Happy School Library Day! Every October we celebrate International School Library Month, but this is the first year that a day has been chosen to celebrate the special place school libraries have in our communities. In a world filled with the likes of Google, eBooks and online learning there’s many excellent reasons to keep libraries alive, from providing a place conducive to study to librarians providing information literacy classes. The school library is the beating heart of the school community.

For me, though, entering that big rectangular concrete building behind the school gates was more personal than that. Not just a place of learning, it was a refuge and a window to a wider world beyond the farms and coal mines of regional Australia. Simply – libraries opened my mind, and here I found my community.

My experience in school wasn’t always easy – I was frequently bullied and ostracised for being a ‘nerd’ and a ‘weirdo.’ I’ll always remember the kind librarians, the towering books offering escapism and the many games of Jenga (a tower of a different kind!) I played with other outcasts in that library. There were many hours spent in glorious, geeky conversation about music, roleplaying games, movies and where we wanted to travel (including hours spent pouring over maps and using the nascent internet to search Wikipedia).

Many an interlibrary loan was placed when I visited my second home. I often went there after school to be picked up, ostensibly to study, but really to escape and relax. My poison at the time was teen magazines, travel books and fantasy novels, which I devoured at alarming speed. Sometimes I’d just sit down in the stacks, grab what looked good, and be off to another place. Sometimes I’d take that title home, sometimes not. I think I liked the anticipation of waiting for the next chapter, something to look forward to after the following day’s trials.

One day – horror of horrors! – I went to find my book and found someone had stolen it (or that’s how it felt). Frantically, I asked the librarian where it was only to find someone else had taken it out, the ruffian. Once I again got it in my hot little hands I started hiding my adopted books. It felt like I had a relationship with these titles, and letting them go off into the hands of another felt like a kidnapping. Afterwards, I’d talk excitedly about the new title I was reading with my fellow gang of book nerds, and they’d respond in kind. We found community in that drab, charmless building, with its flouro tube lights and asbestos ceiling.

And this is the heart of it really – libraries provide an access to the wide world and a sense of community that can’t be found anywhere else on the planet. As we increasingly move our communications online, we must take care not to lose our valuable real-time spaces, where we can share not only our passions but oxygen, too, with those around us. We are social creatures after all, and knowledge and presence are powerful tools for change.

“We read to know we are not alone.” C.S. Lewis

If you want to learn more about the importance of school libraries, I recommend the excellent Students Need School Libraries (Australia), Why are School Libraries Essential? (by i love libraries) and Why School Libraries Matter (at the National Library of NZ).