This address was delivered by our Founder Director, Sujata Noronha on 19th July 2025, at the ILM (inquiry, learning, mindfulness) Annual Library Confluence, hosted by the Shiv Nadar School, Noida. The theme of the conference was ‘Envisioning Libraries as Transformative Spaces.’
The School Library – A responsive organism
Thank you Shiv Nadar School, Noida for this vision and imagination of bringing school library constituents together for a day of thinking as a community. I am not aware of many schools positioning library professional development in this way and with such care, grace and openness. Thank you for including me. As I read the list of speakers in the collaterals shared by the Library team here at Shiv Nadar School Noida, my imposter syndrome kicked in. Why was I part of this elite corp.? I come from the smallest geography in India. Till a few decades ago no one knew we existed. However, now, on most days the roads look a lot like your roads here – many, many DL number plates, honking and vocal tones that are changing the soundscape of our region.
I belong to a people whose language, history and literature is not commonly known outside of our geography but more often than not we are told what our history is by people historically disconnected from our region. Our market places are being filled with hindi, a fascinating version at least of the language as we all try to communicate with each other across linguistic divides. I work within the not for profit sector which has a heart that beats to a different rhythm from private or state players. I work with community and schools that used to be particular to our context. Now a days we feel we are working with more settlers and migrant communities than locals as our locals have chosen to migrate to yet other geographies in an ever changing, unsettled world. And so, what decades of library work possibly enable me to do at this conference, is talk about the library being a responsive organism – in the words of S R Ranganathan, who gave us this maxim as the fifth principle of Library Science.
I hope in the next 20 minutes of your listening time, to share,
How the school library is organically primed to accommodate an ever changing environment, but how in doing that the school library may also be in danger of losing itself. I I will try and share why I feel we need to return to the vision of the WHY over the ‘what’ and the ‘how’. I will reserve the conversation about the ‘how’ and the ‘what’ to your ability and keenness to raise questions in the latter half of this time we have together. Please know I look forward to that greatly – so take time whilst I rabble on to write points, note down something I might say that provokes you and such.
What also probably aligns me to ILM is the vision, realisation, received knowledge and understanding from experience that I hold for libraries. But the sense of inadequacy prevailed. So I did what privileged readers like me do, turn to literature. I tried to bring to mind a character or a person I have read about who also wondered, “why now – why me?” and, be reminded of how they responded to these conditions. In doing so, I am reminded always of the role of literature in human society – to make us better human beings.
As I thought about being faced by challenges and the library – I remembered Borges. All of you will be very familiar with this remarkable Argentinian writer, poet and LIBRARIAN Jorge Luis Borges. Widely considered one of the most important figures in 20th-century literature about whom we may know the phrase, “I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.” In principle I agreed with this sentiment, hundreds of thousands of people around the world, do too and hence merchandise of many forms abound with this quote – but as a reader who is curious as most readers are , I wanted to know the source of this quote. What I learnt some decades ago is that Borges did not exactly say this statement! A good example of ‘fake’ news and the librarian’s pursuit of the source text.
What he said when we translate into English was “I, that used to figure Paradise / In such a library’s guise” got corrupted or evolved into ‘I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of a library.’ But if you stay with me , think with me a little while longer I will reveal to you how brilliantly responsive this moment of articulation was for Borges. You see, he wrote this poem called Poem of the Gifts a deeply personal poem about his blindness and his relationship with books and libraries within which we find this articulation.
The poem reflects on the irony that he, as director of the National Library of Argentina, was losing his sight just as he gained access to hundreds of thousands of books. The poem was written in 1960 when Borges was already experiencing vision problems, making his meditation on libraries and paradise particularly poignant. As director of the National Library, he was surrounded by countless books, he was a reader but could no longer read them.
How must this have felt?
As librarians what experiences have we had that come even a little close to such an irony?
I will pause while you think of your most recent experience of feeling that you have just figured something out and boom it all changes!!!
I think, as deeply committed and practicing librarians you do not need to think too hard. I know that every day we are encountering moments like this, when we think we have understood something and new information comes in negating that what we thought we knew. A new political act or mention or censorship may compel us to look at something in our collection differently, a new curricular movement may demand that we put down one cap for another hat. A new virus may compel us to take on library practices and use modes that we did not imagine before, a new futures market may confuse us about what our role in the library is actually supposed to be and what is to become of the school library – after all – but through it all we are responding – we are responsive and in that we are fulfilling what we chose to serve – the library. Is this the best that we can do? To answer that,
I will take us back to the Poem of the Gifts. In this poem Borges writes about exploring the library with his walking stick, and references Paul Groussac, his predecessor, who also became blind while serving as library director. I often feel there is some ‘lesson’ here for all of us who read books in poor light and now possibly stare at screens for hours on end. But I digress – Borges writes about how this profound loss of sight was a gift to his imagination. Because he was a reader, a librarian, a lover of books, a writer – all the acts that deep reading and neural pathways enable in our brains – what we call thinking – he was able to imagine and conceive what paradise might be like and his imagination told him it would be a kind of library.
I suspect that in this fast changing landscape of the school as a space, the library has survived and in many instances thrived because of the librarian’s ability to be imaginative and to be responsive. Many skeptics predicted and continue to predict the death of the library , the death of long form reading and the death of thinking – but we are here doing just that and so I remain immensely hope filled.
So now what? Some of you may be thinking where is this going? You have told us that the library is what allows us to use our cognitive capabilities to the fullest, that we librarians are responsive and that we are here to stay – so now what?
Let me move ahead in the time honored tradition of library work – through the retelling of a story that comes from a song.
First I would like you to listen to the folk song – in Yiddish
https://youtu.be/divQQ6TOaD8
It is beautifully adapted into this picture book by Simms Taback, Joseph had a Little Overcoat, a story as old as time itself. When we took one thing and made it into another and then another and another, until it no longer resembles or has anything to do with what it originally was. Each of us may have a similar story in our own culture and language but I draw attention to this story as a metaphor of responsiveness that may be fraught for the identity of the library. What is the school library meant to be? What has the school library become? How is it responding to everything that is happening all around? Is it responding at all or does it seem stuck or has it gone too far away from what it should be? Each of you as professionals who have chosen to work in school libraries can and must ask this of yourselves. Did I begin as an overcoat and now, am I a button? Or a tie? Or a handkerchief or a vest? Or something completely and totally different ? What is my school library like?
To do this together, we may have to return to the central tenets of the school library. I went back to a text many of you would have studied in your school librarianship training. S R Ranganathan’s New Education and School Library : Experience of Half a Century , published in 1973 by Vikas Publishing House Private Limited. A book that has seeds for our thinking even in 2025. The text is written, for me, in a most charming arrangement of sections and numbering that one only finds in the work of S R Ranganathan , a mathematician turned librarian, who brought the nomenclature and language of his first domain of scholarship into his second – that of library science.
In the section titled, Part F: What of School Library -Constituents of a school library, S R Rangathan reminds us that an early English use of the word library, largely denoted a collection of books. Users (human beings ) did not necessarily form a part of the imagination of the library. This definition holds true for the time period of the 1750s and possibly early 1900’s.
If any of us know of libraries that have carefully collected books, ordered and arranged, but do not respond to their users, in fact create barriers between the books and users – you can think about which ‘age’ of time that library is still residing within and design an intervention to relieve it of its time bound constraint because we now know that the library is a responsive organism. I know of many librarians and library workers in this country who are discomforted by my visiting because I am going to ask questions about why these books, who is reading, where are the children and such? Some of us are not quite ready to move into even the 20th century
Ranganthan then traces the meaning of the word library into year 1901, to the New English Dictionary which defines the library as “a public institution or establishment charged with the care of a collection of books and the duty of making them accessible to those who require use of them.” Those of us who are welcoming human beings into the library are responding to the early 1900’s definition of the word library. Those of us who are imbuing our collections with care and interacting with our users in ways that enable them to care and learn with the library are well into the 21st century definition of library.
But to return to the school library, in his thesis, Rangathan places the origins closer to the end of the Second World War. He writes, “The illiteracy and incompetence of thousands of so-called ‘educated recruits’ to the army served to disclose the huge waste of public money spent on a compulsory educational system not backed by a compulsory library system”.
According to S R Ranganathan this imagination of the educated student that includes actively using a library birthed into existence the school library which we see today in policy, in curricular frame-works, in some legislation and in practice as an Institution. Ranganathan writes that in order to form readers, the educational method in the school should develop in each student the capacity and the desire to use the library not only in the school but all through life.
Fast forward to 2025, a market economy, the post information age, – private and privatised becoming the defining words of our time – what place does the school library serve? We need to actively and urgently think about this because I am afraid on most days that we will become what happened to the Mitten in this folktale from Ukraine, beautifully illustrated by Jan Brett.
Let us watch.
One imminent danger of the overly responsive librarian and library could reduce us to the mitten in the story – a space that is a catch all for many services until it loses itself, If the library becomes everything to everyone, what is left of the library ? Can the librarian continue to serve users in the manner and way in which and for which libraries are institutionalised?
My aim here is not to add to a groundswell of what the library should be doing to cope with changes in the environment that may be burdening our community. Instead, I want to point a small light on what I think is happening in our struggle to respond and to be present. We are investing too much of our energy and time in the what to do, how to do in the library rather than the WHY of libraries. We are not engaging in different conversations which are needed amongst ourselves and our community of library workers- which makes a conference like ILM an illuminating moment in time. We should individually and collectively reflect on the question:
What do we do and why do we do it?
For the last ( and I promise you this is ending) segment of this sharing, I want to return to S R Ranganathan’s framework of what makes the school library.
He neatly identified three constituents:
- Bibliographic constituent
- Human constituent
- Material constituent
Writing further he says, there will be a school library only when all three constituents co-existing would be brought into intimate relation with one another. Each constituent is necessary but none by itself is sufficient to constitute a school library.
I will slide over Material constituents, recognising I am in the presence of the private sector where resources are generously used for physical infrastructure and I am convinced each of you belong/ work within gloriously built, beautifully apportioned library spaces.. But mere material is not enough or sufficient.
Bibliographic constituent, you will fully understand is the Collection you hold in your library. Who is deciding, whom is it serving, are users at the center of this decision making and process, how participatory is it? How do you ensure the Principles of library practice operationalising- every reader their book – every book their reader – books are for use. I hope this provokes you to think to talk together in the time available.
In all my work and scholarship with the library, I am rested on the premise that it is the human constituent that is at the heart of library work. Ranganathan writes,
“a log of wood with a book at one end and a librarian at another would make the perfect library“
David Lankes, a professor of librarianship, writes in his book, The Atlas of Librarianship, “ It is not a building that makes a library a library, but it is a LIBRARIAN that makes a library.”
Rabindranath Tagore wrote in a delightful essay titled, ‘What makes the library big ?’ written over 100 years ago, but relevant today that it is incumbent upon the librarian to make the library hospitable. He says the contents of the library may make it useful but the use of these contents makes the library significant.
But all of this, cannot be incumbent upon the librarian alone – human constituent includes the management of the school, the teachers, the parents, and the most precious of resources, the students. How can the library come into its fullest being of a responsive entity with all human constituents?
I will now stop, but not without sharing one final concern that I imagine complicates our work in the library. The role of the market that is defining our very existence as a species in terms of a ‘value’. We are being called upon to consistently demonstrate and prove that our existence has a value through some measurable outcomes. We struggle in library work to recognise the difference between value and philosophy. We must spend more time bridging this disconnect between libraries, librarians and librarianship with the question of WHY rather than the question of what and how much.
This tension between the how and the how much and the why is difficult and tenuous and in being responsive entities, I fear that librarians tie themselves into knots proving and establishing their relevance with school management, language teachers and faculty in-charges and external market forces, parents and ‘experts’ who often come from domains distant and removed from librarianship itself!
We, as a community of library professionals should move from having a practice of librarianship to a praxis of librarianship.
To cultivate praxis is to remain curious about our practice and engage with it. It is to want to know internally and externally what is changing and what is steadfast in our profession. It is to think critically about our greater purpose and current goals when we make decisions. Praxis brings philosophical underpinnings to our daily routines and professional decision-making. And because the librarian in the library is a responsive entity I hold very strongly that it is possible.
I will close with inviting Kirti to read aloud a poem that both of us find resonance with and then open the floor for our interaction together. Thank you for being such a responsive and active, listening audience.
Because of Libraries We Can Say These Things by Naomi Shihab Nye
She is holding the book close to her body,
carrying it home on the cracked sidewalk,
down the tangled hill.
If a dog runs at her again, she will use the book as a shield.
She looked hard among the long lines
of books to find this one.
When they start talking about money,
when the day contains such long and hot places,
she will go inside.
An orange bed is waiting.
Story without corners.
She will have two families.
They will eat at different hours.
She is carrying a book past the fire station
and the five and dime.
What this town has not given her
the book will provide; a sheep,
a wilderness of new solutions.
The book has already lived through its troubles.
The book has a calm cover, a straight spine.
When the step returns to itself,
as the best place for sitting,
and the old men up and down the street
are latching their clippers,
she will not be alone.
She will have a book to open
and open and open.
Her life starts here.