Learning to Find Joy through the Library

As a librarian, it may come as no surprise that I am very interested in organization. Good organization is key to helping patrons find what they need to achieve success. When a patron asks a librarian for help finding a book they want, librarians are often able to find the book within minutes of the request. This is thanks to the cataloger who gave the book a call number, a librarian who designated a spot on the shelf for the book, and the shelvers and circulation staff who help return the book to the shelf once it has been checked out. Through all of this teamwork, we can find any book we have with a moment’s notice.

Marie Kondo, author of the famous, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing, has devoted her life to helping the public achieve great organization in their own homes and workplaces. Through her organizational wisdom, many people have learned how to put into practice “less is more.”

One of the key strategies of Kondo’s method is to group all like things together, usually by forming a pile on the floor. Her instructions tell readers to make 5 separate piles of their belongings in the following order: clothing, books, papers, “komono” (miscellaneous items) and sentimental items. If the library made a pile of all our books we would need a mountain climber to summit it! The Lawrence Headquarters Branch alone currently has over 143,000 physical print books in our collection, and this is not even including the 637,736 eBooks we currently have available in our virtual collection!

An essential point of the Konmari method is to only keep what sparks joy (except for things that cannot be disposed of, like the deed to a house or other contractual items). By picking up each and every object in the pile, this can really help a person decide what is important to him or her. Many people may ask what to do with all of the items that do not spark joy?

Kondo advocates donating items in good condition to people and organizations in need, recycling when you can, and disposing of the rest. If you are interested in making a book donation to the Mercer County Library System, please contact your local branch or visit https://mcl.org/about/donations for more information.

Sometimes one of the best ways to recycle an old item of interest is to upcycle it. The Lawrence Headquarters Branch encourages our patrons to upcycle items through our annual TrashedArt Contest. For over a decade, patrons have been taking items that would have been otherwise thrown out and turning them into art. Some really spectacular pieces have been created from humble items like spare buttons, disposable spoons, old papers, license plates and more. https://mcl.org/events/trashedart.

If you are interested in reading Marie Kondo’s books, please check out these resources: