Reveries of libraries, the forty-third: Thesis Citations and Tsundoku Heaven

 

Another responsibility of the durable librarian is to assist a researcher in finding citations for their doctoral thesis. If their doctorate is on the history of tsundoku, for example, the primary source material is well-known to them, if no-one else, set out in their study space in randomly appealing piles. Our work begins with new literature on tsundoku, of the kind unattached to Amazon; articles in online journals with foolproof firewalls; the impossible-to-get pamphlet on Tsundoku Masters reportedly at the other end of a broken Wikipedia link. The would-be doctor pursues these fugitive obscurities with all the enthusiasm of a GP needing to know about a new pharmaceutical. The paper chase extends to microdots and wanton websites of extraneous opinion. Digital has only expanded the stacks of tsundoku exponentially. But then actually, reading all of this secondary literature is less important, it seems, than having (as researchers put it) seen it. Having seen it, it can then be added to their bibliography, a bulging balloon of citations at risk of growing larger than the thesis itself. I sometimes think this resources section should be headed ‘Tsundoku’, in the interests of complete honesty with their supervisors and examiners, as their bibliography fits the definition of collecting more books than they can read. Tsundoku creates the impression the citations have probably all been read, only which ones? Have they all at least been gleaned or skimmed? How many citations have been seen but not read? Anyway, once the searches are successful, the librarian has done his, her, or their work, retiring to help the next researcher, and leaving the pre-doctor in tsundoku heaven. That a librarian’s work entails a modicum of tsundoku is a realization that comes with time in the job. Although our purpose is to provide books that people will read, how many of them are actually read? Circulation records cannot give an answer. The library is a living, breathing model of tsundoku, which is just as well because it is that unread book ordered five years ago that come next Monday morning will be the one book a visiting scholar has to read now. This is true even of thesis collections, whether the thesis be ‘The History of Tsundoku’, or on some other subject. One chapter of that thesis has the heading ‘Surfeit’, a book arrangement that draws anxious sighs from an aesthete of book arts, a nervous clatter of spectacles with the scholar, but from the librarian a request at the next committee meeting for a double extension of the building, preferably yesterday. One person’s surfeit is another person’s surprise. One scholar’s pulp is another scholar’s grail.