The celebrated lions outside the 42nd Street branch of the New York Public Library are named Patience and Fortitude, which I find appropriate, as I’ve visited NYPL branches a few times in recent months to research an upcoming GONY piece, and the task was a strong test of my own capacity for patience and fortitude.

So I welcome the news that the NYPL has enrolled in “iTunes U.,” a section of the iTunes Music Store where academic institutions can share material. The initial selection is pathetic—the “Performing Arts Archives” consists of a single 3-minute discussion of the NYPL’s Katharine Hepburn collection—but I assume that if only for the sake of dignity, the library will fill it out.

My optimism doesn’t come from any notion that the NYPL’s iTunes U. is a breakthrough in itself. Rather, it’s a heartening step in the right direction in that it makes more Library material available to the public, and more importantly, it does so through a familiar interface.

For my research at the Library, I wanted to comb through New York papers from the 1930s and ’40s. NYPL staff would inevitably direct me toward their online New York Times database. When I told them I didn’t want to restrict my search to the Times, I got different reactions. All of the staff agreed that the library has such materials, a few claimed to know how to find them, and none actually did. There was always another room, another database, a binder somewhere…but not here. The material was on microfiche, a fact the librarians underscored with dread, as if they spoke of runic tomes guarded by a ferocious dragon.

But in fairness, I can forgive the fact that a public enterprise on the vast scale of the NYPL doesn’t have experts at every station. The most aggravating thing for me about research at the NYPL is not that the staff was unable to retrieve some information, but that the information they do make available is so difficult to navigate. Each new resource requires you to learn yet another atrocious interface with its own cocktail of Boolean modifiers and its own idiosyncratic ranking algorithm. (And good lord, people, any information retrieval system that, in 2008, still forces you to view only ten results at a time should be taken out back and shot.)

Libraries spent the past decade frantically digitizing their wares while interface design has taken a back seat. They threw books up on “virtual” stacks and figured they’d make the card catalog when they get around to it. In that time, libraries have ceded their authority as information centers to outfits that concentrated on how users navigate information—most notably Google.

The iTunes interface isn’t ideal, but at least it is familiar, one less thing to learn. If the NYPL’s directors still take pride in their status as an information hub (and I think they do), it would behoove them to pursue more projects like iTunes U., which presents information in a context that a general audience understands. As I saw firsthand, it doesn’t matter how many newspapers you have in the back room if nobody knows how to read them.