I miss the library.

Gonna date myself a bit here, but I miss going to the library to research a topic, looking it up in the encyclopedia, then finding different references, looking them up in the card catalog, and finding books I wasn’t even looking for in the section I found myself in. It was an amazing experience, and a great way to gain knowledge. Internet searches are super convenient, don’t get me wrong, and being able to just google something to win an argument is pretty spiffy. But seriously, I miss those days. I think I might take a trip to the library sometime soon to do some research for a post I started on human intellect.

But honestly, there’s something to be said for going to a library and picking up different books on a topic, and sometimes winding up reading about something that you never intended to begin with. When I was a kid, during the summer I used to walk to the library from my house, about a mile away, and just spend hours there researching and reading whatever was on my mind that day. It was awesome. Sometimes, I would convince my mother to drop me off at the big library a couple of towns over before she went to work, and I read books, I looked at microfiche and microfilm (they didn’t have that stuff at the tiny library by my house). I would spend all day there and beg my mom (usually not successfully) to bring me back later in the week.

I dunno. Convenience is great, but only to an extent. I’m in a class now to earn my CPIM designation. I work with people who got that designation 20+ years ago, and the format was very different then. And I can’t help but think that the knowledge they acquired is more robust than what I’m being offered. Yes, you can condense information to accelerate the process, but there are nuances in expanded formats that offer knowledge in their own right. And I may not be getting that….

Anyway, this post is a tangent from what I was working on (human intellect), and I think serves to fill my quota of randomness for the day. It’s after 10 and I need to get to bed.

Adieu.