Something strange has happened to libraries over the sixty years I’ve been using them. I remember, as a child, visiting public libraries and thinking of them in the same ways as I thought of churches. Like churches, mosques and temples, they seemed to be spaces of knowledge that gave access to another, transcendent world. They demanded reverence: they were impressive buildings, cool, with high ceilings, and filled with silence. My life story wends its way through libraries. The first that made an impression on me was the beautiful modernist public library in Poole in Dorset that I visited at weekends as a teenager. I’d pass its newspaper room with its reading racks a window onto national and international affairs, and then go through to the general borrowing section with rows upon rows of books. I remember reading Tolkien’s The Hobbit, and then moving on to The Lord of The Rings. The first volume, The Fellowship of the Ring, was checked out, and so I started on the second, struggling, without the internet or any other aids, to catch up with the narrative. When I took my A levels I’d study in the reference section, up a wide, expansive staircase from the main floor. I did a project on the Renaissance, and I remember using a photocopier for the first time, a huge machine the size of a small car that spit out distorted black-and-white images of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

As an undergraduate in London in the early 1980s, I haunted Birkbeck College Library. It was near to University College London, where I studied as an undergraduate, but also far enough away to avoid distracting meetings with faculty or classmates. I could easily find a study desk by the window, looking out through the leaves – and in winter, bare branches – of the plane trees into Malet Street below. As a graduate student at the University of Florida, I wrote up my thesis in the cool redbrick gothic fantasy of the Smathers Library, which was then devoted entirely to children’s literature. At the University of British Columbia, studying for my doctorate, I would spend time clambering up and down the narrow metal staircases in the Main Library stacks, but then having found my books and journal issues I’d take them off to study at the private library in the penthouse of the Graduate Centre at Theo Koerner House, with its views through cedar trees to Burrard Inlet. By the time I came to Singapore as a faculty member I had my own office, and thus spent less time in the libraries at NIE and NUS. I began to travel to do archival research, to the British Library, still at that time housed under the dome of the British Museum, with a complicated series of slips the counter staff insisted be filled out in a particular way. Among many other research libraries on five continents, I remember in particular the library at Teen Murti Bhavan in Delhi, the warren of shelves at the University of Fort Hare in South Africa, and the Berg Collection in the New York Public Library. Researchers there sat at desks in full view of a glass door, and we were treated as the inmates of a zoo to visitors on Library tours, gawping at us and taking photographs. 

In Vancouver, I now move between SFU’s Belzberg Library in the downtown Harbour Centre Building, and the libraries at UBC, forty minutes’ cycle ride uphill from the West End. I wander between the different branches there, but I’ve a particular fondness for the Law Library in Allard Hall, its wood and brushed aluminum luxury surely supported by alumni donations, with its views over Burrard Inlet, and the Music, Art, and Architecture Library, housed in the rebuilt Central Library building, and featuring a reconstructed Ridington Room with portraits of past University presidents. Yet I do miss two things from the research libraries of my past life: silence, and books, those elements that mark of the library as a distinctive space, a kind of Foucauldian heterotopia.

The lack of silence in contemporary libraries comes from a positive development: they have become more democratic spaces. Public libraries have taken on a larger social role, and university libraries now feature areas for discussion, cooperation, and consultation, as well as facilities for engaging with and indeed creating non-print media. Yet I wonder also if the noise in the library is caused by another change: our growing inability to read deeply or focus. There’s often a buzz of conversation from one table. At another, someone will be making a zoom call, wearing headphones, but blissfully unaware of the volume of their own voice. I bring my own noise-cancelling headphones, as many library users do: if I can, I look for the few remaining designated quiet spaces within the library, and work there.

The second change, though, is more difficult to overcome. There are fewer books in libraries. At both NUS and UBC, I’ve seen them vanish over the years. At UBC many have been placed in storage, and can be accessed by an online ordering system that frequently breaks down. Whole floors of NUS library, too, are now devoted to workstations for students; enter the narrow aisles between bookcases of the Singapore Malaysia Collection, which has moved twice in the thirty years I’ve been using the library, and you step back into an almost forgotten world. I do, of course, access documents online: I read almost all scholarship now in digital format. Yet I still find the serendipity of open access library shelves crucial to research. You search for a book you’ve located in the catalogue, and when you struggle to find it you come across unanticipated treasures on the same shelf. 

In Singapore, I’m lucky to still have access to an old-fashioned library at ISEAS Yusof Ishak Institute. It’s a little way from the centre of campus: I need to walk up the hill at Heng Mui Keng Terrace, cross through the foyer with its koi point and bookstore, walk down an open corridor and I’m there. It’s a relatively small building, but its three floors of shelves are bursting with books. Above all, it’s silent. Researchers cluster at the microfilm reader, or the workstations on the ground floor that give access to the archival material in ISEAS’s possession. Take the lift or the stairs to the higher floors and you’re alone, or in the company of other readers as intensely committed as yourself. Librarians are easy to find and incredibly helpful.  And then, as you’re leaving, there’s a final ritual, long superseded elsewhere. You bring the books you want to borrow to the front desk. The counter staff takes them and scans your card, and then takes out one of those long forgotten date stamp machines, inks it, and then stamps the due date carefully in the back of each book. It’s a final tactile gesture in an increasingly virtual world, and you walk out of the door weighed down by books but with your spirit somehow lightened.