Nicholas Holdermann/The Falcon

Books. We've all heard of them, and from time to time some of us are even forced to crack one open. But where does one find these tomes of paper, ink, glue and knowledge? Well, if you're like me, then chances are you're not getting them from your school library.

But that's okay. After all, scholarly journals are where the real brain money is, not to mention all the online databases we can have as a result of living in an advanced modern age filled with Internets.

Clearly, all the gaps are filled, and students will never ever have issues when trying to do research for a simple paper on Earnest Hemingway's "A Farewell to Arms," right?

Answer: wrong, as I recently learned. I'm not saying our library is bad, exactly. It's just sort of old. Well, the building isn't old--the books are old. And not old in the "What a rare and valuable find this is" way, but rather the "This book was written in the 50s and smells like a raccoon died in it" kind of old. The bad kind of old.

Even worse, it's lopsided in its quality. Ask, say, a student majoring in theology or one of the sciences, and they'll tell you the library is satisfactory. Junior Brit Carlson and senior Susan Bilynskyj (ignore the "j" at the end, by the way) certainly think so.

On the other hand, ask someone who's had to write a literary research essay, like me, or junior Joshua Miles, and the answer will be slightly more negative.

"I hate that place. I never do research there," Miles said. "I go to the [University of Washington] library."

Keegan Blackler is a junior majoring in English with a Creative Writing concentration.

However, even supporters of the library, like Bilynskyj, rely greatly on the Summit and Interlibrary Loaning systems.

"For my senior honors project, I have to get a lot of obscure sources, and Summit gets me about 98 percent of what I need," Bilynskyj said.

It should be noted that Bilynskyj works for the library, so chances are she was brainwashed and programmed to think this. A rescue expedition is in the planning stages as we speak. Don't give up, Susan; help is coming.

I won't deny the usefulness of the book-lending systems, but I am going to use my words to hurt their feelings and not feel guilty about it. Part of the problem with Summit is that students no longer feel that they should expect anything from our library because they can just order it from another one. If I have to get three books on Hemingway, I should be able to find at least one book at the SPU library on him that isn't a biography.

The other problem is time. It takes time for books to get here from other libraries, shockingly enough. Sure, three days isn't a huge deal when you're working on a yearlong honors project, but when you only have a week between the time that you finish a book and have to turn in a paper on it, those three days count.

So, of course, we turn to the online databases, which I was going to spend a good four pages complaining about, but I only have so much space and it turns out there's hope for the future: Carrie Fry, the electronic services/systems librarian, told me that our helpful librarians recently purchased some software that will enable "federated searching," which enables someone to search all of the databases at once. That should hopefully alleviate some of the pain.

There are still two things we should all be asking about online databases, though.

First: What is the point of listing articles in a database and not providing the full text? Dear database makers, if you do not have the article I want, please do not try linking me to my school's catalogue, because I have already checked the catalogue, and it did not meet my needs.

Second: Book reviews? Seriously? The Academic Search Premier database has so many of these listed that as a result it's fatter than a Hutt, four times as useless, and 12 times as evil.

Look, I know we go to a miniscule school.

A mini-school, if you will.

That is no excuse for the decrepit state of the SPU library. We are paying far, far too much to go here, but I would at least hope the result of that would be the ability to go into our library, search the catalogue or databases and find sufficient resources to get the job done. I don't expect a gigantic library, but I expect a better one than we have now.