Browsing the remote corners of the university library is a unique joy

As this chain of Covid lockdowns spins towards its first birthday, I’ve discovered that I really miss browsing. Not the fervid doom-scrolling of online resources in search of anything that might improve my mood with a momentary jolt of serotonin, but real browsing – the sensual act of wandering through the quiet stacks of a library while half-looking for something. In reality, the alleged target is often just an excuse; the real magic is stumbling on the unexpected.

I’ve been thinking a lot – well, probably too much – recently about some of the great libraries I’ve explored during my career. Libraries mighty and humble, new and old, famous and obscure; I’ve found that each has a feel, an atmosphere, even a unique smell. Perhaps needless to say, I have favourites. Like the tiny town library on an island off the coast of Massachusetts, a charmed place of Victorian stone arches and cast-iron spiral staircases, where on a freezing December night the smell of hot dust on the heating pipes rose like a rich tobacco as I explored their collection of exotically weird local ephemera.

More dramatic, yet equally idiosyncratic, is the Hoover Institution Library at Stanford University. Deep in the heart of Silicon Valley, this cathedral-like white tower is remarkable in having 12 floors but hardly any windows. To enjoy the view at its best you need to be escorted by elevator up to the observation deck, a task performed with relish by student volunteers. “Hi! My name is Troy, and I will be your guide for the next 98 seconds…” my urbane guide announced gleefully as we hurtled skywards. Here, beside the muted bells of the carillon, you can gaze out across an encroaching technical landscape ironically determined to supplant books as a core medium.

Closer to home, the UK university libraries I’ve visited have, without exception, hosted fascinating treasures in their less frequented corners. Some of the choicest selections can be found where colleges have merged, or collections of material have been gifted from vanishing institutions. These are often relegated to a less accessible floor or annex – where the shelves are of an older, greyly utilitarian design. Here, where the lack of footfall leaves the carpet tiles with that wiry scrunch of antique newness, real trophies can be found.

Some, with the rosy tint of hindsight, are remarkably poignant. Rafts of forgotten lives haunt these stacks, often career scientists who spent decades in careful, meticulous collection of data which they then tabulated, analysed and published in mighty tomes with deeply troubling titles like Annals of the Empire Soil Evaluation Unit – Africa (East). I suspect few of these century-old sources have been digitised, let alone read – yet some contain gems such as long runs of meteorological data whose new value in climate modelling may be enormous.

Others are curios of a different stamp. Wildly impressive, heavily glossy and subtly printed colour reports from more recent decades celebrating modest international conferences. Professionally photographed, they capture brief, happy days in the summer sunshine for the lucky few who contributed to the ultra-niche field represented. Looking at the smiling faces I wondered how their lives connected, what they are doing now – and where the organisers got the money from.

Then there are the buff archive boxes, hosting the not-quite-ephemeral offcuts of academia – well-intentioned journals that failed to stagger beyond the first few numbers and never got bound. Today, they lurk ignominiously together, dismissively labelled “Vol. 1, Parts 1-3 – Incomplete”. What hopes did the editors have? What happened to them when Part 4 hit the wall and never made it to the printers? Hundreds of tiny, possibly tragic, puzzles lie in these bland coffins – as these unloved orphans still wait for a future that may never come.

I miss all of them.

Don’t get me wrong, academic libraries and their subject teams have done an insanely great job over the past year – building efficient click-and-collect services at an impressive pace and keeping access to knowledge flowing – but the user experience is inevitably that of the fast-food drive-through, and sadly leaves some familiar needs unsatisfied. What I want, and I haven’t found it yet, is an online system that supports pseudo-random rambling through unseen resources in a way that gives the same joy of discovery as a stroll through the academic library.

I’m sure that someone, somewhere has a virtual reality game engine that could be morphed into this role with the addition of new scenery and datasets. Instead of zombies leaping out at you, to be beaten away with a worryingly authentic array of weaponry, collated volumes could glide forward towards you in response to some personally tuned algorithm and gently offer hints of their hidden bounty. Individual journal parts might lift from the display rack like butterflies and flap invitingly towards you, flipping their pages engagingly to an article that might suit your mood. Carefully tuned olfactory notes of floor polish, hot radiator and distressed bindings seeping from the headset might go some way to making this wholesome experience even more sensually complete.

Well, it’s a dream. But, sadly, even my most recent experience of virtual reality has done little to make me feel at one with the technology. Immersive library environments will have to wait for a different generation, I guess.

John Gilbey teaches in the department of computer science at Aberystwyth University.