Things I am learning working in Delhi's libraries

Indian innovation with the decimal point continues. You may have been told, at some point, that the decimal system, with its use of zeros as place holders, was developed here on the Subcontinent. What you may not know is that exciting innovations in number-punctuation-hybridization continue in India’s system of university libraries. Where each institution – and sometimes each collection – is busy developing an entirely unique ordinal system. These innovations are possible thanks to a willingness to use multiple decimal points, high variability in the length of alphabetical and numerical strings between punctuation marks, special capitalization systems, semi-colons, and even quotation marks. Allowing endless organizational variety, with each library’s ordering system as unique as a snowflake. The most advanced systems seem to be based on fractal mathematics, containing as they do a persuasive suggestion of repetition and regularity while, in actuality, not corresponding to any pattern discernable through the use of primitive Euclidean mathematical tools.

My high school library was kind of a joke. I find the contents of the University of Delhi’s library, in particular, rather discouraging. Because they seem to be pretty short on the kind of sources that contain the sort of raw, complete information that is the straw for research brick making. Instead, the library is long on the kind of sources that give predigested and massively abridged summaries of various concepts. So, for example, the library only has a scattering of the annual reports of most government offices, but they have whole bunches of encyclopedias and Ready Reference guides.

What this all really took me back to is the days of writing research papers in grade school and high school – when research really meant looking up what somebody else already came up with. (Real research, of course, is writing what somebody else already came up with; realizing this only after-the-fact; and then inventing a reason why what you’ve done is, despite appearances, totally new). And it just sort of reminded me of all the things I thought were terribly intellectual when I was growing up – like Star Trek (watched by nerds = smart people = people who would know great art). Ah, youth!

Sometimes the best place to study Indian linguistic minorities is Dixie. Ironically, you know who has a complete run of the government report I was trying to find at University of Delhi? Johns Hopkins. That makes me feel very foolish.

Dust is dirt. In movies about searching out the secret to Jesus’s progeny or the Temple of the Crescent Moon, dusty libraries always have a powdery sort of look. A character pulls out an obscure book and blow on it, sending forth a grayish cloud of accumulated matter.

This is NOT how really dusty books actually work, at least not here. This dust is not some talcum powdering of antiquarian charm. This is grime. Blowing on this dust dislodges nothing. Though one’s hands and clothing (and backpack and school supplies and lunch) do become dirty when put in contact with such a book, the total quantity of muck on the book is only imperceptibly altered and much of the text remains obscured by brown film.

The great unsung heroes of the history of human knowledge are the indexers. Honestly, I don’t know how anyone ever found anything before electronic search. But what few scraps of information were retrieved in those dark times was thanks to the superhuman tolerance for boredom and/or crippling struggle with obsessive compulsive disorder of the press clippers, the book review filers, the bibliography annotators, and the reference editors of yesteryear.