"How to organize a public library"

From How to travel with a salmon and other essays, by Umberto Eco.

Post dedicated to the rambling librarian of Singapore.

1. The various catalogues must be housed as far apart as possible from
one another. All care must be taken to separate the catalogue of books
from that of periodicals, and these two from the catalogue by subject;
similarly, the recent acquisitions must be kept well away from older
collections. If possible, the spelling in the two catalogues (recent
acquisitions and older collections) must be different. In the recent
acquisitions, for example, "pajama" should be spelled with an "a", in
the older, "pyjama" with a "y". "Chaikovskii" in recent acquisitions
will follow the Library of Congress system; in the older catalogue the
name will be spelled in the old-fashioned way, with "Tch".

2. The subjects must be determined by the librarian. On their
copyright pages the books must bear no indication of the subjects under
which they are to be listed.

3. Call numbers should be impossible to decipher and, if possible, very
complex, so that anyone filling out a call slip will never have room to
include the last line of numbers and will assume they are irrelevant.
Then the desk attendant will hand the slip back to him with the
admonition to fill it out properly.

4. The time between request and delivery must be as long as possible.

5. Only one book should be released at a time.

6. The books distributed by the attendant after the request form has
been properly submitted cannot be taken into the reference room, so the
scholars must divide their working life into two fundamental aspects:
reading on the one hand, and reference consultation on the other. The
library must discourage, as conducive to strabismus, any crossover
tendencies or attempts at the simultaneous reading of several books.

7. Insofar as possible, no photocopier should be available; if such a
machine does exist, access to it must be made very time-consuming and
toilsome, fees should be higher than those in any neighborhood copy
shop, and the maximum number of copied pages permitted should not exceed
two or three.

8. The librarian must consider the reader an enemy, a waster of time
(otherwise he or she would be at work), and a potential thief.

9. The reference librarian's office must be impregnable.

10. Loans must be discouraged.

11. Interlibrary loans must be impossible or, at best, must require
months. The ideal course, in any event, is to ensure the impossibility
of discovering the contents of other libraries.

12. Given this policy, theft must be very easy.

13. Opening hours must coincide precisely with local office hours,
determined by foresighted discussion with trade union officials and the
Chamber of Commerce; total closing on Saturday, Sunday, evenings and
mealtimes goes without saying. The library's worst enemy is the
employed student; its best friend is Thomas Jefferson, someone who has a
large personal library and therefore no need to visit the public library
(to which he may nevertheless bequeath his books at his death).

14. It must be impossible to find any refreshment inside the library,
under any circumstances; and it must also be impossible to leave the
library to seek sustenance elsewhere without first returning all books
in use, so that, after having a cup of coffee, the student must fill out
requests for them again.

15. It must be impossible on a given day to find the book one had been
using the day before.

16. It must be impossible to learn who has a book that is currently on
loan.

17. If possible, no restrooms.

18. Ideally, the reader should be unable to enter the library. If he
does actually enter, exploiting with tedious insistence a right, granted
on the basis of the principles of 1789, that has nevertheless not been
assimilated by the collective sensibilty, he must never ever -- with the
exception of rapid visits to the reference shelves -- be allowed access
to the sanctum of the stacks.