A year with the Trinity College Library

Some thoughts on new places, learning, and the elusive promise of the university.

My first year at Trinity College Dublin has come to an end, and for the first time in a while, everything has slowed down. I spend my days wandering the streets of Dublin, browsing the same bookstores without buying anything, relishing the blissfully inconsequential gatherings with friends. As people head home, one after one, I am slowly left with the Dublin locals, all settled into the calmer rhythm of summer jobs and weightless evenings. This welcome change in tempo has given me some time to reflect on what I’m doing here, and what this university thing is really about.

I often think that the best way to get to know a new city is to get lost in it. This is not a hard thing to do in Dublin, where each street is slightly curved and hilly, a constant challenge to my directional instincts. As a runner, this can be quite frustrating; more often than not I have a long stretch to wander home after a completed distance. Yet each time is also a minor epiphany. As I reach my house, suddenly in a frantic panic to make an 11 o'clock lecture, I have connected another section of the city to my fractured mental map.

For the first time since I've gotten here, I have had time to put active effort into exploring the place that has been my home for the past eight months, only to realize, that I already know it quite well. All the stories of my first year are bound up with the streets of Dublin, they bring weight to the unconventional twists and turns. In this way, the map that builds over time in your head of a place is not comparable to a regular map.

It has no easily discernible structure or visual representation, but appears when you need it as an intuitive sense of direction, a growing confidence that the next turn will lead you in the right direction. Certain corners, markers, and streets become so familiar that navigation doesn't even require active thought. The passages that connect the bus stop to my friend’s apartment, my favorite coffee shop to the park, the grocery store to my house, or the beach to the bakery with cheap hot chocolate have become second nature.

Then a few days ago, my psychic map making was rudely interrupted when I started receiving emails from the college library about some books I still had to hand in. The only problem was that I no longer had those books. I had left them on a library desk before the break, and they had been whisked away by an unassuming student shelver before I had the chance to return them. So, on Friday afternoon, I re-entered the library I have spent so many hours in over the last year to rather sheepishly enquire about the missing books.

I have talked to the man behind the counter many times, yet I still don't know his name. The first time we met, he convinced this unsuspecting first year that I was locked out of the library indefinitely because I had failed to return a book on time. Now, with a more solid grasp of his ironic humor, only matched by his endless knowledge of the library and desire to help, I was more comfortable with the way his eye twinkled as he typed in my information.

The books had been re-shelved without finding their way through the online system, so he noted down the numbers on a yellow Post-it note and offered to help me find them. But I took the note from him, sure I could rectify this particular mistake on my own. I descended the steps into the lower level that connects three of the libraries, and, going from library to library, I got maybe a little too excited by my ability to locate the missing books based only on a series of numbers on a slip of paper.

The Trinity Library consists of six physical libraries that used to be separate entities but have grown together over time. Each of them is dedicated to a different grouping of subjects, and there are many more books in external storage units only accessible through the vast online catalog. As my shelving mishap shows, the online catalog only superficially represents the state of the physical library at any given time, even though it allows you to find most books with the click of a mouse. It is astounding that it works so seamlessly most of the time.

Of course, the physical library developed way before the online system. Like the city of Dublin, the library has grown and expanded organically over the years since its founding in 1592, and because of this, the cataloging isn't exactly intuitive at first. As a librarian once told me, no one would design the system this way if it was done today. But over time, each floor and section became more familiar as I inevitably had to figure out how to find the books on the bottomless reading lists of the history department.

In the early days, I would simply search the online catalog and beeline for the respective shelf. It was effective and, as I would later learn, by design: Each term, professors decide which books are placed in the on-site libraries and which are relegated to external storage based on the modules on offer. But for each day at one of the homogenous desks with five works sprawled out on the table in front of me, I understood the library a bit better, and inevitably I became more ambitious.

Soon I wasn't just finding books for my essays but for the simple pleasure of the search. There is a feeling associated with finding an old book unavailable for purchase, on the brink of literary obscurity, yet available in the depths of the collection if only because no one has bothered to remove it. I began to see the library, not simply as storage and ordering of books, but as an organic structure ungraspable to any one person, yet able to uncover exactly what you need if you know how to use it. Taking some time to understand this vast resource brings some humility to the learning project; there’s a grandiosity to it that commands respect.

With unlimited facts at our fingertips through the internet, even generative AI to write our essays for us, it is easy to forget the point of learning. What is the purpose of committing anything to memory? Why put pen to paper? What does it mean to understand things? Throughout this year, I have come to appreciate active struggle as an essential part of the process, one the library plays a central role in, and one that cannot be skipped or mediated without missing the point.

Understanding can feel like a satisfying click into place, but it only comes after complete confusion and stubborn persistence. Condensing and making sense of large swaths of information takes work. Turning ideas into discernable prose in well-structured paragraphs is a challenge. And as you struggle, you understand the world a little better, not just in the finished essay, but through the holes in your thinking that are found only on the painfully blank page.

We lose a lot if we see the world as a collection of facts to be acquired or things to produce, just as if we see the library only as a big incomprehensible pile from which a book can be dug out by an algorithm. The library's search function allows us to circumvent all the underlying structures to find a certain book, without understanding the context of the shelf, of the unit, of the section, of the floor, of the library. But if we never go beyond it, we cannot grasp its potential, just as I'm sure we cannot truly understand a city unless we allow ourselves to get lost. My map of the library is in no way as complete as the online catalog, but I believe in slowing down, taking a wrong turn, ending up on the wrong floor.

The university is not a well-defined path to knowledge despite the detailed syllabus, lecture plans, and exams that have come to define it in the consciousness of many young people. Instead, its main strength is the access to brilliant professors, other inquisitive students, and yes, the idiosyncratic well of wisdom that is the college library. For a curious mind with a bit of grit, this is more than enough. Learning in this environment is like getting to know a city; the way the world expands is just as organic, imperfect, and impossible to recreate. Slowly but surely you sharpen your instincts and begin to find your way.