The Enduring Library: Technology, Tradition, and the Quest for Balance

EnduringTHE Library TECHNOLOGY, TRADITION, AND THE QUEST FOR BALANCE Michael Gorman AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION Chicago 2003 Portions of this book appeared in a different form in Library Journal, Information Technology and Libraries, Library Trends, and the IFLA Journal. While extensive effort has gone into ensuring the reliability of information appearing in this book, the publisher makes no warranty, express or implied, on the accuracy or reliability of the information, and does not assume and hereby disclaims any liability to any person for any loss or damage caused by errors or omissions in this publication. Design and composition by ALA Editions in Berkeley Book, Alexa, and Futura Condensed using QuarkXPress 4.1 on a PC platform Printed on 50-pound white offset and bound in 10-point coated cover stock by McNaughton & Gunn The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. ϱ Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gorman, Michael, 1941– The enduring library : technology, tradition, and the quest for balance / by Michael Gorman. p. cm. ISBN 0-8389-0846-2 1. Libraries and society. 2. Libraries—Aims and objectives. 3. Libraries—Automation. 4. Library science—Technological innovations. 5. Library science—Forecasting. 6. Librarians—Professional ethics. I. Title. Z716.4.G665 2003 021.2—dc21 2002151679 Copyright © 2003 by Michael Gorman. All rights reserved except those which may be granted by Sections 107 and 108 of the Copyright Revision Act of 1976. Printed in the United States of America 0706050403 54321 This book is dedicated to LOUIS DEXTER GORMAN and BESS ROSA GORMAN CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii INTRODUCTION ix Libraries and Communications Technology 1 The Way We Live Now: Libraries Today 1 2 Communications Technology, 1875 to Now 14 3 Communications Technology and Libraries Today 27 Reading and the Web 4 Reading in a Digital World 40 5 The Nature of the Web 52 Library Work and the Future of Libraries 6 Reference Work in Technologically Advanced Libraries 66 7 Cataloguing in the Twenty-First Century 82 8 Challenges of the Future 95 9 The Future of Libraries: A Research Agenda 110 v vi Contents Overcoming Stress and Achieving Harmony 10 Information Overload and Stress: The Ailments of Modern Living 122 11 Seeking Harmony and Balance 134 INDEX 149 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS wish to acknowledge the help of a number of my colleagues in the Madden Library at Fresno State for their witting or unwitting contributions to this book. In particular, I would like to thank Dave Tyckoson, Ross LaBaugh, IPatrick Newell, Karen Kinney, Angelica Carpenter, and Pat Lavigna. My provost, Michael Ortiz, could not possibly be more supportive or encouraging. I am also grateful to my colleagues and friends in other places: Anne Heanue, Wilma Minty, Anne Reuland, Sherrie Schmidt, John Byrum, Michael Buckland, and Kerrie Talmacs. I discussed one chapter of this book with the late and much missed Brett Butler and profited from his insights. I thank my assistants Susan Mangini and Bernie Griffith for their infinite patience and ever-present resource- fulness. The editors at ALA Editions, especially Marlene Chamberlain, Mary Huchting, and Paul Mendelson, have been patient, persevering, and immensely helpful. As ever, I am more grateful than I can say for the love of my daughters Emma Celeste Gorman and Alice Clara Gorman. They are the light of my life. vii INTRODUCTION In times of change and danger, when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present. —John Dos Passos1 eorge Eliot’s Middlemarch, deemed by many the finest English-language novel of the nineteenth century, is rooted in a particular time and place. The time is the late 1820s and early 1830s and the place England—a Gcountry going through a profound change. Superstition was giving way to science, quackery to scientific medicine, stagecoaches to railroads, cottage industries and hand implements to factories and machinery, and the nation was still consumed with the controversies attendant on the First Reform Bill, finally enacted in 1832. The changes and societal shifts seemed epochal and transformational to the people of the time about which Eliot was writing (forty years later)—as indeed they were. The novel would lack much of its resonance if it were set in quieter, more settled times. The rub is, of course, to find any such times. The American and French Revolutions had taken place a scant fifty years before the events of Middlemarch—and they were epochal, the best of times and the worst of times. The European revolutions of 1848 lay between the times in which Middlemarch is set and the writing of the book, and they were seen as transforming the Continent. The First World War broke out thirty-four years after George Eliot died. It was called “the war to end all wars” and is seen by many as the defining line between the Victorian age and modern times. I could go on with a familiar litany of political, military, and social defining moments— the “quiet bland” Eisenhower 1950s were, after all, the time of the “red scare,” ix x Introduction the stirrings of the civil rights movement, and the very real fears of nuclear war that still haunt most who were children then. At the time of writing the United States and the world are still reeling from the awful events of September 11, 2001—“a day in which the whole world changed,” we are told constantly. These are all great events for good or ill and I wish in no way to belittle their importance, but merely to point out that each age has its clashes between the past and the present, its fears of current calamities and unknown future changes. I have concentrated on the political and military, but one could make exactly the same point about technology. Most now feel only nostalgia for the rural railroads, but the characters in Middlemarch feared and resisted what they saw as a “monstrous intrusion into the countryside that might be repulsed.”2 The events in Middlemarch take place not long after the Luddites had smashed the weaving machines in an ultimately futile gesture against what they saw, quite correctly, as a threat to their livelihoods, to their way of life, and to rural society as a whole. Now here we are, at the end of two centuries that have brought us transformational technologies from the steam engine to the computer, thinking, as people in all ages do, that we have reached some unsurpassable level of technological achievement and are on the threshold of an entirely new age. To a certain extent, that last is true and will remain true until the next transformational technology ushers in yet another “unique” period of change. I think the belief that one’s own time is unique is a hindrance to clear thinking and makes it very difficult, in libraries and elsewhere, to make rational and cost-effective judgments about how best to use limited human and financial resources. I seek in this book to describe our present and future library life, our use of technology, and our ways of looking at what we do. I also seek to describe a bal- anced approach that will enable us to incorporate technology (especially digital technology) harmoniously and without compromising our basic values. The technology that concerns us most is that which relates to communication—the conveying of messages. This has always been the case, since libraries have always dealt, and still deal, with recorded knowledge and information—with complex messages between the dead and the living, the living and the living, and the living and people as yet unborn—irrespective of the technology used to make those records available and to preserve them for future generations. Humankind has been making such records for ten millennia—we know this because one of the technologies used then (impressions on clay tablets) proved to be durable across those millennia.3 Another early technology—ink on papyrus and, later, prepared animal skin—was more perishable, but some examples and fragments have survived, to give us at least an idea of what the earliest recorded knowledge and information was like. Millennia later, the scroll Introduction xi and the codex became the dominant communication technologies, the latter tri- umphing after the Western invention of printing in the fifteenth century. In the last 150 years, the written and printed word have coexisted with a variety of other means of recording texts, sounds, and images. A dizzying array of such means—from nineteenth-century sound recordings on wire to twenty-first- century CDs; microforms of many kinds; film, videos, DVDs; multimedia pro- ductions; and, of course, digital electronic documents and resources—has influ- enced the way we live and communicate. Since all these technologies are the very stuff of what libraries are about, each has had a great impact on the nature and functioning of libraries. It is a feature of society as a whole and libraries in particular that the newest technology is always received with irrational ardor and is always seen as transformational. In just the last sixty-five years, radio has been proclaimed the answer to universal higher education, television the death of the movie indus- try, microforms the ultimate solution to library space problems, audiovisual materials the cause of changing libraries into “resource centers,” and the “virtual library” and the “information superhighway” have been proclaimed the answers to all that ails society. If you look at each of these examples, you will see a pre- dictable series of stages.

Load more