The world is joyously complex

So if there’s one overarching lesson that I’m learning as I study to officially become a librarian, it’s that the world is complex, but, to me at least, joyously so.

It’s complex, but there’s a richness to complexity.

Librarianship, or at least its current and admittedly still-evolving definition for me, is ultimately about helping making sense of the world, but without diluting it or oversimplifying it. It’s about seeing the world from as wide a point of view as possible, while still acknowledging our own biases and perspectives. Information and knowledge, but in a context. A collective pool of the things we know, or think we know, to support the collective act of humans existing as social beings.

The debates ongoing in librarianship around classification and discovery, censorship and access, allocation of resources and project priorities… issues that I suspect most library patrons rarely encounter directly… they strike at the roots of what it means to be human.

It’s fascinating.

Even as I work to catalogue my personal library, the complexity involved has me revisiting and revising and rearranging books as an experiment in miniature of the larger issues being tackled by my profession. And as I begin to practice a more formal kind of librarianship with the small collection that I steward, for my tiny group of patrons – my Books & Bricks Irregulars, I am struck at the richness even in this small sample of people and books.

I have no idea what this means in the grand scheme of things — my existential angst, made all the sharper by the pandemic, has by no means been resolved — but my sense of being called to holistic librarianship has never been stronger.

To borrow a phrase and philosophy from my choir, another richness of people and printed things, I am okay with ambiguity. And in librarianship, that ambiguity is fully a feature.

I (try to) organize, therefore I (most likely) am.

You can check out my corner of this world at The Catalogue Projects over at the Butterflies & Aliens Library of Literary Eccentricities & Rarities.