the library is falling!

[calimac]

Regularly some distressed humanist writes a panicked article about the decline and fall of the university library. There are often some good points, but usually the concern is vastly overstated. Here's one such article.

I learned about the existence of the book by browsing the university's old card catalogues, which had not been destroyed, as they have been at most other libraries. Many of the cards had notations on them by librarians and scholars stretching back more than 100 years.

I can't speak for others, but I was responsible for stuffing card catalogs into computers at several college libraries, and we were always very careful to include all relevant notations. Why there's no reference to a Lowell-annotated copy of Leaves of Grass in the Harvard online catalog I don't know, but the online records of other early copies of the book describe lots of notations and provenance information.

I have had moments in reading a text -- an ordinary one that might now be found online -- when I noticed a minor reference in the margins that sent me a few shelves down to find a much more obscure book that was packed with unexpected clues that changed my project entirely.

Yes, yes, serendipity is a wonderful thing. And even more wonderful serendipities that can send you further away without your having to move out of a chair may be found online. They're called hyperlinks; check 'em out.

That was demonstrated by a pair of bisected, overlapping pages that probably would not make sense in a digitized format, unless the technician was aware of the importance of copying multiple views of those pages.

Probably not, and I wouldn't lose that book for anything. On the other hand, there are all kinds of wonderful things that can be achieved online, like maps that evolve before your eyes, that can't be achieved on the printed page.

Like any conservationist, I am appalled by the fragments of brittle pages that collect on the library photocopiers. Dust to dust. They remind me that I have a body and am not immortal. Where will the library ghosts go -- along with the furtive lovers -- when all the books have been made immaterial and antiseptic through digitization?

They won't be falling apart, for one thing. Many digitization proponents mistake it for an archival process: it is not, but it is a process that improves access, and since it can substitute for the original book in some cases, it means that volume is subjected to less physical stress and will last longer.

What does it mean when the University of Texas at Austin removes nearly all of the books from its undergraduate library to make room for coffee bars, computer terminals, and lounge chairs? What are students in those "learning commons" being taught that is qualitatively better than what they learned in traditional libraries?

This is not what it sounds like at all. The key phrase in that screed is "undergraduate library." Know, children, that the "undergraduate library" was a big-university fad of the 1960s, when it was thought that the average bonehead undergraduate would be too intimidated by the big university research library to use it. So the "undergraduate library," a dumbed-down user-friendly junior-college level collection, was created. All three major universities I attended or worked at in those days had one. I rarely used it, nor did anyone else. It's not news: for well over a decade now, universities have been dismantling their "undergraduate libraries," moving the books back into the main library system and using the buildings for something else. That's what's going on here. At Stanford the building now houses library technical services, freeing lots of room in the actual library for more books. The "library without books" is, at least in this case, a myth.

In any large, old library, there are unknown quantities of printed materials that cannot be found in electronic catalogs. Some of them were missed during the shift from cards to databases; others were never cataloged at all.

Few were missed; what's often happened is that money to complete the conversion ran out, and the remaining card catalog stands in an obscure corner. Items that were never catalogued at all wouldn't have been shelved in public stack areas, so the serendipity that the author lauds would not suffice to find them.

Sometimes librarians think a book that hasn't been checked out in decades is seldom used.

Nobody who went to my library school would make that error.

But many books are consulted in the stacks without being borrowed; if those books are not there, they will have to be obtained by more labor-intensive and costly methods. Most of my discoveries as a researcher come from the efficiency of being able to spend 10 seconds glancing at the contents of nearby books instead of having to make an elaborate and time-consuming plan to track down tangential leads.

Here there's a real problem. Browsing access to offsite storage, even if you go there (often an hour's drive away), can be very limited.

Computers are helpful, but the stacks cultivate intuitive bookish instincts. Those instincts may not be quantifiable, but they produce discoveries that the rational structure of electronic databases almost inevitably preclude.

Actually, electronic databases can produce intuitive unquantifiable discoveries at an amazing rate. They just require the development of different instincts. Like the author's, my training in intuitive and serendipitous searching is in books. I'm still training myself in the techniques of doing it online.

the panic about brittle books and necessity of microfilm replacement described by Nicholson Baker in Double Fold

Double Fold ... well, Double Fold was sophomoric. If, as Baker says, libraries were actually discarding unique original newspaper files in favor of the microfilm editions, that's scandalous, but it puzzles me because I was taught thirty years ago that that was a dumb idea of the 1950s that wasn't being done any more. On the other hand, the brittle book problem is entirely real, and Baker's dismissal of it was staggeringly ignorant and unobservant.

I recently obtained an ex-library edition of Poole's Index to Periodical Literature from a dealer for $200. Poole's is indispensable for Americanists, and it would have been cheap at twice the price. The dealer probably carried the books away from a library sale in a copier-paper box marked $10.

And guess what? Poole's is now online. Which is where large indexes belong. The ease of searching indexes online is incomparable to thumbing through volume after volume of an index. As long as some libraries keep their hard copies -- Harvard has one -- Americanists should cheer how much easier computerization has made their work.

Comments

Amen!

[(Anonymous)]

(not wanting to be anonymous, but I'm not a LiveJournal user nor have an openID)

I work for a larger national library, and I agree with every scrap you say here. The researcher may be very fond of paper indeed, but I feel that he's coming up with arguments based on what paper does for him, (maybe the smell gets him high. It sure does to me) not what content there is within nor how to go about making the most of it.

My job is to make our catalog come alive, and trust me, there are some seriously funky cool and better ways to find information than what any manual process can bring, guaranteed. We've got ouself some 6 million items in our collection, and about 4 million of these have catalog records. Rome wasn't built in a day, and the old library of Alexandria isn't standing. It's never about what to do, but always about how much money we've got to do it.

[cleverusername2.livejournal.com]

Very well said. Unlike this liberal arts professor you are making counter arguments and explanations from the inside an informed position rather than from the partial understanding of a frequent library user. I especially like your views on Undergraduate Libraries, though the only college I attended that had one, the University of Washington, it was still being regularly used, perhaps because they moved the audio-visual collection there. I tried hard to get through the Chronicle article, even though when someone mentions poor maligned Nicholson Baker it makes my eyes cross. The brittle book crisis is real and still with us. As librarians we should try our best to calm alarmists like Baker and this professor. You are completely right in stating that digital copies are for access rather than archival storage. We're working on preserving born-digital documents, but we still have a long way to go.