It’s kinda scary
As I’ve stated in the previous post, I have moved out to a new university. Today, I have the chance to take a tour on one of the library in my campus. There are 5 libraries in total, but I’m only going for the one that houses social sciences books and materials. I figured there will come a time for me to check out all the other libraries. No need to rush, being a freshman doesn’t mean you have to know every inch of your campus. Remember to take your time.
It is called Chifley Library, a pretty big library that has 4 floors and provides collection for social sciences and humanities related materials. The librarian gave us a tour around, showed us where the printers are, computers, study areas, how to return and borrow books, etc. Pretty standard. 30 minutes passed, we have been on all floors except the basement. We went there. That’s when things got interesting.
The basement (1st floor) contains a small study area with 2 wooden tables and a whole bunch of big books; mostly politics and government archives/documents/papers thingy. They are stored in compactus. It’s my first time seeing those things (such efficient shelving method). It is interesting, but not much to inspire me to make this post, isn’t it?
The next collections are microfilms. They are this thing that do that (you get it). I guess it’s kinda like the old reels that we obtained from camera. So before the digital era, I suppose this is the way people in the past used to save their files (not your computer files), aside of having them physically. You can store pictures, newspaper articles, published journals, everything that can be documented.
“These drawers here contain microfilms. Does anybody know what a microfilm is? It’s basically blablabla (I forgot his exact words), so it works like a projector. You can use that old machines over there to view it. You’ll just have to give it a spin and you can look and read what’s inside.
It’s scary when you come to think of it. These things are more effective and will last longer than any other type of documentation. For example, how many of you here who still have a laptop with a cd-rom player? There are not many laptops nowadays that can play CDs. Floppy disks are considered extinct. But these microfilms are different, you just have to put the film(reel) in front of a light source and you can see what’s inside. Alright now, moving on ……..”
It’s scary. That’s when I realized something.
It’s not about the microfilms, it’s about something else.
As I walked inside the library, I saw all these abundant collection of books, archives, researches, etc. It’s a massive collection of information and knowledge stored in one place. And that’s not all, they have four other libraries that are also full of books and documented materials. Not mentioning their online library and databases. This library is like the place you saw on TVs where they seek out information about things they wanted to know and asked on experts.
It’s kinda scary when you realized that almost every thing you need to know are provided in the library. Not just in my campus, yours too.
It’s kinda scary when you realized that almost every thing you need to know are provided in the internet. We basically have access to everything we wanted to know, wished to know and things that we don’t even know existed.
I’m 19 years old and I know the internet. I am part of the generation that lives with the internet and can’t live without it. I am a part of a smart-ass generation who thinks they know everything about the internet. The truth is, we don’t know everything about the internet. One thing that we do not know is that we underutilized it. We are not maximizing its potential. Yes, internet and technology have helped us in a way that we can never imagined before. I used it for my studies, entertainment, socials, daily life activities, etc. But then, do we really use it to gain more knowledge and information? (And by MORE I mean MORE. Not only to google things out of curiosity, but far more beyond that.)
It’s kinda scary when you realized that you have thousands of books ready to be read but you never actually pick one up.
It hits me. It hits me hard. We have the potential and are given the potential to access these books, these information, and we should.
It’s kinda scary when you realized that you only have 60 years left to live and you barely know the tip of the universe.
So try to pick up a book. Try to read the books in your library. Try to use the internet better.
I will try too.
We should all really start to fill up the gaps between our neurons.
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Originally published at tributetoleki.blogspot.com.au on March 2, 2016.