A vanishing breed
“How many books do you actually have in the VU library?” asks a visiting lecturer from a university in Bhutan as she looks around with a look of awe.
We are in the archives of the library and bookcase after bookcase fills our field of vision in a dark dim room. “Ehm…” says the Head of Research Support, “I don’t know the exact number but I do know that there are more than 34 kilometres of books here”. “Students recently organised a silent disco in these archives” the VU colleague continues his story, “70% of these books have never been requested by anyone, which is why we are inventing alternative purposes for these archives”.
We continue the tour around the VU Library to a large artwork made from unused books. The artwork is beautiful. Most of the VU books are available digitally these days, allowing other things to be done with the physical copies. Yet it is almost impossible to explain that we have some kind of igloo made out of new books while these Bhutanese teachers have to try so hard to access books relevant to their field.
A little later, we visit the newly refurbished study rooms in the library. Students played a major role in the redesign. One of their absolute conditions was that there should be ‘bookcases’. Full of fantastically inspiring books, a 40-something like me would think. But no, the bookcases are only to be there as decoration, to give a ‘certain feel’ while you sit in a chair armed with your laptop and mobile phone. After all, you gain your knowledge by surfing the internet, watching YouTube videos and/or perhaps via a trip to chatGPT.
For our guests from Bhutan, all the information about the ins and outs of our academic library is almost incomprehensible. Imagine a remote kingdom in the Himalayas where electricity and internet often fail or the bandwidth is simply too low to look anything up. Books at a university are then pure gold, your main source of knowledge. It is hard to comprehend that the majority of our books are gathering dust, are used as art or only for decoration. And to be perfectly honest: it is difficult for me to understand too. I am one of those people who can lose myself in a book for hours, who looks forward to holidays to work through piles of books and who even has a library card. I enjoy reading books to the little 3-year-old girl in my life. I simply cannot imagine a life without books. However, after this tour around the VU Library, I cannot help but conclude that I belong to a vanishing breed.
