I love libraries but one beloved library from my childhood holds a special place in my heart. It's…read morethe Rundel building, which used to have a "Secret Room" hidden behind a door disguised as a bookcase. As a child, seeing this door open into a miniature world with dolls from around the world was almost magical.
Today, the Secret Room is in the new library across the street while the Rundel building houses the areas for genealogy research and history. My recent visit to Rundel was to use their brand new, top-of-the-line microfilm readers. These wonderful machines don't just allow you to photocopy your research pages, they allow you to save your pages and email them to yourself or even save them on a thumbdrive. How efficient is that?
There is a fair amount of security on this building and my Harvard library microfilm of a manuscript from the early 1900s caused a bit of a stir every time I entered and exited the front doors to feed the parking meter. While I'm certain that no one cared as much about this manuscript as I did, I wasn't going to chance leaving it unattended just in case I was hauled off to parking jail. Anyway, I was able to get some of my work finished in the quiet microfilm area on the second floor while keeping that parking meter fat and happy.
As I sat at the machine, examining pages that were filled with the thoughts of a writer who lived long ago, I felt a strange twist of comfortable melancholy in this building. The magical Secret Room was gone but my warm childhood memory was revived, and as I read the words on the pages of this manuscript from long ago, I was touched by the thoughts of someone who did her best to not only make the world a better place, but tried to ensure that her thoughts were recorded in history. Her publisher made so many mistakes that she decided not to publish the book, and actually said so in the manuscript. Amazingly, here I was, sitting at a microfilm machine in Rochester, NY, reading the words she wrote a century ago, more than 2,800 miles away, and in another language. I am grateful to the Rundel library, not only for a warm childhood memory but especially for making that possible. Rock on, Rundel!