Ann E. Michael is writing coordinator at DeSales University, and a poet. She blogs on poetry, nature, philosophy — and sometimes libraries — at www.annemichael.wordpress.com.

“..Like many avid readers, I’ve been engaging with texts since I teethed on my first book of nursery rhymes. So I admit to a strong bias toward the presence of real books in real library buildings. My students, however, seldom enter their freshman year having spent hours browsing the stacks and need the physical experience of libraries and bookshelves. New college students have grown up with forms of information gathering that provide quick and unreflective answers, which is what the high-school system urges them to do. They have no coaching in how to research the less-than-obvious, the open-ended. No one has yet demonstrated to them how to branch beyond one text, to synthesize, to object, or to change perspective. Some of them have never stood, befuddled and overwhelmed, in a library aisle. Students benefit when instructors force them into the stacks. The tall rows of silent spines may be intimidating, but they also open up possibilities and discoveries. The curious, inquisitive, emotional human mind — which is not an algorithm seeking one specific text or trained upon one set of parameters only — can find on those shelves a physical object that provides something unavailable through virtual technologies. It can lead a person astray. It can challenge what we think we know and then it can suggest another book, another author, a further shift in point of view. It can be a beautiful object in and of itself, with visual and tactile aspects unavailable in virtual form…”