Lessons of the Music Library

A wise man reads both books and life itself--Lin Yutang

THERE ARE several lessons to be learned from the Edna Kuhn Loeb Library. The library's size and location relative to surrounding buildings suggests one lesson.

The library is located in the North Yard, off Oxford street--literally, in the shadow of the new Science Center.

Read the three-dimensional, multi-million dollar message--in this age science and technology are more important than the humanities.

We prefer to spend billions of dollars on a rock-collecting excursion to the moon rather than feeding and clothing people on earth.

Another lesson from the music library--although students, faculty, and administrators sometimes appear to be the most important part of the university, without the libraries and the people who run them, the University would not exist.

Every week hundreds of scholars and would-be scholars pass through library doors in search of the humanizing influence of music and music literature. Sometimes the human beings who make it all possible are taken for granted.

People keep the records, catalogue the books, order new books and records, paste down the bookplates, send paperbacks to the bindery, hunt down missing books, put books back on the shelf.

People sift through the mountains of literature and recordings that are published each year and decide what is important and what isn't.

People determine what books and what knowledge will be available.