For eight years my job was to make things findable. I want to make a slightly grand claim about that and then undercut it.
The grand claim
A library card is the cheapest passport ever issued. It costs nothing, it admits you to a building that is warm and free and expects nothing of you, and it grants access to a collection that no individual could assemble and no algorithm curates. In a period of my life when I had very little money it was, straightforwardly, the most valuable thing in my wallet.
The undercut
Libraries are not neutral and the collection is not the world. Somebody chose what is on those shelves, working within a budget, a policy, and a set of assumptions about the community they serve. I spent eight years being one of the somebodies. We did our best and we were wrong about plenty.
The archive I worked in held four hundred years of provincial records, and the thing you notice after a while is not what is in it. It is the shape of the holes — whose land transactions were recorded and whose were not, which names got a full entry and which got a line.
What this does to a reader
It makes you ask, of any collection, who assembled it and what they left out. That question applies to a library, to a syllabus, to a bookshop’s front table, and to the recommendation algorithm that has replaced all three for most people.
The difference is that a library’s decisions were made by a person with a name, a budget line, and a policy you could go and read. I do not think libraries are better than algorithms because their choices are wiser. I think they are better because their choices are accountable, and can be argued with at a public meeting.
Get the card. Then complain to them about the collection. Both parts.