Alexandria, VA – I thought I had run out of memories – if not musings – but Mary Wadland’s Publisher’s Note in the October Zebra about libraries sparked a memory. Mary reminisced about weekly visits to the library with her mother, “getting lost in the shelves and shelves of books set aside for people my age…putting dozens back before settling on the one or two I’d check out myself….I didn’t run in the library or talk in a regular voice. I whispered.”
Me too. Libraries for me, when I was growing up, were sacred spaces.
The memory that popped up was a letter I wrote to my mother apologizing for making two extra phone calls. We had a “party” line (a shared line) in those days. You knew which number the call was for by the number of rings. You were allowed a set number of calls for basic service and were billed extra for calls above an allotted number. Those were the long ago “Ma Bell” days when phones were attached to the walls! Those two extra phone calls were to the library.
Backstory: I lost a library book and called the library to find out how much I would owe for the book. I don’t know how little-girl-Nina knew what number to call. Maybe it was written on my library card. Perhaps I was just resourceful. I found I couldn’t be told the cost of the book because I couldn’t remember its name and that I should call back in a couple of days. When I called back, I learned the book had been returned and I would only have to pay for a missing page. I wonder now how the price of a page was calculated, but I digress.
I find a number of things remarkable about these memories. For starters, that at 8-1/2 years old, I went to the library alone by train. That I thought to call the library about the lost book (and was resourceful enough to find the phone number), that I wrote a note of apology to my mother, that she saved it, and that today, I have a scanned version of that letter in my personal archives.
Old Nina looks back with tenderness at the young Nina who wrote the letter. My mother’s handwritten annotation at the bottom says “Nina – 8-1/2 years.” My phonetic spelling may not have been unusual for someone that age. Today, I would grade it a C at best.
For this column, I pulled up a map of Brooklyn train stations but couldn’t recognize the one closest to the library branch I would have gone to. I called the Brooklyn Public Library, where a kind and helpful librarian was able to discover that today’s Schenectady Avenue Station used to be known as Utica Avenue Station, a name I remember. The Eastern Parkway Library Branch was two stations from where I would have started and a block from where I would have exited. I love librarians!
Here’s how I happen to have a scanned version of this letter. A couple of years ago, a friend alerted me to a service at the Fairfax County Library called the Memory Depot (research.fairfaxcounty.gov/memory-depot). This free, do-it-yourself station enables you to digitize materials. The library’s Memory Depots are located at the Centreville Regional Library, City of Fairfax Regional Library, George Mason Regional Library, Pohick Regional Library, Reston Regional Library, and Sherwood Regional Library.
You can digitize the following formats:
• Photographic prints, negatives, and slides
• Scrapbooks and other documents
• VHS and VHS-C video cassettes
• Audio cassettes
• Vinyl albums (only at Centreville Regional Library)
• 3.5” Floppy disks
At the Sherwood Regional Library, I used an Epson scanner to scan and number hundreds of my documents and photographs. I’ve done a middling job of creating an Excel file linking descriptions of those records to their file numbers.
One needs to take an orientation class on how to use the equipment. It really is do-it-yourself. And you need to sign up in advance, in person or online, to reserve the equipment. You’re allowed three hours at a time.
You bring the materials you want to digitize and a USB or external hard drive with sufficient capacity for your materials.
The Memory Depot is a wonderful service of the Fairfax County Library system. I checked with the Beatley and Barrett branch libraries in Alexandria and could not find a similar service, but non-Fairfax County residents can sign up using their local (reciprocal) library cards.
One drawback for me the last few times I went is that the room I use at the Sherwood Branch now is home to a noisy 3D printer and games for young children. When I asked them to use their inside voices, I was shushed!
Still, I love libraries and librarians.
David McCullough, 1933-2022, who (per Wikipedia) was acclaimed a “master of the art of narrative history, and awarded the Pulitzer Prize twice, the National Book Award twice, and recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award,” is quoted as saying,
“I think the public library system is one of the most amazing American institutions. Free for everybody. If you ever get the blues about the status of American culture, there are still more public libraries than there are McDonald’s. During the worst of the Depression, not one public library closed their doors.”
Mosaic artist-photographer Nina Tisara is the founder of Living Legends of Alexandria
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