Ode To Librarianship

A Bio-Bibliographical Essay

[Translation and update of “Oda a la Bibliotecologia”

originally published by the author in Spanish in 1993.]

by David Leslie Kent, 2005

To be a librarian is to live among giants. Among these giants who have enjoyed the pleasure of working in libraries are Jorge Luis Borges, Carlos Fuentes, Pablo Neruda and S. R. Ranganathan, the father of librarianship in India. Librarianship has taken on the responsibility of advancing the work of caring for and making available the collective memory of humanity, indispensable work for world advancement. I am proud to live among such giants.

Even before becoming a librarian books had always played a supremely important role in my life. The encounter with the ideas books contain has caused unexpected twists and turns in my life. For example, a book called Christ’s Alternative to Communism by E. Stanley Jones made me question whether the biblical precept to love all human beings was incompatible with war and military training to kill some of those human beings. When the government of the United States ordered me to pay military service and wanted to train me to kill human beings in Vietnam, I refused. The government had to choose between sending me to jail or sending me to perform two years of alternative service in a hospital. Because I had read Jones’ book I spent two years doing alternative service in a hospital instead of two years killing human beings in the jungles of Vietnam.

When I read Gandhi’s Autobiography my life changed again. Many know Gandhi for his campaigns of passive nonviolent resistance. I focused on his lesser known constructive action program where Gandhi speaks doing work to satisfy the basic necessities of clothing, food, and housing. Because I read Gandhi’s book I left a clerical job and decided to build houses for people. I studied carpentry for a year and joined the carpenter’s union. I worked hard for a year, exposed to the cold northern winds. Then, because I read Five Laws of Library Science by S.R. Ranganathan, I decided to become a librarian, where my clumsiness would not result in smashed fingers.

After five years of university work I graduated with a Masters degree in Librarianship. Once again, for the good fortune of discovering the book, Meditation: The Art of Ecstacy by Osho, my life turned upside down. Osho and Ken Wilber are the most prolific and brilliant authors I have read in the last fifty years. Osho was a philosophy professor at Jabalpur University and has more than 300 large, heavy books in English, many of which are translated into other languages. Osho’s books are about westerners like Nietzche, Socrates, Pythagoras as well as easterners like Buddha, Lao Tzu, Kabir, and hundreds of other teachers, wise ones, and mystics. Because I read his book I decided to go to India to meet Osho and meet myself through meditation techniques he taught me. Through meditation and through living in India I found myself in a world completely different from the world of the Americas and the world of Europe.

Being a librarian has led me to explore previously unknown worlds, such as India and Colombia, as well as previously unknown interior landscapes. My profession as librarian and the books I have encountered have helped me to know the world and know myself in countless ways. I am a Hoosier farm boy who grew up next to Indiana cornfields. As such my experiences and my horizons were limited. Through books, and their influence in my life, new worlds have opened.

Today we live in a world flooded with information. More than seven thousand articles are published daily and more than 100,000 books are published annually, and the majority of those publications are not available full-text on the unorganized, unevaluated World Wide Web. They are cataloged and available through the world’s libraries. The field of librarianship is in the vanguard of finding ways to manage such a flow of information. Using new technology librarians labor to satisfy new needs for information. Thanks to librarians, for example, scientists can find the scholarly research needed to advance knowledge in the various fields of medicine. The same with engineers, lawyers, students, and everyone who does research to take advantage of the stores of human knowledge organized through the work of librarians. Google Scholar, in Nov. 2004, invited us to “stand on the shoulders of giants.” Those librarians, with whom I am privileged to be able to share, are giants who contribute to the development of humanity.

Works Mentioned

Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand. Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth. Translated from the original in Gujarati by Mahadev Desai. Boston: Beacon Press, 1957.

Jones, Stanley Eli. Christ’s Alternative to Communism. New York: Abingdon Press, 1935.

Osho. Meditation: The Art of Ecstasy. New York: Harper & Row, 1976.

Ranganathan, Shiyali Ramamrita. Five Laws of Library Science. Madras: The Madras Library Association, 1931.

Page last updated by dlk on 31-Jul-07