For example, you'll read the words, "'I am the light of the world,' says the Son of Man" (Jn 8:12), and that, too, is from the Greek translation of the Septuagint (the ancient Jewish translation from Hebrew). ~~~ pak And there is a second level where the reader has to be fluent enough in Greek to pick up the meaning of a word in the context, whether or not it's something the reader would typically encounter in English. ------ jordanlev I used to work at a university which had one of these stacks. When you were asked to read an article in the stack, you didn't really even get a choice, you just had to go find a stack and bring it back with you. And of course this would take you half an hour, so you weren't going to be reading more than one article during the day... To this day I still consider it to be one of the most boring jobs in the world (I have never been unemployed). I would rather be paid $40 an hour to put my books in order by the door of the closet than ever work in a library again. ~~~ stvswn As the former (now sadly defunct) library director for one of the largest universities in the world, I must protest this assessment. We would _never_ just tell you to find a stack. If you had been trained to find a stack, you could have found a stack -- you _would_ have found a stack. And I must take umbrage with your characterization of library work as an uninteresting job, even on a day-to-day basis. I know people who _love_ their jobs at libraries. There are challenges, there are rewards, and there are never enough hours in the day to do it all well. ~~~ jordanlev That is a good point -- I guess my point of view is from the point of view of a student trying to finish my assignments quickly... I would much rather be at the reading lounge with the music blasting and a coffee machine :) If I could find an article on my topic in a stack that I liked, I would read it immediately. However, I think one of the biggest challenges at work is knowing that you won't finish the assignment, so you take whatever you can get... then you get an hour of lunch... and repeat the next day. ~~~ stvswn Good point. In general though, it's been my observation that libraries are poorly suited to people with lots of immediate demands on their time (like students, and the like). ------ sgt101 I don't know about stacks and card catalogues, but for bibliographic access we're using "Faceted Search" as an alternative to Google! It's a work in progress at the moment but is really fun and powerful. I hope that you like it as much as we do :) [https://www.bibsonomy.org/server/ludumdare.com](https://www.bibsonomy.org/server/ludumdare.com) ------ sundarurfriend For those who are interested, there's a follow-up to this post [http://www.kosmopolit.com/2011/01/26/kosmos-2011-a-stack- of-...](http://www.kosmopolit.com/2011/01/26/kosmos-2011-a-stack-of-books/) that went into the history of libraries, and then in more detail about digital libraries and digital books and digital text. ------ jcr In addition to the books and the card catalog, there was usually a pile of "crap" to sort. Most of it was printed on "cheap paper" such as brown paper, tissue paper, or old newspapers. The "crappy" papers would also have ads for things like snake oil or counterfeit bank notes printed on them. The sorting of the "crappy" books was a bit difficult but it could be managed. The real problem was where you didn't have the option to throw out the books, because of some kind of legal reasons, often a copyright issue. I had to keep the books sorted and organized and we tried to find a way to make the books somewhat accessible to users (not the crap). Sometimes we had to throw away the crappy papers. The worst place I had to deal with was with public records. The "legal" part of the job was sorting through all the old public records from cities, counties, states, and countries and making sure that the copies were clean enough to be usable for anyone who wanted to access them. I got the idea of the "public library" from "crappy" books but the real "libraries" had to deal with the public records. I would often be left wondering about the legal obligation of the "archives" to keep a certain level of legal "accuracy". I still miss my "crappy" paper job, but I did learn to love the "libraries" with no restrictions on "accuracy". ~~~ tjr On one occasion I had to sort some very old, well-thumbed comics of the 1940s. In addition to all the usual stuff you find in old books, there was also some very detailed drawings of anatomy, including some anatomically-correct genitals in women's clothing. It was a weird experience. ------ dclowd9901 I once got an internship at an academic library at UC Berkeley during the middle of a quarter. The work I was hired to do was to re-acquire some rare books to bring them back into the catalog, which was part of their collection (most of which was just books on display). One day, I was asked to help this woman who was getting ready to get married at UC Santa Barbara (where she was studying). We went down into the basement, up the elevator, into a section of the library, and up a very large set of stairs into a reading area. There was a card catalog, and I was shown how to use it by this woman. I spent most of the morning getting to know this one card and finding all these books, and a few articles of information on them, and sending this woman an email to tell her what I had found. The only reason I got the job was because I knew C++ pretty well and had experience in large code bases. A year later, they didn't need me anymore. ------ petercooper A friend (as a child) was responsible for arranging the book section of a national hospital (for children). He used to take his school backpack full of random books into hospital waiting rooms. The children would immediately flock around him to see what he had gotten. Many came up asking him to search something up, but never with books in hand. ------ stirbot I was supposed to help my grandpa find the books in the library of a private academic library where he worked in the early nineties. They have a nice database of the books held at the library, which is actually used for ordering books to be purchased by the patrons. He said that while it was possible to find everything by searching, there was no way you could be sure that your order was correct. ------ mxfh "He also explained how he had come up with the library's name - in the Roman world, libraries were known as bibliotheca, the plural of which is bibliotheca. The name has stuck and 'library' is still used around the world today" I have often wondered what is a roman library called? This is because I had the impression that in general a library is not only filled with books, but that it should also contain something that resembles book-shelves or shelves of book-like objects. ------ jgalt212 > I have a degree in mathematics, so I was able to see whether the book was > really what I thought it was So does google. This might make a decent filter to have as part of a query in addition to google web search. ~~~ sillysaurus3 And "books" is usually a misnomer. These days it's any media where content is sequential