Score One for the Seattle Public Library
March 25th, 2005Laura Lemay tells a story:
“Well it so happened that there had been a particular book I had read when I was a kid that had deeply freaked me out. I had been looking for this one book ever since but I had forgotten the author, the title, and most of the plot. Others had read this same book — I had had conversations about it on usenet and on various BBSes and I was not the only out who had been way affected by it, but none of us could remember any details about it. I had done web searches about it over the years and nothing had turned up. So when the Seattle Public Library bragged about being able to answer any question, I immediately thought of my mystery book.”
“We were staying at the hotel across the street from the library, so I went back on a quiet afternoon and wandered over to the children’s section. ‘I’m looking for a book,’ I explained to the librarian. ‘Published probably in the 70’s, about a psychological experiment done on teenagers. They are imprisoned in a maze and have to dance in order to get food pellets. It was a really dark book. There were escher-like stairs on the cover.’
“The librarian tilted her head sideways for a moment and said ‘That sounds like William Sleator.’ She typed something into the computer and then read off to me: ‘House of Stairs: Five sixteen-year-old orphans of widely varying personality characteristics are involuntarily placed in a house of endless stairs as subjects for a psychological experiment on conditioned human response.’”
“Well, I’ll be damned. Less than a minute to solve a problem I had been working on for twenty years. Score one for the Seattle Public Library.”
Psst. SPL. Create a testimonials page and make this the first entry. Make sure that the people who pay the bills know how much you are appreciated. Don’t let stories like this go unnoticed. Heck, take an extra step. Set up a PubSub subscription for your library and see who is talking about you.