WHITBY FREE PRESS, WEI)NESDAY, JUN! I : I1986 PAGE1 l Whitby Public Library celebrates 75th A library, when you stop to think about it, is a rather remarkable place, a fact that is not lost on Margaret McFadyen, chief librarian at the Whitby Public Library. "A person can expect to find such a variety of in- formation in the library, things ranging from how to fix your car to industrial and business listings, the name and address of your M.P., government services and departments, statistics, topographic maps, travel information, local history, genealogy... "Libraries have to cover the whole spectrum of publishing and relate what is being published to the community's needs," says McFadyen who has only grazed the tip of the iceberg. If you can't find what you are looking for in the Whit- by or Brooklin branches, she continues, the library can plug you into an infor- mation network that exten- ds across the country and into the United States. Sup- pose, for the sake of argument, you are trying to track down an obscure tome about the mating habits of the rufous-sided towhee written by a Victorian or- nithologist whose name, understandably, escapes you. Unless you happen to live next door to somebody whose taste in light reading runs to late 19th Century ornithology, the obvious place to begin your search is at your local library. Anxious to get your hands on this arcane masterpiece you set off for the Library right after supper (they're open till 9 p.m. weekdays) and head straight for the subject catelogue. If you are a library novice you will probably begin by looking under "Birds" or "Animal Behavior" and quickly find yourself swamped in a sea of information that contains - having riffled through hundreds of file cards - not a single mention of the noble towhee. At this stage you may be starting to feel a little overwhelmed by the magnitude of the task you have set yourself but, un- daunted, you turn to the obliging and omnipresent librarian for assistance. According to McFadyen this is one of the most com- monly encountered stum- bling blocks to the rookie researcher. "I've had people ask for information on 'Canadian Agriculture' when what they really wanted was a recipe for peach jam. People can't believe that the information catelogue is that specific. They always go to the generality first." says the library head. A little wiser, you return to the subject catelogue and look up "Rufous-Sided Towhee" only to discover the prized work is not in the library's collection. Had you been a member of Whitby's first public library back in 1914 this irksom discovery would have marked the end of your quest but today's public library is to its predecessor what the space shuttle is to the horse and buggy. "The public library as it is now is very different from what it would have been back then," says Mc- Fadyen. "Even just in ter- ms of the size of the population served but also in the range of materials in our collection. Of course there are the books and the periodicals but now we have a complete range of audio- visual materials, records, cassettes, video disks, video tapes, 16 mm films and even a few computer programs." And, of more immediate interest to someone who is trying to find an antique or- nithological masterwork, the library has the means to put you in contact with just about every library in the country. According to Mc- Fadyen, the Whitby Public Library is directly linked by computer with 40 other libraries in south-central Ontario. Once it has been established that the book you are looking for is not in the library's collection, a systematic search of each of the 40 will be initiated at your request. If at the end of that search you have still come up empty handed, the Whitby Public Library will call in the big guns - the National Library. According to McFadyen the National Library has a record of every book on almost every public library shelf in the country. It may take as long as a month or more to track it down but if there is even one copy of this, by now, desperately awaited text, it will be located and mailed to the Whitby library posthaste. A key figure in this in- credible odyssey is your tour guide, the friendly librarian. Ready, willing and able to help you with almost anything from iden- tifying a rare insect to locating the address of your long-lost uncle Louie in Jacket River, New Brun- swick, librarians are a library's greatest resource, says McFadyen. Librarians have to be generalists and have an in- terest in everything. They might be helping someone identify a piece of china one moment and the next moment somebody is coming through the door wanting to know everything there is to know about lam- prey eels....Whenever someone has a question on their mind, no matter what subject it might be on, and I mean literally almost any information, it's likely to be here and the librarians are here to help you find it," says McFadyen. Unfortunately, getting that message out to the general public isn't easy, according to McFadyen who fears too many people take their local library for granted. Although almost a third of Whitby's 45,000 citizens are members of the library, she believes that membership would be in- creased considerably if people only stopped to con- sider for even one moment everything is has to offer. "People often say they don't need the library but that's not true. Everybody has some informational need and the library has the advantage of combining physical resources with the human resources that can SEE PG. 25