Not Your Typical Library

8mm Film Reel and Canister – Photo Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Libraries are great. They’re also old, like, really old. There’s evidence of collections of tablets with text in Assyria reaching as far back as the 7^th century BCE, and despite almost three thousand years of progress, the general idea of a library is the same. While we don’t use tablets (at least not the ancient kind) or papyrus anymore, if you walk into a library you’ll still be greeted with the same thing: writing.

But we live in an exciting period in human history, and while books still dominate libraries there are more and more mediums by which we can communicate information and ideas. One that’s somehow more intuitive than books; that would be photos, videos, and audio. Growing up reading is something that we all had to learn, but simply listening, looking at a photo, or watching a movie doesn’t require years of learning, and is sometimes able to convey much more complex ideas than a book ever could. Amassing a collection of these forms of media is what the Sound and Moving Image library (SMIL) at York University has been doing for a while and continues to do.

I’m not sure about other students, but for years I’ve walked through Scott library at York without ever batting an eye at the SMIL. At most I may have peeked inside and thought to myself “hmm, that’d make a nice study room”. Recently though I decided I would go and see what it had to offer, and I was surprised at the vast selection and amount of material. I guess somehow I always thought I could access what I needed through quick online searches or streaming services, but the SMIL had things that were either a complete pain to find online, or simply not available elsewhere.

With the film festival nominations for BIOL4095 being submitted I’ll be taking a look at Call of the Forest: The forgotten Wisdom of Trees, which just so happens to be available at the SMIL.

There are so many resources and materials available to students, not just at the SMIL but all throughout campus, and too often we don’t realize they are there, or we take them for granted. Let’s instead appreciate them and explore what they have to offer.

You can view the online catalog of the SMIL at: https://www.library.yorku.ca/web/smil/collections/