Back in those halcyon pre-Oxford days, the library was a place one might quite easily walk past every day for twenty years and never enter. Local libraries entertain a smattering of blue-haired old women seeking out the latest Mills or Boon and a couple of over-eager children with a lack of social life; they have never been exactly one for pulling in the masses. At university, though, things change. Much as we hate to admit it, the Bodleian is quite simply the place to be.
With its grand total of 38 libraries, and over 6.5 million books kept in those mysterious, Harry Potter-esque caverns stretching under Broad Street alone, the academic reasons for paying the odd visit to an Oxford library seem pretty obvious. What magnetic force, however, has us working there non-stop is a rather more difficult egg to crack. Is it simply the rather sadistic pleasure we get in seeing that it’s not only we who are desperately attempting to struggle through Ulysses before Monday morning? Or is it a staged mating ritual in which sitting opposite someone in the library provides the perfect opportunity for that inter-college branching the club situation can’t always provide?
There’s certainly an element of voyeurism involved in library working; more than one of us has whiled our morning away wondering if the girl sitting on the far corner got her coat from Topshop, or debating whether the student opposite’s use of colour pens could benefit one’s own work ethic. At the same time, however, the library forces us to work without the temptations inherent in working in one’s rooms; it is, at least theoretically, rather more difficult in a library to a) spend half your day on facebook b) have a massive tantrum about one’s workload or c) talk to one’s current flame on the phone for an hour (though all, I will declare from eyewitness evidence, have been managed by certain individuals within library premises at least once.)
From that first anxious trip to the intimidating industrial-sized photocopier, to that tentative attempt to negotiate the purgatory of telnet and make a stack request, Oxford libraries are certainly – for the novice at least – a habit which is at first hard to understand. By the end of your first year, however, be assured that you will return home as a hardened library snob, happy to march into your local library and express contempt over their lack of copies of whatever obscure text is on your summer reading list. Now, isn’t that a nice thought?
