save this one. So, at that time I was like:
"Why do we have to read this dark novel? And, I don't really understand what's the point of this." But, our professor,
thank God, he was encouraging, and he was making us think.
This is a very important concept. And, I've been spending all my life, I think, trying to follow up on this, trying to
think by myself to make my own mind about the books I read. So, I came to UFM and I studied Engineering,
maybe a ten-thousand book library, but it had all the books that I needed for computer science, for... really understanding
what this discipline was all about.
But then, when I left for grad school, and I went to the huge libraries --we're not talking a few thousand or ten-thousands of books;
we're talking millions of books, millions. What do you do there? Well, you browse, and you are happy,
and if you like books, this is amazing to be there.
But, of course, I also knew that in Guatemala, we would probably never have a library like this.
Ten million volumes that easily cost a hundred million dollars, it's never gonna happen in Guatemala.
That's what I thought at that time. And, also, the bookstores.
When I left Guatemala and I went abroad and I saw all the bookstores, and I started buying books: used,
new, and sending them home; we finally posted this little note in my study:
"Home is where you keep your stuff while you're out there getting more stuff and sending it home".
So, very soon I had all these books that I had stored here at my mother's house.
In the end, I decided to go full way and study Librarianship, and I ended up managing the Learn Resource Center on this ship,
it's called The ScholarShip. This was a traveling university, and we went around the world, and of course any university needs a library.
And, the first thing to build a library is to have shelves.
So, let me tell you how you run a library, in about three minutes. You have shelves and you need books; so, there was a consulting librarian;
she ordered the books and she had them delivered to the ship. So, that's a function that's called selection and acquisition.
Now, we have the books. We have to put them on the shelf. Well, they have to go on the shelf in a certain order.
And, if you've ever gone to a library, and wrote down the number of the book and then looked for it on the shelf,
you should know that that number is actually quite magical. It's a code for a portion of the universe of knowledge.
So, here are the books. Here's the stamp, very important, you have to stamp your books, so that if somebody takes it,
you will know where it's from.
You don't just stamp it once. At least twice or maybe in three different places. Then, you record the book in your lists:
you make an inventory. And, so, we had a manual inventory but we also entered it into the computer; and you put the right number on the spine,
so the book goes on the right place on the shelf.
So, that's what we were doing there. And, of course, this is a ship, it moves, so the shelves had this protective device,
so the books wouldn't fall over, all over the place. So, now the library is ready for use and students come, they use it.
We were at sea for sometimes seven days, ten days at a time.
And the books were used a lot. Our Internet connection was really slow. Facebook was just getting started,
but you couldn't really even use Facebook. It was so slow and expensive to use. So, the books were a good alternative.
We also had downloaded Wikipedia, so the students had access to some reference sources.
Of course, it was not enough to research but it was something. And, the books got checked out, so we were circulating the books,
and people would use them for like identifying birds they saw, and then they would bring them back.
Sometimes, the books can come back wet or damaged, and then we had to replace them: reorder them. And all of that has a big cost.
So, here is the check-in; students worked in the library, and we would re-shelve them; and that was the library.
Now, notice it was a ship, and we did go through the Panama Canal, and at that time I was hoping, I was wishing
I could have this book again with me just to compare if what I had read so many years before was even close to the truth.
We went through the Corte Culebra, which I couldn't understand when I read it in the book, but then when I saw it, it was amazing;
and of course, the "locks," quite an amazing experience.
But everything good comes to an end, they say. Unfortunately, the program ended after the first year; and we had to pack up the library.
But this gives you a nice life-cycle for a library. We packed it up in boxes and it was shipped off to Ghana,
where it became part of the University of Ghana's collection.
So, empty, empty shelves. That's what waited me at home. My mother had packed... well,
I had to help her packed all my books and we had to get rid of many of them. It was hard.
I kept some, the ones that I considered important, special for me. But many I just gave away.
I didn't have any more space for my growing collection of books.
Librarians do the same thing, it's called weeding, you know, like you pull the weeds in a field.
We are weeding all the time in libraries, we get rid of the books that nobody is reading, or that nobody wants,
or that are completely out of date, like this Dbase programming book.
Shelving space is a big issue for libraries, and mass storage has been one of the solutions. So, you still keep the books,
you don't give them away. But if your library has two million books that nobody has used in the last 15 years, which can happen easily,
then, you put them in storage.
University of Chicago came up with a great solution: they put them in storage under their campus; so that,
you can get instant access to the books, but you have a beautiful reading room on top of that big underground storage.
This is the underground storage where the books are. And it takes 20 minutes to retrieve them.
Another solution is digitization, and this is one of the books that was digitized by Universidad [Francisco] Marroquín.
It's very convenient, you digitize a book, you place it online, you don't have to ship it to keep it on the shelves,
and everybody can have access to it.
Of course, if you want to get a book these days, you can always get the physical book, but you can also get a digital version.
And, if you looked above the yellow button, it says "Rent with one click." You can now rent books from Amazon; so,
you don't even have to keep the digital copy forever. It will disappear. It will die.
You can even lend books online; so, if you purchased some books, you can lend them or find books that you can lend.
But, if you're really nostalgic, you can even get online and buy that copy of The Count of Monte Cristo again in the original form,
you know, the same edition; if you look for stuff, you will find it eventually, but who wants to bother with physical things?
Look for the free legal copy that is available online in all the different formats that you may want. So, books are digital.
What's the future of libraries and bookstores? This is a picture I took at the Newark, Airport in 2007.
Borders and this announcement on the wall, right? The new Sony Reader coming your way, and Borders going about its business,
selling books, like always.
All of these books are now available digitally, and Borders has closed. This is a picture I took last week in the Houston Airport.
Borders bookstores have disappeared. Will the same happen to libraries? I'm sure. Libraries are sustained by their clients,
and if you look at this, this is the circulation, the times and the number of books that have been checked out in average per person,
per year in the US since the 1850.
And, it has a tendency to go down. It's gone down from 20 to about 6, last year. Same thing is happening in academic libraries:
from about 26 per person, maybe 15 years ago, to less than... about 15. So, there's a strong trend. People are not really using libraries that much.
They're not checking out books that much. They may be using libraries for other things but not to get the books.
And, this is very clear in science and technology libraries like this one. Science and technology libraries are getting rid of their books.
Stanford University, they got rid of seventy thousand books; they left only ten thousand on the shelves. And, this is the library where I work now,
at Effat University, it's an engineering college and we're building... yeah, I have to also learn how to read this, a little bit.
We are now designing a new library, and it will have a museum, that's a round shape, and it will have lots of reading space,
but very little space for shelves if you compare it to what libraries used to be like.
So, if librarians are maybe going to lose their jobs because all these libraries are going to be closing, what are they going to be doing?
This is a quote that my husband loves, it's from Ralph Waldo Emerson. And, he says we should have professors of books.
Well, maybe we should, maybe librarians can become professors of books and guide us in finding worthwhile readings.
Maybe librarians can go step further and teach us through the books, like this ...
interesting idea that Stephenson has in this novel, highly recommended, I have a copy here if anybody wants to loan it, to take it.
But what becomes of our shelves if we get rid of books? They become empty.
They disappear, they no longer talk about us, they don't tell us "who you are" by the books, the company they keep.
Or maybe, they will, but we will display it in a different way, with different kinds of devices or lists online.
But, for me what's important is no matter what format the books take. If you look at this image, remember the monk reading the book?
Well, there she is reading a book on a kindle. And I hope she's engaging all her imagination, her intelligence, her power of decision to
believe or not what's in the book, and to make the most... the best use of it that she can.
And I also have a parting thought and it is this: Doesn't this picture make you feel like you wish you could give her books or e-books?
Thank you.