The poet, playwright and former Librarian of Congress, Archibald MacLeish, asks this question in his essay “The premise at the center” in his book, Riders on the Earth.  Is a library merely a collection of objects – books, maps, journals, CDs, documents, DVDs, audiobooks, and the like?

The deciding factor that distinguishes a library from a collection of objects is that they were “chosen to constitute a library.”  MacLeish finds that libraries are extraordinary in that they exist.

Would an individual discover meaning from this collection of objects called a library?  Would a library “with its books in a certain order on its shelves….assert that there is indeed a ‘mystery of things?’”  These books, these things when gathered together fell “into a kind of relationship, a kind of wholeness, as pieces of experience, manuscripts in bottles, messages from long before, from deep within, from miles away, belonged together and might, if understood together, spell out the meaning which the mystery implies.”

This is a very poetical way of phrasing the librarian’s motto:  Too Many Books, So Little Time.