This is a Clever Blog Title

Dear London Public Library,

I would like to complain about the abysmal internet you offer to your visitors. It is truly some of the worst internet I have ever used. When you have 70 or so people scattered throughout the library on laptops, all using the same internet connection, things tend to get bogged down — and that is why I’m writing this open letter to you. Once you get a few people on the network at the same time, it’s like using dial-up. Just loading Google itself takes 2 minutes.

And to that you may say, “well the internet is free, its open for anyone to use — where do you have the right to complain about it, you aren’t paying for it.” True, very true. But at the same time, why offer this service if it’s completely inept at working, let alone functioning at all. Faster internet isn’t that expensive, or hard to implement.

Look at Fanshawe for example. Hundreds of students all over campus, on laptops, and iPods, and other internet devices, all using one giant campus-wide network. It’s always consistently quick (albeit the odd time.) You can’t offer that to the small number of people who are using the internet to read the news and check emails? (Or Tumblr?)

C’mon…

The Archives collection at Westerns Weldon Library currently holds 1.5 million negatives from the London Free Press. All of the Free Press’ photographs from 1938 to 1992 — an incredible plethora of London history archived for safekeeping. 

Unfortunately, all of the photos are also locked away in cold storage where no one can see them. I mean, you can see them, but you have to tell them a day or two in advance which exact negatives you want to look at so they can take them out of cold storage and have them ready for you to look at. If they aren’t what you wanted, you have to do it all over again.

If you don’t know which negatives you want, you have to go down to D.B. Weldon, and flip through page after page of text — indexes that summarize all the photographs in the collection. Needless to say, this isn’t a very visually pleasing way of finding what you want to look at.

If you want to use any of the photos, say scan them for use in a project - or say you want to post them on your blog so you can show people (hello!) - you have to pay money — something like $5-10 per image. If you want to use them for anything, you have to pay even more money. Which is understandable, they have to make money some how, but even so. It seems like they want to tack on a fee for just about anything.

No wonder most of London is ignorant of this massive photo collection — Western Library is just sitting on it. I understand they have a small staff, and that digitizing 1.5 million negatives would be an immense undertaking, but in the long run it would be beneficial. Instead of having to take negatives out of cold storage, people could just look at the digitized versions for the ones they want, eliminating any change of negative damage. Also, with the internet, people would be able to look at London history from their own computers in a way that has never before been available.

And with a continual amount of images coming in that would also need to be digitized, you think even starting the process would be better than nothing — at the current rate the negatives are just piling up. Before you know it, they will have to scan even more negatives.

London history, in one word, is hidden. Locked away in a freezer. Oh how I wish it wasn’t so.

This post was hashed out yesterday while sitting in the DB Weldon library at UWO. Starting as some obscure thought, it mutated into the diatribe you see before you.

Sitting in Weldon library you come to realize one thing; that the amount of writing happening before your eyes is of an excess one has a hard time comprehending. Just in “Room B” amongst the periodicals, there are probably about 40 students, all typing, researching, and reading away; jotting down notes and writing down sentences.

But where does it all go? There are hundreds if not thousands of words being written and typed in this room alone. It baffles the mind to think that there are a multitude of rooms on the 5 other floors of this building, all with even more students doing the exact same thing. 

Where will all this writing go? Where will all the jot notes end up? How much of said jot notes will even wind up being included in the final product? If I had to guess, not all of it, which means that there is a large quantity of discarded research just going into the wastebasket.

Take the forty students in this room, and multiply it by (if I had to guess) at least 20, if not more, and you would get the number of students writing, jotting, highliting, typing, etcetera in just the DB Weldon library.

A plethora of words and writings, which will ultimately be, what? Where will this large accumulation of literature end up and what value will it have even brought into the lives of its writers?

All of these words and papers will be read by a professor, graded, and then (most likely) discarded. In a majority of cases, it will all probably be forgotten over the course of their future lifetime. Hours upon hours of researching ultimately forgotten; the time spent just frittered away on something that wouldn’t last, nay remembered.

The caffeine flows through the veins of the students as they try to spend even more time finishing their work so it can be handed in before the deadline, because apparently all this work means something, and will somehow add to their future lives.

Either that or they are all just wasting time another way; socializing without really socializing on the time sucker known as Facebook.

I feel that I am becoming a book nerd; not because I am a major aficionado of books or anything, just because I find myself spending more and more time in the downtown Library than I used to. (I’ve been here 3 days in a row - including part of last week! Soon people, instead of saying I don’t go to the library enough, will be saying I go there too much!)

I used to have this negative association with the library based off of past experiences. Whenever I came to the library, it was always to study for a project or something (and this was like, Grade 4. At the time, we didn’t have Internet, so we came to the library to study and use the computer terminals.)

Because of this, whenever I would think of the library, I would think of sitting at that lone computer terminal, forced to go on websites and frantically write down notes. I never came to the library to get books out, or to read, so I never saw the library that way. I only saw it as a place where time was wasted toiling away in front of a monitor.

Lately however, that’s begun to change. I’ve found books that I want to read and, much like I frantically wrote down notes, I’ve been frantically signing out books I want to read so I don’t forget the names of them. That, and so no one else can take the book I want out.

Problem is, I keep finding books that I want to read; and I know I can’t read them, because I have a queue line of other books that I have yet to read from days past. Right now, I have 6 books signed out of the library, and all of them I signed out with the intention to read - which was a totally stupid thing to do.

I can’t keep up. Mainly, because I can’t read fast. But that’s just me.

I have a reputation for not picking up a book. I have a reputation for not reading, which is totally unfounded, because I read news up the wazoo during the day (which would explain why I don’t have time to read a book.)

My sister used to come to the library on a near-daily basis to do homework and other things, so I can see the allure of the library. It has a nicer atmosphere than my bedroom; its very open and bright and knowledge filled. You can’t help but come in here and want to read or do work. Must be the feng shui of the place or something.

MT