The document is a transcript of a talk given by an author to librarians about what writers want from libraries. Some key points: 1) The author discusses how physical libraries helped with research for their books by finding unexpected sources browsing closed stacks. 2) They argue physical books are still important for absorbing notes and ideas during the writing process in a way digital formats cannot replicate. 3) The author urges librarians not to move to a fully digital/closed stack system and to keep the browsing experience of physical books available.

1. Huler Page 1 of 21
NCLA Conference
Greetings, Librarians and Library types.I was asked to talk about what writers want from
libraries, and I come here as something that people seem to believe is vanishing – a book
person – so I‟m thrilled to be here to talk to you about what a writer like me wants from a
library run by people like you.I really thought about this. And though I‟m not a librarian,
I do have some actual suggestions for how to stride boldly into this new world of ours,
and I hope you find my thoughts helpful.
I‟m a writer of nonfiction, which means I‟m a purveyor of that most 21st century of
commodities, “information,” whatever that is. When I – early: by the time I was four I
was already sneaking out behind the garage to write things down – to become a writer, it
was easy to know what that looked like. I would smoke a pipe, I would wear a jacket with
patches on the elbows, and I would sit at a desk stroking my chin, and every now and
then I would say, “Aha!” and then I would write something down, with a fountain pen if
not with an actual quill. Some indeterminate time thereafter – my daydreams have never
been particularly detailed – I would show up at a bookshop, speak in front of a throng of
cheering men and fainting women, sign several hundred books, and then go do the same
thing again in another city. I never thought much further than that, though I suppose I
believed that once a month or so an armored truck would back up to my house and drop
off a big canvas bag with a dollar sign on the side of it, and there you have it: the literary
life.

2. Huler Page 2 of 21
So I‟m as big a fool as you all are: we all fell for books. Our shared passion, and our
shared and unpredictable future.
Books. Everybody wants to write a book. Everybody knows that writing a book will save
them. Everybody looks at writing books as the answer to their problems – the thing that
will make them feel alive, like they count, fill up that empty place inside, make their
mothers stop telling them they should have gone to law school.
Sure they will. I tell people that they should not write a book to get rich – they won‟t;
they should not write books to get famous – they won‟t; and they should not write books
to get dates – because how many ways will writing a book NOT get you dates? “Oh,
look, a writer, I hope he asks me out: he‟s both poor AND neurotic!”
No – the only reason you should write a book is because you can‟t stand not writing it,
because you‟re learning about a topic that makes you so insane you cannot live without
talking about it, that you‟re at the point of running outside and stopping random people
on the sidewalk, grabbing them by the coat lapels, to tell them about your topic. I just
wrote a book about infrastructure, the grid, and I was, like, “Did you know there are two
electrical grids? Transmission and distribution? Did you? And did you know that
everything on the grids comes in threes, because of phased power generation, which has
been part of AC electrical transmission pretty much from the start? Did you? DID
YOU?”

3. Huler Page 3 of 21
And they kind of back away, and think about calling 911.
That‟s when you write a book. And if that‟s when you write it, you‟ll be happy. Because
all you want is for it to exist – for its own sake. When I used to work at B. Dalton
Booksellers in Philadelphia, we were all writers there and we used to open the boxes and
rub the books on our faces: “One day, … one day … this will be me! My book will be in
boxes like this!” And sure enough that day has come, and as crazy as bookmaking and
bookselling and booklending has become, I still wouldn‟t be anywhere else. And to be
sure, things are changing and they‟re crazy and nobody knows what the future brings, and
that‟s good -- but I‟m one of those who believes there‟s significant overthinking going
on. In some ways I‟m like Maurice Sendak, who was just yesterday quoted in the
Guardian in the UK as saying about e-books, “I hate them. It's like making believe there's
another kind of sex. There isn't another kind of sex. There isn't another kind of book! A
book is a book is a book.” John C. Dvorak in PC Magazine reviewed the Kindle Fire in
the context of a “peaking pad market,” as publishers learn that people just kind of like
magazines.
Yay! Yay for books, yay for authors, yay for libraries, yay for librarians.
And then, regrettably, back to reality, which is that everything but your bathroom rug is
going to be digital in about an hour. But there‟s truth in what Sendakand Dvorak said,
and to get us there I will tell you about my three most recent books – how libraries helped

4. Huler Page 4 of 21
me write them, the role libraries and librarians played in getting them written, and what I
hope for from the library of the future.
My most recent book, “On the Grid,” focused on infrastructure and traced it all over the
place, from my house to reservoir, treatment plant, cable company, nuclear reactor. So, as
you can imagine, a lot of reporting went into this. But a lot of research too – many hours
spent at the NCSU library, where I found histories of most of our current infrastructure
systems, but also stumbled on – in the stacks – the “History of Public Works in the
United States,” by the American Public Works Association. Printed in 1976 in the pebbly
binding reserved for books that look nice but nobody really reads, this 700-page tome
turns out to be filled with exactly what I was looking for – though it never turned up in
any of my online or catalog searches. I found it, low on a shelf, when I milled around an
infrastructure section.
Of course I ended up buying my own copy – yay, AbeBooks! – to draw in and write in
and fold the pages of, but the point is, I found that book, and so many others, by just
milling around the section. Closed stacks will never – never, never, never – equal this
experience. Nor will e-books – or Google Books – ever equal what it is like to have a
dozen books open, spread around your office, with post-its and underscores and
highlighter pens and pencils stuck in between pages for bookmarks.
Allow me to digress: author Seth Godin, who prides himself on knowing how to address
what comes next, is not always right, and he has said this:

5. Huler Page 5 of 21
The scarce resource is knowledge and insight, not access to data. The library is
no longer a warehouse for dead books.
I strongly doubt this on two levels. The first is that the library will always be a warehouse
– virtual or otherwise – for the ideas that have come before us and that circulate among
us now. And that the library will always contain books? Look at its name: from libris, the
library has books at its very root. The library will always be a warehouse for books – it
must be.
The second, even more important, is that books are dead. A book is the opposite of dead
– and not just because of marginalia and the pleasures of the flesh I mentioned. But since
the dawn of writing, a written record has been the literary equivalent of immortality – of
the author whispering directly into your ear. And to be sure, electronic sources give the
author that same endless whisper, but surprisingly, they do not – in my opinion – give
you the same opportunity to talk back. That is, despite the wonderful searchability of
digital texts, despite the capacity to annotate the electronic text and then immediately and
forever lose access to that annotation, almost every author I know, once he or she has
chosen the central texts with which he will be working on a project, gets real books.
A real book absorbs underlining, that marginalia, takes post-it notes. Anybody use
onscreen post-it programs? Yep. It‟s a different thing entirely. And you can have 15
books open on your desktop – but it‟s still just as fast to look something up in one of

6. Huler Page 6 of 21
them if you open two more. Plus you might remember – “it was on the left-hand page,
near the bottom, and I think it was italic… was it a red book?” A physical book gives you
more clues to remember what you‟re looking for, different neural pathways to search
your memory. This is more than just sentimentality. Just as when you want to remember
something you write it down not just to have the note but because by writing it you bring
a new pathway – a physical, neural one – to trace for the fact. You might say it out loud,
too, bringing hearing in, a third pathway. You may blank on Sheryl Crow‟s name, and
then learn a way to remember it by remembering crows landing in your backyard. A silly
example, but the point is this: information “out there” is not just floating, and it doesn‟t
get zapped into your skull, at least not yet. There‟s still a physical interface: you look at
it, whether on a screen or a book or an iPad. And that‟s not an ancillary part of your
relationship to information: that‟s fundamental. We will all do well if you all remember
that and keep it holy. A book is not data – a book is knowledge and insight.
Which brings me to an actual piece of advice about the library of the future. I am begging
you – please, please, please, I am begging you – do not allow the believers that digitizing
solves all problems to push you further and further into a closed-stack world. Yes, you
can look up your title online, and all kinds of search techniques can lead you to similar
books. But nothing – nothing in this world – compares to wandering the stacks in the
vicinity of where a likely looking book will be. So many clues: spine, title, wear, color,
size, quality of printing – the book is talking to you while you‟re ten feet from it. Can a
screen do that? I should say not.

7. Huler Page 7 of 21
And don‟t even bother telling me that your “scan the shelves” program gives me the same
experience, because if you tell me that I will slap you. It will not. A library is a place
where you go into the shelves and look around for books – which are manifestly not
dead.They are the voices of the past and those who have interpreted the past. They are
waiting to talk to us.
Yet, for example, the brand new James Hunt Library currently being built by NCSU, has
in my opinion already made the worst possible starting decision by focusing not on books
but on “information,” and by choosing to be a closed stack resource.
To a writer – and I‟m convinced to most readers – a closed-stack library is like the
difference between an antiques catalogue and an antiques store. The only job of the
catalogue is to get you into the store. If you remove the store, you‟ve missed a vital part
of the point. As bookstores vanish – as they appear to be doing, in any case stores where
people buy new books – libraries only escalate in their importance as repositories of
actual living books, as places where people can interact with books. Fight – fight to the
death, I beg you – those who wish you to forget that foundational part of your purpose.
Digression complete. And if you wish to hear more about infrastructure, read “On the
Grid.” In physical or e-book format.

8. Huler Page 8 of 21
The book I wrote before that was “No-Man‟s Lands,” about retracing the journey of
Odysseus from Troy to Ithaca – in the Mediterranean, not in Upstate New York, so I‟ll
save you making that joke. Obviously I spent a lot of time on ferries and trains and in
crappy hotels, but equally obviously I spent months before and after my travels in the
library. The centuries of discussion about Odysseus and Homer and travel and mythology
can be sought well on websites and Wikipedia, but in the library – in the library I was
among my forebears: Joyce and Frazier, Herodotus and Thucydides, Pausanias and
Strabo. Bringing their books – their books – to my table gave me an intimacy with them
no website or screen can yet equal.
And again – I‟m sure you can take an ebook outside, and read it under a tree. And for a
murder mystery or a YA title an ebook serves a vital purpose. But for sincere study?For
interaction? That‟s still a whole-person process, long may it be so, and you‟re better off
with a real actual book. A book is solar powered; it‟s a read-only random-access
information storage system that hasn‟t reached the end of its life, not by a long shot.
Don‟t let anybody tell you otherwise.
And speaking of Odysseus, maps too: How many maps did I consult in the library? How
many ways did I use all the physical resources of the many libraries in the Triangle?
Libraries. I used my computer plenty, but I could have written the book without it.
Without the books I found in libraries? Not possible; as well to try to write it without the
classics professors I spoke with, without the Mediterranean itself.

9. Huler Page 9 of 21
And finally I reach my most library-intensive project, “Defining the Wind,” about the
Beaufort Scale of wind force. You‟re familiar with that, probably – a 13-step descriptive
scale of the wind, from 0, calm, “smoke rises vertically,” through 2, light breeze, “wind
felt on face; leaves rustle; ordinary vane moved by wind”; through 12, hurricane,
“devastation occurs.”
You can well imagine that what called me, as a writer, to the scale was its miracle of
crisp prose, its sensual language, its strong verbs, its rhythms, its … well, its perfection.
But to understand the people behind its history – Sir Francis Beaufort, among others – I
went to collections of, yes physical books and objects, held by many of the world‟s great
libraries. I‟ll read you a brief passage from that book in which I describe my experiences
there. Mind you, it‟s a short passage – I have two little kids now, and usually when I read
aloud to them one of my goals is that they fall asleep. At the moment I would prefer that
as few of you as possible fall asleep, so I‟ll keep this quite brief:
“As my interest in Beaufort and the scale that bears his name expanded, I found myself
corresponding with and visiting researchers and libraries, which was tremendously
exciting. As an undergraduate in college, I definitely envisioned my future as a sort of
New Yorker cartoon of an academic, flitting into and out of the Royal Society and the
library of Congress and such, stroking my chin thoughtfully.
“After a few library trips, even though I was pretty lost in most of them, I thought
that was me. Beaufort‟s letters and journals reside at the Huntington Library in Pasadena,
for example. When they finally gave me the okay to come and paw through them, I

10. Huler Page 10 of 21
thought I was something – until I arrived at the library and went through an orientation
process so bewildering that it too my most of the week I spent there to get my bearings
and actually find anything like what I was looking for.
“My favorite thing about the Huntington was that fifteen minutes before the end
of the day, when you have to turn in your rare books and manuscripts for safekeeping,
they tap a little brass counter bell – twice, exactly, rapidly – and you must bring the
material back to the counter. At the Clements Library at the University of Michigan, for
the same purpose they tingaling a little bell like the one the old rich lady in a sage farce
would use to summon her French maid. At the Met Office, they simply come around and
sadly tell you they‟re terribly sorry, but you just have to leave, though you‟re so welcome
to come back again tomorrow.
“This isn‟t the only way libraries differ. At the Hunginton, for example, when you
are in the sanctum sanctorum of the manuscript room and you whisper a question across
the counter, the person there is so likely to know the exact answer that you bein to take it
for granted. At the Met Office, the archivists would delight in helping to figure out what I
was trying to find, and would invite me to join them for afternoon tea. They did that at
the Admiralty Archive, too, but there a friendly archivist even drove me to the train
station after I had kept him late by an hour. Perhaps he just wanted to be sure he was rid
of me.
“At the Library of Congress and the British Library, on the other hand, you are
dealing with government employees, and you know it. Both of those libraries are closed-
stack, which means the surprising juxtapositions and miraculous leaps forward that come
from browsing among the shelves are forbidden: you write the book you want on a slip of

11. Huler Page 11 of 21
paper and someone supposedly goes to get it for you. In the Library of Congress your
book comes up on a conveyer belt; at the British Library someone just brings it up – if it
ever comes. If it doesn‟t, nobody can tell you why.
“In the British Library restaurant I grumbled about this to other researches, and
they tole me horror stories. „They say the British Library is the most complete library in
the world,‟ one said. „They keep it that way by not showing anybody the books,‟ and we
tittered self-righteously. You have to get a special reader‟s card to use the British Library,
and with my reader‟s card and my in-jokes I felt like the effete researcher I had always
imagined myself one day being.”
What follows, of course, is inevitable comeuppance, which you can learn about by
reading Defining the Wind.
Part of that little love letter to libraries is of course sentimental – I‟m a sentimental writer.
But part of it is as utilitarian as my love of the physicality of books that helps me
remember where I saw or read something. As I wrote that book I recalled the sources of
whole passages that were otherwise unmoored in memory by remembering which busts
surrounded me when I read them, which type of must – the damp kind or the dusty kind –
characterized the room in which I found them, whether the tables were long and
communal or small, had banker‟s lamps or shaded ones.
Again: books and records are physical objects, and we forget this at our great peril. I‟m
sure eventually the records of the British Met Office will be digitized, and I‟ll be able to

12. Huler Page 12 of 21
find the note describing how one of the people responsible for installing wind vanes lost
his nerve while atop a chimney and had to be coaxed down and read it directly at my
desk, but I think that if I hadn‟t found it in the Met Office, unfolded it, and held it in my
hand, laughing with the Met Office librarians, I would not have got the same information
from it – my understanding would have been qualitatively different, my writing process
changed – my book, in short, not as good.
I realize, of course, that I have slipped into part two of my remarks here: I am telling you
what I want from a library, and you have perceived that in no uncertain terms I want the
library to be the place full of books. I want it to be the place full of things, physical
objects, actual texts. I don‟t think there‟s anything more important a library can do. And
from the bottom of my heart I beg you.
You became librarians for the same reason I became a writer: not wisely but for love.
Don‟t give up that love. Fight for our books. Fight for our reality.
But that doesn‟t mean – not for a second – that I don‟t want my library to have every
electronic resource in the world. I want it to have J-Stor and Lexis/Nexis and everything
else, and I‟m not in the least offended by the fact that in this electronic world I have to go
to the library to use those services. That‟s okay – that‟s how those services control their
information, make sure I pay for them, through library fees or taxes, so the companies
can stay in business. That‟s fine. I use those services. I love their searchability, their
convenience. But I don‟t think they‟re books – and I don‟t think they replace books.

13. Huler Page 13 of 21
And I want your expertise, librarians. I love librarians – deeply, deeply love them, and
not just because they are forever taking off their glasses, shaking out their topknots, and
turning pell-mell into femmes fatales.
I love librarians for what they mean to writers, and the people who become writers. I‟m
talking about Mrs. Horn, my librarian in elementary school, who read us Charlotte‟s Web
and rocked our world, even if the corners of her mouth collected that weird substance
while she read that always reminded me of the picture of the Tyrannosaurus on the cover
of the Golden Book of Dinosaurs. And I‟m talking about my librarian friend Cynthia,
who in my early days as a writer steered me to Gales Encyclopedia of Associations,
which enabled me to fillnotebook after notebook with comments from useful experts – to
say nothing of allowing me to entertainingly drop the names of, say, the Pulverized
Limestone Association or the Desert Tortoise Council.
What I‟m talking about, that is, is expertise. How much time I spend every day trying to
navigate technological and informational straits that for my predecessors would simply
not have existed. They lived in a world of books, not my world of Information. But I have
to wander the webs, with their famous lack of street signs, their Fibber McGee‟s Closet
organizational structure. “Wherever it is, that‟s where it is,” a friend of mine once wrote.
I‟ll never be on top of that. But that‟s okay – you will! You have that job! Do that for me!
I‟m glad to pay for it! I need you to do it. I don‟t know how the hell my computer works,

14. Huler Page 14 of 21
or my car, but I need them both, and I pay for them. I want the same thing from my
library. I want librarians to point me to archives, to online sources, to texts. I want
librarians to show me where to start, to listen when I come up and say, “I found this –
now what?” or, more likely, “I don‟t know how to do it.” And I want them to help me. I
want them to help me find my way around this garden of “information.”
Yet information is just a word, a new word for something as old as humankind, and
we‟ve depended on it from the very start. Whether it‟s in books or databases, information
is something we need – in fact, it‟s something we crave, something we lust for. As a
writer my job is to take facts – data, interviews, observations, “information,” – and turn it
into story. Give it an arc, a frame, a structure. Turn it into a narrative. And so story
becomes my world, narrative my tool. If you‟re a hammer, everything is a nail: if you‟re
a writer, everything is a story. I tell people I‟m a narrative junkie.
And junkie is the right word.That‟s what we humans are: junkies for story. And libraries
are shooting galleries, and the drug their users need is information. Librarians are
pushers, and for the last 500 years or so the gateway drug has been the book. I‟m here to
tell you, from the perspective of an unrepentant user, that we need that drug – we need
the shooting gallery. And we desperately need the pusher. So thisnext request – and
again, think of me begging – is that you never stop pushing that information on us.

15. Huler Page 15 of 21
Now I know, I‟m preaching to the converted, and I hear your cries: the world is changing,
tax revenues are disappearing, needs are metamorphosing; we can‟t simply do what
we‟ve always done.
Okay, who you talking to? Remember – I‟m a writer, a journalist: if anybody‟s world is
changing as quickly as yours is, it‟s mine. I talk to people all the time about those
changes, and how we respond to them. Surely I complain, as most writers do, loudly, and
every single day, about those changes. I used to tell people that as a freelance writer I
spent 40 percent of my time as a salesperson, 30 percent as a dunning agent, 20 percent in
office management, and 10 percent in IT – and in my free time I wrote. And that was
when IT meant learning a bit about a new word processing program or fiddling with a
wonky printer cable.
Now add in Facebook and Twitter and email and Google+ and Wikipedia and ALDaily
and the obligatory two or three blog entries you have to make per week or else according
to one consultant or another you don‟t exist, and … well, and now what? Now freaking
what?
Here‟s what I tell people: That sucks. It completely sucks that the world now expects
writers to do their work for free. But the other thing is: that‟s reality. I don‟t want to be a
post-comet dinosaur refusing to participate in the new dusty-atmosphere ecosystem. “I‟m
against the comet,” that dinosaur says. “The comet is a terrible idea that makes
dinosauring a pale shadow of what it ought to be.” Well, maybe so – but if that‟s your

16. Huler Page 16 of 21
attitude, then lay down and die. I agree – I‟m against the comet too. But my response?
I‟m trying as fast as I can to get small and grow feathers, because like it or not that‟s the
future.
But I don‟t plan to stop eating, or never move, or refuse to participate in any other way.
It‟s a participate or die ecosystem, and I don‟t care to die. Just the same with my work: I
spend so much time every week wrestling with new programs and technologies, learning
to shoot and edit audio and video because the world tells me that‟s what I need to be able
to do now, learning to tweet and update and respond to comments, to blog – which is just
code for writing quickly, for free, without an editor, which I find abhorrent.
But too bad for me – that‟s the world, and if a writer is what I want to be, then I‟d better
find a way to fit in. I‟m right, certainly – most blogging is sloppy and shallow, most
online video and audio content is little more than timewasting. But if people are turning
to their screens for their stories – if that‟s how they get their news – then it doesn‟t matter
whether I would prefer them to wait for newspapers to drop on the doorstep at 4 a.m.
That ship has sailed. Same with books. My wife uses a Nook, I‟ve read books on that, on
her iPod, online, with Google books, every way you can imagine. To be sure, I love a
nice bound book, and as I‟ve said, for purposes of research and true intimate engagement
I think there‟s a lot to be said for a bound book that a digital book cannot equal. But
wishing away the digital? It‟s pointless – and suicidal. It‟s criticizing the comet when
what I need to be doing is getting small and growing feathers.

17. Huler Page 17 of 21
But – not so fast. We certainly need to adapt to the digital. But what we must also do –
what it‟s utterly vital that libraries do, and here I‟m back to my first point – is NOT leave
behind the physical. You don‟t need me to point you towards Nicholson Baker and his
ilk, to their paeans to paper, to the physical, the ephemera, the marginalia. Blake‟s notes
in the works of Reynolds, Melville‟s on the pages of his Emerson. We live in a physical
world, where objects occupy space and have weight: a book has design, and feeling, and
page weight, and coating, all things that help create a good boundary between the
information within the book and the reader getting that information.It smells a certain
way, it feels a certain way. Digital sources can ape that – but they can‟t be that. I‟ve said
many times something not dissimilar to what I quoted Sendak saying: Online porn, for
example, has its uses, but I prefer women.The one is not the other – and it‟s a good thing
to remind ourselves of that. And not just to appreciate the physical, the real, to sing its
praises – but to recognize what it offers that the digital cannot. I beg you: just as you
can‟t refuse to move into the digital world, you mustn‟t forget that the digital world is
only that – a digital representation. It‟s not the thing itself, despite what people tell you.
Don‟t give up on a history of thousands of years of gathering physical texts together just
because Google tells you that you must. Let me promise you: you must not.
Which brings me to perhaps my most important belief, and my final actual suggestion to
librarians. Newspapers, publishers, magazines – all live in a capitalist ecosystem where if
they cannot get people to pay for their products, they go out of business. Libraries, for the
most part, do not. I know it‟s hard to get tax dollars for anything, that you‟re competing
with the sheriff‟s office and trash collection and street paving. That our nation has gone

18. Huler Page 18 of 21
mad, refusing to pay for the services it needs, but the facts remain: Libraries, supported
by tax money, live in a socialist ecosystem and have the opportunity to lead rather than
react.Which is to say: the money you do get? Do library stuff with it. And I am going to
remind you – remember? Not wisely but for love? – that you didn‟t get in this profession
for a nice stable easy life. You got into it to save the world by enabling it to learn about
itself, by managing its information. I must remind you: this is your duty. This is your
obligation. This is why you exist – to help knuckleheads like the public take good care of
their information.
I spoke to librarians as I prepared these remarks and they all told me the same thing. They
didn‟t go to graduate school to be underpaid babysitters for adult crazy people. They do
not want the job of helping computer-illiterate people fill out job applications online.
Everyone agrees that libraries need to retain lotof free computer time, especially as
broadband gets more expensive and providers fight against civic broadband and other
ways civic government tries to provide information access to the people inexpensively.
The library is the only place people can fight back.
But the librarian‟s job should be helping people find information with that access, not
helping them get jobs or update their Facebook pages. That‟s a community center, a job
center, not a library. “But,” one librarian told me, “that‟s the only way we can make our
contribution now.”

19. Huler Page 19 of 21
Wrong. If that‟s what the library is going to be you might as well add a needle exchange
and a food pantry. We‟re going to need lots of those in the coming awful years, but I
don‟t think the library is the place to go for that.
The library is the place you go for books. For information. For a librarian who knows
how to help you find out more about Aristophanes or Eisenhower or Lady Gaga, about
gay marriage or the strange quark. The library is a cathedral: much more than the Capitol
or the White House, our country stores its life in the Library of Congress. That‟s where
the best of us is – and it‟s real, and it exists, and all you need is a driver‟s license and
you‟re allowed to go inside and see it.
I know that idiot county governments measure library effectiveness by idiot door counts,
completely missing that a library does its task when it finds that one piece of information
for that one special researcher, that one engaged citizen. And I know that when door
counts go down, dopes are going to tell you that libraries have to be something else –
they have to be coffee shops, or employment centers, or community centers, or bowling
alleys. But they shouldn‟t. They should be libraries – the place with the books – and they
should get better at it. William Greenleaf Elliot, founder of Washington University,
where I went to college, said that it‟s nice to educate a thousand people to the usual
standard of scholarship. But the true model of a university is to find that one special
student and help him or her achieve an education above and beyond that standard. Not
surprisingly that university was filled with students who each thought they were that
person.

20. Huler Page 20 of 21
Libraries have the same task – to reach for that special connection. While they‟re about it
they can easily help the average customer find the average bestseller, the Encyclopedia
Britannica or Wikipedia, the newest search program or the newest incarnation of “Angry
Birds.” But libraries have a great marketing strategy – hey, it‟s the place with all the
books! Everybody gets that! Don‟t let go of that. Don‟t stop being the book place. That‟s
where I want to go when I‟m looking for help, for information, for understanding. I want
to go to the place with all the books.
Again – I know you‟re trying to do not just more with less but fifty new things a day with
less, and at least 48 of those new things are things libraries probably ought not to do, and
they were thought up not by librarians but by politicians. And I know your funding is
vanishing. And I know it makes sense to keep accommodating, to try to keep being
libraries in your spare time while trying to satisfy whatever politician is currently pulling
the strings.
But I also know that libraries are in trouble because as a people we are lost. And when
people are lost, the very few wise ones among them start asking for directions – they turn
to sources of information to learn what to do. When the people come in looking for help,
do you really want to greet them with a job application? Wouldn‟t you rather greet them
with – well, with what you know about that I don‟t?

21. Huler Page 21 of 21
We‟re lost; we‟re all going down. The energy is vanishing, the sea is rising, the money is
gone. We‟re all going down. We can‟t pretend otherwise. But I‟m going down fighting.
I‟m a writer, and I‟m going down telling stories, organizing information: being a writer.
Don‟t you want to go down protecting the books?
You want to increase door count? Sell beer. You want to be good libraries? Develop
collection. Get new tools. Be smart. Do what libraries have always done.
We‟re lost. We don‟t know where to turn. Steve Jobs is dead, and he was the last one
who knew what was going on. But maybe, if you keep refusing to let circumstances turn
you into something other than librarians, when the next Steve Jobs comes to you, you‟ll
be able to help.