The Beloved Reference Shelf--On 'Relevance'

In this digital age, all one really needs is an empty room, a comfortable chair, and an internet-enabled device. What one doesn't need, strictly speaking, are shelves and shelves full of books. The first shelf to go, often, is the reference shelf, as those books are heavy and expensive and the internet is particularly excellent at providing immediate access to reference material.

Those of us who love reference books have to adjust.

Like most people, I most often treated reference volumes as books for quick consultation, taking them down off of my reference shelf as needed. But I treasured the shelves I stocked with English dictionaries and thesauri, language dictionaries in several languages, a dictionary of quotations, a rhyming dictionary, concordance, several atlases, and my much beloved New York Public Library Desk Reference, which I affectionately called the NYPLDR. (Part of an Amazon review of the book summarizes as follows):

Sections of the desk reference include music, literature, and the visual arts, religions, philosophy, and museums around the world, alphabets, grammar, and daily etiquette. Life-saving first-aid procedures are described, as are cooking tips, stain-removal advice, personal-finance details, and legal information, plus useful addresses and phone numbers relating to adoption, disabilities, and domestic violence, alcoholism, family planning, and television networks. With sections on travel, sports and games, as well as the United States and the political world, this is an irreplaceable reference of great scope and value.

I was, shall we say, something more than a casual user of reference books. I admit that I sometimes read reference books quite a lot like regular books, picking a volume of my parents' World Book Encyclopedia off the shelf and simply reading through it. My reader probably won't find it surprising that when I received an etymology dictionary as a gift, sometime in my early teens, I read it from cover to cover. The NYPLDR was similarly entertaining.

So when Farhad Manjoo callously suggested that we should celebrate the end of the Encyclopedia Britannica's print edition, I was a bit peeved. And I breathed a sigh of relief when the NYPL (of NYPLDR fame) deemed print encyclopedias 'relevant' even in the digital age. I was a little saddened that they saw the target users mainly as the old, recent immigrants, and those who couldn't snag one of the limited number of computer terminals in the library. Will there never again be a 13-year-old who says, "Hm, today seems like a good day for a read through the "D" volume"?

Etymological aside: Since it's hard for me to encounter a word without looking it up, I also serendipitously discovered an interesting irony: relevant is from the Latin 'levis' meaning 'light,' i.e. 'not heavy.' The connection becomes somewhat clear if we understand 'relevant' as 'legally sufficient,' as in a defense, which was its initial meaning. A legally sufficient defense had the ability to 'relieve' an accused of the burden of the accusation, i.e. to "lift" it or lighten his or her load. It brings a bit of levity, doesn't it, to note that 'light' is not exactly an apt description of the Encyclopedia Britannica.