When I was a kid, my mom would take me and my big sister to the Turlock public library once a week where we’d walk out with a stack of bedtime stories so big she could barely carry it to the car, and I didn’t help because I was two. Three days later we’d have read through the entire stack and then spend the next four days vehemently demanding that our parents reread our favorites.

Thank God for patient parents.

I’ve been pro-library for all of my remembered life (as I’d wager to guess most people reading this post are), but I’ve been a library advocate for the last four years. I’ve also been attending college for the last four years. Coincidence? I think not!

The rise in College tuitions disproportionate to the rate of inflation is a real issue, one that merits someone more educated and better researched on the topic to talk about it than I. But, from a student’s perspective, I can at the very least attest to my growing respect for any medium designed to share knowledge for free.

Your local library, whether it be part of the Stanislaus County System, or something grander like the New York or Los Angeles public systems, has been and will continue to fight to keep up with the times and present you with as much convenient access to as much knowledge as is feasible.

And they’re happy to help you personally too!

You should use them!

They will love you!

You should also use your university library.

While my lifelong heart clearly lies with the public libraries and librarians across the world, when it comes to bare bones facts and knowledge, it’s University libraries that win out.

The Vasche Library, Stanislaus’s own building, feels massive. In its pre-renovation state, walking in the first-floor tutoring center and realizing that there were three whole floors to the building was like opening a wardrobe and realizing that there was an entire Narnia out there waiting for you.

The first true realization of, like, my mental mortality, was walking into the Vasche Library and realizing that if I spent the rest of my life trying to read and understand every book in that building, I would die before I even got halfway through the collection.

Which is why I opened up my laptop in the study section and played Minecraft instead.

(My Minecraft Library)

No that’s not a joke, yes it is still funny. A University library has this awesome energy to it, of holding some of greatest collections of human knowledge over the course of all of history, so much so that that we have to choose and use our time carefully within it, which sometimes means researching gender norms in early Amerindian civilizations, and sometimes means playing Minecraft.

Both are valid in their own time!

But most importantly, and what really gives college libraries the edge over public ones is that coveted coveted access to thousands of scholarly articles from hundreds of different peer-reviewed journals that are otherwise hidden behind a superfluous paywall the journals have (one that rarely pays the actual authors/researchers, by the way) and opens the door to you learning about the most recent, cutting-edge research about anything.

The university library lets students bypass the paywalls and obstacles put up to make the access of knowledge difficult. Libraries make it easy. They are the key that opens the lock to the questions about the universe you’ve had burning in your mind since you could first ask “why?”

That is what made me realize that college was special. Not the smart and approachable professors, not the beautiful campus, no not even the friendly cats.

It was the library, and its website.

There are times to sit down and work on that sweet grind mining for diamonds, and then there are times when you can do yourself a favor by literally expanding your horizons and knowledge of the world by surfing the library website. It may sound melodramatic (and we all know I have a tendency for that too) but it’s true!

Your university library is awesome!

Take full advantage of it!