The importance of books, free access, and libraries as places—and the dangerous inadequacy of the information science paradigm

The Importance of Books, Free Access,and Libraries as Places—and theDangerous Inadequacy of the InformationScience Paradigmby Thomas Mann

Although libraries mustcontinue to provide electronic

resources, the distinctivestrength of research librarieslies mainly in their ability to

provide free access topreservable book collections

that facilitate theunderstanding of lengthy

textual works and that cannotbe tapped into electronically

from anywhere, at any time, byanyone.

Thomas Mann is a Reference Librarian inthe Main Reading Room of the Library of

Congress, 101 Independence Avenue, S.E.,Washington, D.C. 20540-4660

,[email protected]..

T his discussion will focus on col-lege and research libraries and, tosome extent, public libraries, not

special libraries. Within that ballpark, Iam going to defend a proposition thatwould probably get me tossed out of mostschools of information science, namely,that all formats of recorded knowledgeare not equally important. Of the manyformats that general libraries must dealwith, books are more important than theothers; and, furthermore, books requirespecial technical treatment that differsfrom the treatment of Web sites, films,audiocassettes, compact discs, and thelike.

I am going to start by looking at thehistory of railroads in the this country—the reason will become obvious—but be-fore I do that, I must ask readers to pleasenote I am not saying or even suggestingthat the non-book formats and Internetsites areunimportant or dispensable. In-deed, in special libraries they may right-fully claim to be much more importantthan books. Even in research libraries it isdesirable for catalogers to deal with Websites as well as books (although I willargue that books should be their primaryfocus). Electronic formats are here tostay. Whether they should be regarded asadditions to book collections orsubsti-tutesfor them in research libraries is thepoint at issue.

As for railroads, anyone who reads li-brary literature or goes to library confer-ences has heard it said, probably manytimes, that railroads got into trouble be-cause they assumed they were in the rail-road business rather than in the transpor-tation business; and that if libraries want

to survive, we have to realize we are inthe information business, not the bookbusiness. Very few assumptions about ourprofession have done as much damage asthis misguided analogy. We truly need todo some critical thinking before we repeatthis nonsense any further. To specify whythe analogy is misguided, we must firstlook carefully at railroad history.

THE TROUBLE WITH RAILROADS

Where does the belief come from thatrailroads got into trouble “because theyassumed themselves to be in the railroadbusiness rather than in the transportationbusiness”? It can be traced directly to anarticle entitled “Marketing Myopia” writ-ten by Theodore Levitt in 1960 inTheHarvard Business Review.It was re-printed in the same journal in 1975, as a“classic,” with a note that the publisherhad sold more than 265,000 reprints of it.1

Levitt, who was a lecturer in businessadministration at Harvard at the time ofthe article’s original publication, justthrows out this observation on railroads asthough it were self-evident. He providesno footnotes, no documentation, and nosources for it.2

Subsequent overviews of railroad his-tory written by historians ignore this re-mark entirely and concentrated instead onthe real problems of railroads, such as:

● The growing strength of competingmodes of transportation such as cars,trucks, airplanes, barges, and pipelinesystems;

● Massive federal subsidies for compet-itors in the forms of interstate highwayand airport construction that were notmatched by subsidies to railroads;

268 The Journal of Academic Librarianship, Volume 27, Number 4, pages 268–281

● The fact that much transcontinental in-formation that formerly had to betransported by physical means, such asmail, switched into electrical channelsof communication, such as telephones;and

● The fact that federal regulationslargely boxed railroads into the rail-road business and prevented themfrom cooperating with the trucking in-dustry or investing in airlines evenwhen they wanted to.

The Interstate Commerce Commission(ICC), for example, prevented the Penn-sylvania Railroad from developing an in-termodal container system (of the typelater called “piggyback”) that could beoffloaded from trains onto flatbed trucks;3

the ICC also refused to allow railroads topass along increased costs as freight rates,an action that “seriously undermined rail-road profitability.”4 The U.S. Congress,fearing monopolization, let die in 1943the enabling legislation that would havepermitted the New Haven and Pennsylva-nia railroads to invest in commercial air-lines.5 In the 1930s, Congress also subsi-dized a huge public works project ofbuilding locks and dams along the Mis-sissippi from Minneapolis down to St.Louis; the result was that “Barge rates are[now] so low that there is simply no railcompetition from the Midwest’s grainbelt to the port of New Orleans.” Thisbarge traffic now carries 100 million tonsof bulk commodities, including 63% of allU.S. grain exports. A century ago, how-ever, prior to the federal government’sdirectly subsidizing the railroads’ com-petitors, the situation was completely re-versed: there was virtually no river freighttraffic above St. Louis because “the pas-senger train had all but killed the steam-boat.”6

Compare Levitt’s analysis of the prob-lems of railroads with two others. Thefirst is from the article on “Transporta-tion” in the Encyclopedia of AmericanEconomic History:

The decline of the railroad industry has beenlinked to technical change, to changing pat-terns of demand, and to government inter-vention in the transport sector. The growingstrength of competing means of transporta-tion has clearly been the central problem: forexample, the inroads on bulk traffic by theimprovement of inland waterways, particu-larly the development of the St. LawrenceSeaway (opened in 1959), and the inroads onhigh-value, low-bulk commodities by motortransportation. These tendencies have been

exacerbated by shifts in demand, particularlythe increased reliance upon electricity that is“moved” by high-voltage, long distancelines, and the shifting composition of thenational product in favor of services andaway from the products of agriculture, min-ing, and manufacturing.7

The second is from historian ClarenceCarson’s article, “Throttling the Rail-roads”:

What happened to the railroads in relation toother means of transport can be put suc-cinctly. The railroads were regulated, re-stricted, restrained, circumscribed: their rateswere set, expansion and contraction limited,investments monitored, competition hin-dered, and services prescribed. They werebound hand and foot, as it were, most man-agerial leeway taken from them, vested withresponsibilities without corresponding free-dom, and treated as though their owners andmanagers were irresponsible children. Theirwould-be competitors, on the other hand,were given special privileges, were fostered,succored, developed, and were for varyingperiods of time little hampered by restrictivelegislation.8

Levitt simplistically asserts that rail-roads got into trouble because they didnot fill transportation needs themselves—because of “marketing myopia,” hesays—and “not because the need wasfilled by others (cars, trucks, airplanes,even telephones).” This statement is sheernonsense. Levitt’s belief that railroads gotinto trouble “because they assumed them-selves to be in the railroad business ratherthan in the transportation business” isboth unsupported by its author himselfand directly contradicted by a host ofother, more scholarly analyses of railroadhistory. And yet the nonsense of Levitt’sanalysis is routinely held up as gospeltruth in the field of information science.

FALSE CLAIMS TO EVIDENCE

Of course, it might be said that Levitt’slarger point, that enterprises unclear aboutwhat they should be doing will run intotrouble, is still valid. But that point issimply self-evident and makes no claim toscholarship. What distinguishes Levitt’sassertion is its claim to have an actualhistorical and not-self-evident example ofthis point. A concrete historical examplehas a much higher truth-claim on our at-tention than a mere shot-from-the-hipbromide or platitude because actual his-tory often has a way of not supportingnaive generalizations about the way peo-ple are projected to behave. Levitt was,therefore, claiming to have evidence for

his generalization that he in fact did nothave. And the field of information sci-ence, in parroting Levitt’s nonsense, isalso thereby effectively claiming to havereal historical evidence thatit does nothave in support of a further dubious prop-osition about libraries. In other words,bad scholarship and bogus claims to evi-dence are being used uncritically in sup-port of a highly questionable claim. Thisis a recipe for disaster.

Of course, it is the second part of theanalogy that most concerns the libraryprofession, namely, that libraries will getinto trouble if we consider ourselves to bein the book business rather than the infor-mation business. If we are looking for amore accurate analogy, let me suggest thisone: Just as the major problems of rail-roads had causes other than their manag-ers thinking they were in the wrong busi-ness, the problems of libraries also are notcaused by librarians who think that booksare fundamentally important to their busi-ness. Sane librarians in general librariesimmediately recognize that we are inboththe “businesses” of books and informa-tion, of course; but the customary analogyto railroads usually portrays books andinformation (especially information inelectronic forms) as contrasting ratherthan complementary forces, and, moreimportant, it also usually attaches aslightly, if not strongly, malodorous con-notation to a continued concern for themaintenance of book collections.9

“Just as the major problems ofrailroads had causes other than

their managers thinking theywere in the wrong business,the problems of libraries alsoare not caused by librarians

who think that books arefundamentally important to

their business.”

The provision offree access tobooks,particularly copyrightedbooks, needs tobe the central concern of general librariesin the 21st century.10 Again, I do notmean to say or even to imply that thiscentral, defining concern of general li-braries ought to be theironly concern: Ofcourse, we need to provide access to otherformats inside our walls and to the Inter-net outside the walls. But, for several rea-sons that I shall come back to, providing

July 2001 269

access, especially to the Internet, cannotbe our central or defining characteristic.

Let me first, however, defend the cen-tral importance of the book format of re-corded knowledge against the uncriticalassertion that it is no more important thanany non-book format.

THE LINK OF THE HIGHEST LEVELS

OF AWARENESS TO THE BOOK

FORMAT

First, there is a hierarchy in the levels ofawareness that we have of our world,from data to information to knowledge tounderstanding to wisdom. Each level ismore complex than the previous in thateach integrates more and greater kinds ofawareness. Information can exist in rela-tive isolation; it becomes knowledge onlywhen it is perceived as corresponding to,or cohering with, larger generalizationsthat are shared by other people. Andknowledge itself reaches the level of un-derstanding only when the reasons orcauses underlying its appearances becomegrasped and articulated.11 Here is the im-portant point, and there is no gettingaround it: If the higher levels of knowl-edge and understanding are going to begrasped, they require greater attentionspans than do the lower levels of data andinformation.

The book format is by far the bestmeans that the human race has yet de-vised for communicating to itself knowl-edge and understanding, as opposed tounintegrated data and information. Now,of course, at this point any self-respectinginformation scientist will wish to jump inand point out an unquestioned truth in theinformation science field, namely, that theintellectual content of books can be freedfrom their spatially confined physicalcontainers and reconveyed in other for-mats that are either easier to store and toduplicate, such as microfilm, or that canbe broadcast electronically around theworld, that is, digital formats. And this isa true statement.

TRADE-OFFS IN FORMAT CHANGES

But it is also a naive statement. That is,although it may be wholly true, it is notthe whole of the truth, for there is anadditional truth that is being naively over-looked, namely, that when we change theformat of a knowledge record, we alsochange theaccessto it. The mere exis-tence of information does not guaranteeits actual use; the format of its presenta-tion has a material bearing on making the

content either easy or difficult to use, andease of usehas been shown repeatedly tobe the most important characteristic indetermining which sources will be con-sulted by information seekers.12 Andthere is a real trade-off in digitizing booklength texts into screen display formats.Yes, such operations free them from onephysical location, which is good; but suchoperations also evidently make their intel-lectual content more difficult to absorb inscreen display formats, which is not good.

Let us ask ourselves a few questionsand respond with honest answers ratherthan wishful thinking. How many of ushave read a half-dozen books in the lastyear? How many of us have read a halfdozen book-length texts in digital screendisplay formats in the last year? By“book-length texts” I mean coherentworks in narrative or expository form of alength equivalent to, say, a 200-pagebook. I do not mean an electronic displayof 200 screens of information, such as thelengthy roster of hits one might retrievefrom an AltaVista or an eBay search. I donot mean lengthy displays of “directory”information or lengthy bibliographies orlengthy genealogical lists or lengthy cat-alogs. I mean lengthy and coherent textualworks in connected narrative or exposi-tory forms. Again, how many of us haveread a half-dozen such works in an elec-tronic screen display in the last year? Inthe last 10 years? How many of us haveread such works in electronic screen dis-plays at all?

Walt Crawford, in his article “PaperPersists: Why Physical Library Collec-tions Still Matter,” makes a number ofrelevant points:

What happens if the premises arguing forlibrary conversion to digital fail? Logically,if the premises are invalid, then the conclu-sion is false or at least unsupported. . . .Reading from digital devices, whether porta-ble or desktop, suffers in several areas—among them light, resolution, speed, and im-pact on the reader—and there has beenessentially no improvement in any of theseareas in the last five years.Many futurists have conceded this point.They now admit that people will print outanything longer than 500 words or so. It’sjust too hard to read from a computer, and itdoesn’t seem likely to get a lot easier. Ifevery long text is printed out each time it isused, there are enormous economic and eco-logical disadvantages to the all-digital li-brary: briefly, a typical public library wouldspend much more on printing and licensesthan its current total budget and would use atleast 50 times as much paper as at present.13

If we ourselves do not read lengthytextual works, that is, those that requirelong attention spans, just as readily, justas eagerly, and just as carefully in screendisplays as we do in book formats, thenthere is truly some force at work indicat-ing a very important difference betweenthe two forms regardless of the possibleidentity of their contents. And a differ-ence of such magnitude in results cannotbe dismissed as merely transient andephemeral sentimentality. The danger isthat research libraries may act as thoughproviding electronic book-length texts(with their marvelous keyword search ca-pabilities) is an adequatesubstituteforproviding the same texts in traditionalbook formats. If we make only electronicforms available,we will be undercuttingstudents’ ability to understand lengthyworks as connected wholes.This is a bigdifference, and the field of informationscience cannot simply sweep it under therug.

NAIVETE ABOUT “K IDS GROWING UP

WITH COMPUTERS”Of course, the usual reply here is some-thing along either of two lines. The firstsays, essentially, “Well, it’s true that thedecrepit generation of old fogies whogrew up with books cannot makethe tran-sition easily, but today’s generation ofkids is growing up right from the startwith computers, and they’re taking to itlike ducks to water.” And I would cer-tainly agree that young people today areindeed growing up comfortably withcomputers in ways that may not be com-fortable to their parents’ generation. But,again, as with the railroad analogy, weneed to do some critical thinking here andnot just swallow a plausible-soundingstatement that may actually be missingthe real truth. To say that kids today aregrowing up comfortable with computersis simply not the same thing as sayingkids today are comfortable reading andabsorbing long narrative or expositoryworks in screen display formats. What ishappening is that young people are beingaccustomed to screen displays that requireshorter rather than longer attention spansand that require less rather than more ver-bal understanding articulated in words.14

The fact that copyright-free editions ofmost of the world’s great books are nowaccessible online, for example, does notconvince me that they are actually beingread online. Doing keyword searches oftheir texts for particular passages is sim-ply not the same as the much more im-

270 The Journal of Academic Librarianship

portant work of actually reading and ab-sorbing their intellectual content asconnected wholes.

“T EXT IS OUTMODED ”?The second reply to the obviously dispar-ate functioning and results of the two for-mats (book and screen display) runs alongthe lines of, “reading and writing maysoon be passe—and that’s a good thing.Text is outmoded: A total switch to imageand/or oral forms of communication willbe more in line with the right-brainedintuitive thinking necessary for a trueKnowledge Age.”15 Dare I suggest that,again, some critical thinking is neededhere, too? There are a number of impor-tant assumptions underlying our civiliza-tion, or perhaps I should say conclusions,that have been hard won over the millen-nia: such things as the importance of freespeech; private property; constitutionalgovernment and the rule of law; universalsuffrage; parliamentary democracy; theseparation of legislative, executive, andjudicial powers; the separation of churchand state; the right to trial by a jury ofone’s peers; market economies with stateregulation; the need for military forces tobe answerable to civilian control; wom-en’s rights; human rights not dependenton the views of parochial majorities; anda basic understanding that ethical con-cerns do not reduce simply to estheticpreferences or to local power relation-ships among haves and have-nots. Indeed,underlying many of these would be theunderstanding of time itself as linearrather than endlessly cyclical, allowingfor the very possibility of progress in sci-ence and in human social institutions. An-other large, underlying assumption wouldbe that the universe itself isgood andworthy of attention, exploration, and en-gagement, and that we are capable ofchoosing in large measure the ways inwhich we live in it. This particular as-sumption is very different from otherviews, that the world is simply a sharedillusion masking an ultimate void, andthat the way to deal with problems is notto grapple with them, but is rather tomeditatively raise one’s consciousness tothe point that they are no longer perceivedas problems to begin with. It is also verydifferent from the view that the universeis just a blind aggregation of moleculesand pieces of meat colliding with eachother according to physical laws of matterand energy that preclude the very possi-bility of free will and moral responsibil-ity. There are, of course, many people in

our own country who would disagree witheven this short list of “basics”. But, moreto the point, the culture that we have,founded as it is on these ideas, providesthe very preconditions that allow theirdisagreements to be openly voiced in thefirst place and also taken seriously as mat-ters of inquiry that areworth discussing.

A grasp of the most important insightsabout ultimate reality that underlie ourcivilization is not achievable through“right-brained” spatial or musical think-ing. History shows us that such insightsare not intuitively obvious. More impor-tant, the massive wars of the past century,both hot and cold, have taught us howfragile these gains are and how readilythey can be lost. If they are to be pre-served in our culture, then their preserva-tion ultimately will have to be groundedon a level of understanding—not just ondata or information, and not just on visualimpressions or sound bites, but on under-standing—best achievable through thestudy of books, the one format that facil-itates rather than discourages the intellec-tual absorption of lengthy narratives andexpository textual works.

“A grasp of the most importantinsights about ultimate realitythat underlie our civilization isnot achievable through ”right-

brained“ spatial or musicalthinking.”

Book formats, of course, are not suffi-cient by themselves for the preservationof culture; but they are nonetheless nec-essary because they, preeminently, enableus to grasp the deepest levels of criticalreasoning in ways that non-book formatsgenerally cannot match. Let us not forgetthat the most visually compelling politicaldocumentary ever made is still Leni Rief-enstahl’sTriumph of the Will,which doesa masterful job of appealing to, and ma-nipulating, sights, sounds, impressions,intuitions, and feelings; but to judge thisfilm a “success” in visual or “right-brain”terms while neglecting its moral implica-tions is to abandon all critical thought. Tosuggest that our basic rights, freedoms,protections, and social arrangements canbe maintained, when push comes toshove, on the basis of intuition, good feel-ings, sound bites, engaging music, and theinterplay of visual images is to go beyond

the point of pedagogical irresponsibilityto the point of sheer lunacy. The historyof our past century—and that of everyother century, too—teaches us that “push”does indeed have a persistent tendency tobecome “shove” on really important po-litical and social issues.16

THE PERSISTENCE OF COPYRIGHT

RESTRICTIONS

There is yet another looming fact aboutthe importance of books that is also star-ing us in the face, but which, too, is beingregarded by information science largelythrough rose-colored glasses: in a singleword: copyright.Many people in our pro-fession apparently still believe that copy-right restrictions keeping current booksoff the Internet will soon be “worked out”at high level meetings of publishers’ rep-resentatives, governmental agencies, andlibrarians in such a way that “all informa-tion” will soon, even inevitably, be avail-able in electronic forms, freely accessiblefrom anywhere, at anytime, by anyone.There have already been innumerablesuch meetings, however, and they allcome predictably to the same conclusion:The matter needs further study and moremeetings. The very predictability of thisconclusion indicates an underlying realitythat is not going to go away no matterhow many meetings we paper it overwith, namely, that unless we all agree tolive under a communist or a socialist re-gime that bans intellectual property andcopyright restrictions on its dissemina-tion, we are simply not going to have allbooks or all other information records on-line, despite naive predictions to the con-trary. And again, history, especially in thepast century, has not been kind to theassumption that such socialism is achiev-able, save by dictatorial coercion.

Of course there are now services suchas NetLibrary that provide electronic cop-ies of works from selected mainstreamuniversity and trade publishers. Butplease note: Free access to these works isavailable only with either awhererestric-tion (exclusively within library walls) or awho restriction (only to users with pass-words). These electronic books cannot befreely tapped into from anywhere, at any-time, by anyone on the Internet. But evenfor the restricted audiences who can tapinto these services, the trade-off in formatis such that the connected reading oflengthy texts-as-wholes will inevitablysuffer, no matter how many advantages ofkeyword searching for isolated informa-

July 2001 271

tion may accrue. Research libraries can-not blind themselves to the trade-offs.

BASIS OF COPYRIGHT RESTRICTIONS

IN HUMAN NATURE ITSELF, NOT

TRANSIENT CONVENTIONS

Briefly, I think that until human natureitself changes and we all become self-lessly benevolent and willing to freelycontribute our own intellectual propertyto the common good of society, “all in-formation” will not be online by2047—or even by 5047, for that matter.17

(Those who claim that it will be onlineoften further blur the crucial distinctionbetween free access and paid access, adistinction fundamental to the mainte-nance of libraries as places.) The inabilityof information science to understand thatcopyright restrictions will not vanish, andthat all information will never be freelyavailable online to everyone, at anywhere,at anytime—no matter how many “highlevel” meetings are held—strikes me as aclassic case of too much unintegrated in-formation getting in the way of substan-tive understanding. That thereis a humannature that is not infinitely malleable, andthat will not change as facilely and asreadily as whatever ourtechnology dujour may be, is the point at issue; but it isa point that does not register on the screento begin with when the range of one’svision is constricted by blinders that allowonly technological problems to be per-ceived as relevant.18 If we are to attain anunderstanding of the limits of human na-ture, of an inherent selfishness that willnot go away, and that consistently under-mines utopian and socialist attempts toignore it, we will achieve that understand-ing only through the study of books.19

THE CONTINUING NEED FOR NEW

LIBRARY BUILDINGS

There are still other reasons that booksneed to be the particular concern of gen-eral libraries. For one thing, books arestill being published every year, and inhuge numbers. It is worth noting that thelast year’sBowker Annual(2000) radi-cally revised upward its statistics on thenumber of books produced in this countryin recent years: in 1999 it recorded the1997 book title production as 65,769 ti-tles; now it records 1997 production as119,262 titles. Similarly the revision ofthe 1998 figure is from 56,129 to 120,244titles. It is more than questionable to as-sume thatbooksare making “the transi-tion” that is so cavalierly assumed in so

much information science literature thesedays. The predictions of a few decadesago that we would all be living in a pa-perless society were wrong; the persis-tence of the mistake—that is, to think that“all” information will be online by 2047(or pick any other year)—is yet anotherexample of information science’s inabil-ity to recognize the obvious.

A major consequence of the continuingpublication of books in huge numbers isthe crucial need for library administratorsto build new buildings, and to expandexisting physical facilities. To dismiss theneed for new buildings on the assumptionthat “everything will soon be electronic”is the height of professional irresponsibil-ity. The persistence of copyright lawalone precludes the possibility of “every-thing” becoming digitized; and the cava-lier assumption that only electronic for-mats need to be regarded as importantalso represents ade factoabandonment ofresearch libraries’ professional responsi-bility to preserve knowledge records instable formats.

There is another factor of the need forbuildings that also ought to be considered.Those university administrators, deans,and library directors who buck the fash-ionable trend to envision future librariesas all online will be giving their schools amajor competitive advantage in attractingstudents. Admittedly, this competitiveedge may not show up for decades. Butwhen the reality that copyright restric-tions will nevermagically vanish finallysinks in, as it inevitably must, then thoseuniversity libraries that have planned nowfor the physical space needed to accom-modate large future acquisitions of books,those universities will have major advan-tages in attracting the cream of the facultycrop. And the brightest students will beattracted to the brightest faculty. In con-trast, those institutions that can offer theirprofessors little more than the Internet,the delays of interlibrary loan, and unbrow-sable remote storage collections will findtheir chickens coming home to roostwhen prospective students start compar-ing them to other universities that canoffer large, growing, well-maintained,and well-cataloged research collections inpaper formats, collections that are not,and never will be, available on the Inter-net. It will take courage for any libraryadministrator to fight the prevalent drifttoward focusing primarily on electronicresources,; but those administrators whosucceed will have left their institutions a

lasting intellectual legacy and a majorcompetitive advantage in the 21st century.

REVIEW , SELECTION , AND QUALITY

CONTROL

There are still other advantages that booksoffer over the Internet. In the first place,books (as well as other records insidelibrary walls) must go through severallevels of review and quality control be-fore they appear in the library: They mustfirst be accepted and vetted by editors andoutside readers before getting publishedin the first place, and then they must getreviewed again, compared, and selectedby library professionals before they getpurchased—quite unlike the situationwith sources on the Internet, which can bemounted by anyone at all without anyreview, selection, or quality control.

“Ironically, and tragically,when we omit any mention ofreal libraries and confine our

advice to the realm ofevaluating whatever is withinthe Internet, then our messageitself is woefully deficient in

critical thinking.”

How has the library world been re-sponding to the presence of so muchquestionable material on the Net? Whatwe seem to be doing is telling ourselvesthat we need to teach students how to docritical thinking about Internet sites. Thisis not a bad thing to do, of course, but it isalso not an entirely good thing, withoutqualifications. Specifically, there is a dan-gerous concealed proposition underlyingthe basic strategy. Given the problem ofthere being so much chaff on the Net, ifthe only solution we propose is that stu-dents learn how to evaluate Internetsources, then our solution has conveyed atacit permission that it isacceptableforthem to confine their searches entirelywithin the Internet,as long as they justthink about what they are doing. And thatmessage, above all, is what students willpick up on. We should also be tellingthem to think outside the box of the In-ternet to begin with, to use real librarieswith their huge stores of knowledge andinformation sources that have alreadybeen evaluated, reviewed, and selected, asan alternative to the Net. Ironically, and


tragically, when we omit any mention ofreal libraries and confine our advice to therealm of evaluating whatever is within theInternet, then our message itself is woe-fully deficient in critical thinking.

THE CONCEALED PROPOSITION

UNDERLYING DISTANCE EDUCATION

A similar message is conveyed by schoolsof library and information science thatpromote distance education courses intheir field: The tacit, but nonetheless veryclear, message conveyed to students is theuse of a real research library is not nec-essary for a degree in higher education—not even in library science itself. You canrely for all of your requirements on thefew sources we have seen fit to digitizefor you. Thinking outside the box of whatyou can find through your home computeris neither desirable nor necessary, noteven for a graduate-level degree. Andwhat is the unintended consequence ofsuch a tacit message? What, for example,should distance education students dowho may have a visceral suspicion thatthe traditional analogy of railroads to li-braries is misguided? They can find sup-port for the customary endorsement of theanalogy online, even through the Ameri-can Library Association’s own Website!20 But they will not find online themany sources capable of refuting thecomparison. For those sources, theywould have to venture inside the walls ofa real research library. Heaven forbid thatsuch a requirement be placed on agrad-uate student! All the more desirable, infact, is the clear message to rely on onlythose sources that are digitized andsearchable from home—such thinkingwill socialize and acculturate studentsinto the professional practice of wearingintellectual blinders, a habit that will becrucial to their success in the field ofinformation science.

LONG-TERM PRESERVATION

To return to book formats: Yet anotherlooming fact about their importance isalso staring us in the face,; but, again,information science regards it, if at all,with an optimism that crosses the line intonaivete. It is, in a single word,preserva-tion. The prospect of preserving digitalformats through simple “migration ofdata” from one generation of machine toanother has turned out to be a muchgreater problem than predictions of 15 or20 years ago anticipated. I sometimesthink appealing to electronic formats,

rather than to microfilm or deacidifiedpaper, for long-term preservation pur-poses in terms of an analogy: It is likeputting the fox in charge of the chickencoop and then announcing that the Amer-ican Poultry Association is holding highlevel meetings with important “stakehold-ers” such as the Department of Agricul-ture, the Fox Breeders Association, andvarious commercial biotech companies, tocreate standards for genetically engi-neered foxes that, in the future, will bevegetarians.

A simpler and less expensive solutionwould be to not rely on foxes in the firstplace. It would be better to recognize thatalthough foxes provide an invaluable ser-vice in controlling the countryside’s pop-ulation of rabbits and rats, the very char-acteristics that make them so valuable inpest control also makes them terrible asguardians of chickens.

“We cannot rely on digitalformats to solve preservation

problems when it is in the verynature of these formats to

cause preservation problems inthe first place.”

Similarly, the very characteristics thatmake digital formats so useful in provid-ing new and wonderful ways of searchingtexts, and of distributing information in-stantaneously to a worldwide audience,are the very things that, unfortunately,also make these formats bad for preserv-ing the information. We cannot rely ondigital formats tosolvepreservation prob-lems when it is in the very nature of theseformats tocausepreservation problems inthe first place. I do not by any means wishto discourage the important work that isbeing done in the area of preserving elec-tronic formats, especially those works thathave appeared or exist only in digitalforms with no paper or microform equiv-alents. But I also think—and this is theimportant point—thatthe “default posi-tion” of the library profession ought notto be an automatic assumption that suchwork will “inevitably” succeed.There is areal likelihood that it may succeed onlypartially and only temporarily. One majorreason is that the preservation of elec-tronic formats is not merely a technicalissue, intractable as that is, all by itself. Italso entails massive economic and politi-

cal problems, because any “solution” thatworks temporarily will itself become abottomless pit of expense, requiring ex-tensive and open-ended funding for itsown survivability. Of course there hasbeen some recent good news in this area:The Library of Congress (LC) has an-nounced that it will receive a special,multi-million dollar appropriation fromCongress to deal directly with the wholedigital preservation problem. The pointhere, though, is that although this is in-deed very good news, the library profes-sion needs still to regard this new initia-tive as an exploration and a trial and notas an inevitable success. The problem byits very nature does not lend itself to any“one shot” solution. Nothing short ofmassive increases in funding, probablyfor many libraries, and endlessly sus-tained,will address the problems of pre-serving electronic formats; moreover, the“broadcastability” of electronic formatspreserved at any one site will inevitablyraise legal questions of “fair use” acces-sibility from other locales. Legal prob-lems of this nature will probably not besolved simply by having money thrown atthem. The bottom line, in the real worldof economics and politics that we cannotescape, is that most of the informationnow stored in digital forms, including thevast bulk of the Internet, may very wellnot be adequately preserved for futuregenerations.21 For that reason alone suchinformation ought not to be regarded asthe top priority or thecentral concern ofresearch libraries.

THE INEVITABILITY OF TRADE-OFFS

AND THE NEED TO DETERMINE

PRIORITIES

What I am ultimately suggesting is that itwould be prudent for the library profes-sion to think much more in terms of trade-offs rather than in our customary terms oftrying to do everything—an attitude em-bodied in the very title of a recent confer-ence in New England, “User-OrientedTechnical Services: All Things to AllPeople.” Such an attitude is nonsense,right from the get-go. To use a prevalentexpression, we need to “Get over it.” Wedo not have the money to do everythingwe would like to do, and we never will.And so we have to choose among alter-natives and prioritize what we do andavoid the wishful thinking that we can doeverything.

I sometimes get the impression fromALA pronouncements, as well as from

July 2001 273

library journals, that the desirable priori-ties for libraries nowadays can be dia-grammed as in Figure 1, with provision ofaccess to the Internet as our core function,with a couple add-ons such as providingcoffee bars, meeting rooms, and culturalprograms tacked on to it just so that wecan offersomejustification for maintain-ing libraries as physical places. This wayof thinking assumes, without a shot beingfired, that all information will indeed be-come digitized in the future and that, byheaven, we are in theelectronic informa-tion business, not thebookbusiness. Thismay be something of a caricature, but Ihave seen and heard enough of it that itscares me.22

Let me suggest a different diagram ofpriorities for general libraries, actuallytwo of them. The first is shorter-term, thesecond is longer-term. In Figure 2, printcollections, especially of books, are at thevery center of concern, and their mainte-nance and growth forms our highest pri-

ority. In the next ring is the provision offree access to the Internet to whoevercomes in the door. (By “free” I mean“without direct charges to individuals atthe point of use.”) In the next circle wecome to non-book formats, including au-diovisuals and site-licensed databases,both CD-ROMs and Web sites, that can-not be freely tapped into from anywhereat any time by anybody. Just as withbooks, people have to come inside thelibrary’s walls to gain free access to thismaterial. Some of this may be cataloged;much of it must simply be recorded ratherthan cataloged because of the trade-offsinvolved with catalogers’ limited timeand resources. The access to this materialis through channels that must be differentfrom the channels leading to books, apoint I shall return to in a moment.

Let me jump ahead to Figure 3, whichI regard as a longer-term model. The maindifference is in the changed position ofthe second and third circles: Here the pri-ority of providing free access to the Inter-net has migrated farther from the center.Why the change?

INTERNET ACCESS: THE GOAL TO

BYPASS L IBRARIES ENTIRELY

It is because large commercial and gov-ernmental forces are at work, all tendingtoward the goal of getting ordinary citi-zens and householders connected to theInternet in their homes.There is a realbuck to be made here. Not only does theInternet offer businesses worldwide thechance to place advertising within everydwelling in the country, which is some-thing television can already do, but theNet offers two incredible additional ad-vantages to businesses: It enables them totarget specific audiences and market

groups who turn to specific Web sites,and it offers them the chance to reachthose consumers and their credit cardsimmediately and interactively.

The desirability of this commercialgoal for businesses is being seconded bygovernment, which sees educational andcivic goals being fostered by the samehousehold hookups to the Net. In remarksmade December of 1999 in the Rose Gar-den, President Clinton, speaking of a con-ference then being held to close the “Dig-ital Divide” between information havesand have-nots, noted recent successes ofthe public-private partnership to wire allschools and classrooms to the Internet.But he then went on to add the following:“there’s still a lot more to do. We mustconnect all of our citizens to the Internetnot just in schools and libraries, but inhomes,small businesses, and communitycenters” [emphasis added]. Two monthslater, in announcing a multi-billion dollarfederal program to solve the problem, hesaid, “Our big goal should be to makeconnection to the Internet as common asconnection to telephones.”23 This is a po-litically popular agenda, represented astied to education, that will probably begarner bipartisan support in the Bush ad-ministration. But it is also an agenda that,in allocating funds, simply ignores long-term preservation problems.

The bottom line is that powerful inter-ests are at work that seek tobypass librar-ies and librarians entirelyin providingaccess to the Internet. With the coming ofinteractive TV and federal subsidies, evenpoor people will probably not need librar-ies for gaining access to the Net.If, there-fore, we define the Internet as central tothe mission of our libraries, we will beputting libraries out of business.The bestthing we can do is to find an importantcultural niche in the provision of knowl-edge and information that cannot be filledby the Internet. Of course we need tocontinue providing free access to the In-ternet, too, but this cannot be our centralor defining mission.

WHAT REAL L IBRARIES HAVE TO

OFFER

What is distinctive about libraries? Thereal strength of libraries lies in our abilityto provide access, both now and in thelong-term future, to important resourcesthatcannot be tapped into from anywhereat anytime by anyone.This means bothprint collections—especially copyrightedbooks—and site-licensed databases andWeb sites that are too expensive for peo-

Figure 1Internet Centered Model

Figure 2Print Centered Model, Near Term

Figure 3Print Centered Model, Longer

Term


ple to subscribe to individually. Bothprinted sources and site-licensed elec-tronic sources have something very im-portant in common: People who wantfreeaccess to them must come inside the wallsof libraries as places. These are the thingswe need to concentrate on, and they aremuch more important than coffee bars,meeting rooms, and cultural programs forjustifying the maintenance of libraries asplaces.

THE CONFINING BOX OF THE

INTERNET

I have spoken of several blind spots inacademic information science these days.The biggest blind spot of all is informa-tion science’s habitual inability to thinkoutside the confining box of the Internet.And just what are those confinements?Again, we need to analyze the problem interms of trade-offs, and again, they arestaring us right in the face. The Internetdoes not and cannot work without trade-offs amongwhat, who,andwhererestric-tions. That is, if people wish to providefree access to information, then they arelimited in what can be digitally distrib-uted: copyright-free information. If infor-mation providers wish to mount copy-righted resources on the Net,and wish toprofit from them,then they usually mustlimit who has access, through either sub-scription fees (and passwords) or point-of-use charges.24 In general, the most ef-ficient way to providefree access to thevast bulk of copyrighted information, in-cluding low-use material,in a way thatstill allows a profit to be derived from it isto introduce awhererestriction: that peo-ple must consult the copyrighted informa-tion within particular places.

“The biggest blind spot of all isinformation science’s habitualinability to think outside the

confining box of the Internet.”

Libraries fill precisely this niche inthe information economy: They can pro-vide free access to copyrighted printsources, especially books, as well as tosite-licensed databases because librariesimpose on them awhererestriction to aplace within walls. (And even this re-striction is mitigated in real libraries bythe fact that much of what is storedwithin the walls can be checked out foruse elsewhere, at any time of the day or

night, and by the fact that there are somany libraries and that they are so geo-graphically dispersed in so many com-munities. Libraries may even providefree access to selected commercial da-tabasesoutside their walls when the ac-cess is restrictedto users with the li-brary community’s passwords, that is,when awho restriction is added.)

The Internet cannot provide free accessto the vast bulk of copyrighted informa-tion from anywhere at anytime by anyone.The Internet is boxed in by restrictions inwhat it can mount andwho can view it.Real libraries, in contrast, are not re-stricted inwhat they can offer; it can beeither public domain or copyrighted ma-terial. And real libraries are not restrictedin whocan have access to it; anyone whocomes in the door can look at anything,either print sources or site-licenses data-bases or any variety of non-book formats.

In other words, information scienceadvocates have been telling us for yearsthat it is the weakness of libraries thatthey require you to come inside theirwalls to look at their contents. Theyhave it exactly backwards: It is pre-cisely the majorstrength of librariesthat they require you to come inside thewalls, for, in the real world of unavoid-able trade-offs, it isprecisely that re-striction that enableslibraries to elimi-nate all point-of-use charges. Theimposition of thewhere restriction toparticular places is the most efficientmechanism our society has devised formaking the vast bulk ofcopyrightedin-formation freely available to anyonewho wants to look at it, not just thosefew who are parts of communities withpasswords, while also enabling its pro-ducers to profit from it.25

What, then, do research libraries haveto offer that the Information Superhigh-way does not? Only the greatest aggrega-tions of the most important records of oursociety: knowledge records, not just infor-mation records, and in the format that bestallows them to be readily grasped andunderstood as connected wholes, in for-mats that have gone through critical eval-uation and selection processes, in formatsthat libraries actually have a good chanceof preserving for centuries without exor-bitant costs, in a manner of access—thatis, within walls—that enables them to befreely consulted by anyone. Again, theseare not our weaknesses; these are pre-cisely our strengths.

THE BIG DIFFERENCE IN THE

TECHNICAL TREATMENT OF BOOKS

If the contents of books are to be ex-ploited to the fullest extent, they requireprocessing that is different from mostother formats. And again, the difference isso obvious that it seems to be yet anotherblind spot to the field of information sci-ence. For optimum access, books requirenot just cataloging but also classifiedshelving. Most other formats do not re-quire classified arrangement to the extent,or to the degree of complexity, that booksdo. And please note: I am not talkingabout the classified arrangement of surro-gate computerized catalog records search-able in call number order; I am talkingabout subject arrangement of the actualbook volumes on shelves.

What difference does classified shelv-ing make? Let me give just one example.One of the long-term scholars at the LC isworking on a book on the Third Crusade.For whatever reason, he needed to findthe definition of an obsolete medical term,arnaldia. Of course we checked theOx-ford English Dictionaryfirst; it simply isnot there. So I tried various specializedmedical dictionaries and encyclopedias inboth our Main and our Science ReadingRooms. No luck. I also tried every data-base I could think might be relevant andthe Internet. Again, no luck. I finally wentback into the bookstacks to the classifica-tion range for our retrospective collectionof medical dictionaries, nomenclatures,and encyclopedias; in the LC system, thisis the range of R121 through R125. I amusually not this thorough, but I thoughtthis might make a good example, so Icounted what is in this area. At LC wehave 2,148 volumes on 121 shelves. Iquickly browsed through the range,looking especially for fat volumes in oldbindings. In short order I found two olddictionaries that defined the term; essen-tially, it means “baldness.” While I waslooking in the “arn” sections of the alpha-bets of these works, however, I also founda lengthy article nearby onArmymedicalstatistics in an eight-volume encyclopediafrom 1923. Its comparative tables ofcauses of death of military personnel invarious countries over many years, goingback into the 19th century, caught my eyeand struck me as possibly useful to an-other regular researcher. This other re-searcher is a government contractor work-ing on a long-term study of the effects ofdrug and alcohol abuse in military forcesaround the world; she was delighted to

July 2001 275

have the article brought to her attention,and she photocopied the whole thing.

Even though our catalog records cannow be searched in call number order, it isnot possible to tell from mere surrogatecatalog records whichvery fewvolumesof the 2,148 contain the specific wordarnaldia.Nor would it have been possiblefor any catalog records to alert me to theexistence of the other article on armymedical statistics that I was not lookingfor. Even if tables of contents were to bescanned into the catalog, this importantlevel of information would still not besearchable.

Classified shelving enables us to do, ineffect, full-text searches of our most im-portant knowledge records, our retro-spective book collections, down to thepage level and, indeed, even to the level ofan individual word.The possibility of ex-tractingthis levelof information from ourenormously valuable book collectionswould be completely lost if book volumesthemselves were no longer shelved insubject-categorized arrangements and ifwe had to rely on searches of catalogrecords alone for subject access. Re-searchers in libraries throughout the coun-try use classified shelving for this deeplevel of searching all the time.

“The technical processing ofbooks requires not just the

creation of surrogate catalogrecords, but also the shelvingof the volumes themselves inan intellectually structured

arrangement, and thecomplexity of this type of

treatment differentiates booksfrom the way we handle most

other formats.”

The point here, though, is that the tech-nical processing of books requires not justthe creation of surrogate catalog records,but also the shelving of the volumesthemselves in an intellectually structuredarrangement, and the complexity of thistype of treatment differentiates booksfrom the way we handle most other for-mats.26 This, however, seems to be yetanother blind spot to academic theoristswho do not see any distinctions to be madein the processing of book and non-bookformats. Of course, I would argue that sev-

eral control principles do indeed transcendthe media being processed: principles suchas categorization of material, standardiza-tion of category designations, and displayedlinkage of the designations. Categorizationis important because it enables researchersto recognize many records relevant to theirtopic within a retrieved group, whose indi-vidual members will contain uncontrolledwords that could never be guessed or spec-ified in advance. Systems of controlled vo-cabulary and classification thus offer majoradvantages to researchers over systemsrequiring precise specification—usuallythrough guesswork—of uncontrolledwords in advance of actual retrieval.27

CHANNELS OF ACCESS BEYOND

CATALOGING

I mentioned earlier that some material inthe outer circles of library priorities mustsimply be recorded rather than catalogedbecause of the trade-offs involved withcatalogers’ limited time and resources andthat access to this material must be pro-vided through channels other than cata-loging. I would enlarge that to say thatmuch material even within theinner cir-cles of library priorities can be madeavailable only through channels otherthan cataloging by librarians. For exam-ple, I have had many occasions to helpresearchers working on our Internet ter-minals by steering them in many differentdirections. When they ask for help withthe Internet, often the best response is,“Oh, what you really need is theDictio-nary of Scientific Biography, or EuropaYearbook, or the Almanac of AmericanPolitics, or a good published bibliographysuch asBenjamin Franklin: A ReferenceGuide, or some of our site-licensed data-bases such asPeriodicals Contents Index,or Dissertation Abstractsin the First-Search system, or theFrancis file in theEureka system.” Sometimes, even withinthe Internet, they need it pointed out tothem that AltaVista has a “NEAR” Bool-ean operator that most other search en-gines do not have, or that often the fastestway to get directly to an organization’shome page, without a lot of clutter, isthrough a Google search.All of these re-search options are such that most peoplewill simply not find them through catalog-ing, no matter how good or how extensivethe library’s catalog may be. But there isanother channel through which peoplecan find them: through reference librari-ans.

In the over-all scheme of things, refer-ence service is just as important as cata-

loging. But my impression is that manypeople in technical services tend to act asthough this thought has never occurred tothem. This is a blind spot that is peculiarto many catalogers, I think, or at least tomany cataloging managers who seem un-able to notice any resources in a libraryexcept those that appear on a computerscreen. The result is an endless and futilequest to make online catalogs be “allthings to all people.” I repeat: Get over it.Why? Because that attitude is doing realdamage to libraries.

THE UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES OF

CORE CATALOGING

One of the biggest blunders I have wit-nessed in my 20-some years as a librarianis our profession’s widespread embrace of“core cataloging” as the general standardof what catalogers ought to aim for. Andwe seem to have embraced it, at least inpart, because catalogers are stretched sothin, in so many directions, already. I amespecially concerned that core catalogingrecommends that only two subject head-ings be applied to any book record.28 As astandard for the library profession, this isa disaster. When those of us on the re-trieval end are trying to achieve the mostdesirable ends of reference service,namely, to get both an overview of theextent of what is available on a topic andalso to zero in on the most relevant sourc-es,29 vocabulary control is much morepractically useful than simple uncon-trolled vocabulary enrichment. In otherwords, in a world of trade-offs, I wouldprefer additional controlled subject head-ings over scanned-in tables of contents ina heartbeat.

Not only does the lack of additionalcontrolled subject headings reduce ourchances of finding the most relevantbooks in a systematic manner (rather thanthrough sheer guesswork), but it does pos-itive damage to the whole cataloging en-terprise in two specific ways: first, it un-dercuts the principle of specific entry. Theassignment of fewer headings puts moreworks into broader categories that oughtto be distinguished into finer categories,and in large collections, such works be-come effectively buried within the largercategories.

Second, the restriction to two subjectheadings undermines the indexing func-tion that the catalog serves in relation tothe classified bookstacks. If the fewer as-signed headings must be at broader ratherthan more specific levels, this will under-cut the traditional linkage between the


first subject heading and the class desig-nation; indeed, assignment of an overlybroad heading in the first position mayalso cause a wrong class number to beassigned. For example, works under thesubject heading “Small business” usuallyget classed in HD (economics) or KF(U.S. law) areas, but if the books beingcataloged are assigned the more specific“–Accounting” subdivision, they getshelved in HF (commerce) classes in-stead. If they receive the “–Finance” sub-division they are usually shelved in HG(finance); and if they are on the biblio-graphical aspect of the topic (“Small busi-ness–Bibliography”) they are shelved inthe Z class area. For a researcher, thebottom line is that an array of these pre-coordinated subdivisions under the “smallbusiness” heading will both alert her tothe existence of a whole range of aspectsto the subject she might not have consid-ered and also steer her to in-depth, full-text records shelved in entirely differentareas of the stacks. But if all of the booksunder “Small business” do not get themore specific subdivisions, then the rangeof class numbers on records retrieved un-der “Small business” (from HD to HF toHG to KF to Z) will not be intelligiblydistinguished—everything might just belumped in HD—and readers will not per-ceive, to begin with, that there aremanydifferent specific aspects to the subject, 30

nor will they be able to see which shelfarea would be best to start with for oneaspect rather than another, when theyhave questions that require browsinggroups of subject-related full-texts downto the page level.

Let me add a personal plea to readerswho are catalogers: please doguerillacatalogingwhenever you can. Please addas many subject headings to book recordsas you can get away with and make themas specific as you can. Do not limit your-selves to two, no matter what the “stan-dard” is supposed to be. Please try to dohigh quality work even when low qualitywork is expected of you. Please try towork in accord with a high standard evenwhen our profession’s leaders, or yourown managers, tell you that a low stan-dard is desirable. The quality of the workyou do does make an enormous differenceon the retrieval end.

If the practice of coresubjectcatalog-ing for books continues, then, our profes-sion will have substantially dumbed downthe major avenues of subject access to themost important, most convenient, mostvetted, and least ephemeral format that

our society has devised for conveying toits members the highest levels of aware-ness, the levels of knowledge and under-standing, not just data and information.

TERMINAL CORRECTNESS AND THE

BLIND SPOTS OF THE INFORMATION

SCIENCE PARADIGM

We will have accomplished this dumbingdown of our culture precisely because wehave hobbled ourselves with an inappro-priate information science paradigm thatholds out, as a goal, the provision of allknowledge and information being freelyavailable, electronically, from anywhere,at anytime, by anyone. I have a name forthis belief that everything will be avail-able from computer terminals, “terminalcorrectness” (TC). The terminally correcthave now distorted the library professionjust as much as the politically correcthave corrupted the humanities. Adherenceto the unrealistic goal of making “every-thing” available via computers is creating

“The terminally correct havenow distorted the library

profession just as much as thepolitically correct have

corrupted the humanities.”

blind spots in our perceptions, right andleft, areas we cannot notice with any crit-ical awareness because to recognize theunavoidable trade-offs in them would beto undermine the information science par-adigm at its very foundations. Amongthese blind spots are an insufficient regardfor:

● The hierarchy of levels of awareness,from data and information to knowl-edge and understanding, and of therough (but nonetheless real) ties theselevels have to different formats of pre-sentation;

● The full effects that format changeshave, not just on the quickness of find-ing a record without physical travel,but on the ease ofunderstandinglengthy narrative or expository texts;

● The importance of necessary culturalvalues that cannot be preserved whensociety’s awareness of them is shuntedthrough formats primarily hospitableto data, information, sound bites,“right brain” impressions, intuitions,feelings, and visual images;

● The inevitable and unavoidable persis-tence of long-term copyright restric-tions on the dissemination of privateintellectual property;

● The presence of unworkable and his-torically discredited utopian and so-cialist assumptions behind the beliefthat all knowledge and informationcan be freely distributed electronical-ly;

● The need to build new library build-ings to accommodate the continuingproduction of books and other recordsin paper formats;

● The quality control and selection pro-cesses of real libraries that make theircollections such desirablealternativesto the clutter of the Internet;

● The tacit and crippling message thatstudents pick up when we encouragethem to confine their searches to In-ternet sources alone;

● The additional tacit message we con-vey that real libraries are not necessaryeven for graduate level education,when we promote distance educationcourses without real-library visitationrequirements;

● The inherent unsuitability of elec-tronic formats for long-term preserva-tion purposes;

● The continuing importance of real li-braries as the best mechanism for pro-viding free access to the vast bulk ofcopyrighted materials;

● The inevitability of trade-offs amongwhat, who,andwhererestrictions gov-erning the provision offree access toknowledge and information records;

● The powerful commercial and govern-mental forces that are seeking to makelibraries completely unnecessary ason-ramps to the Internet;

● The weaknesses, as well as thestrengths, of keyword searching and acorrespondingly insufficient regard forthe strengths, as well as the weak-nesses, of controlled vocabulary sub-ject searching;

● Any means of searching that cannot beviewed through a computer screen,such as browsing classified (and non-digitized) book collections down tothe level of pages, paragraphs, andeven individual words;31

● The crucial difference between search-ing superficial surrogate catalog

July 2001 277

records arranged in classified orderversus searching the actualfull-textsofbooks themselves in classified order;

● The importance of serendipity, theability to recognize, within cataloger-created standardized subject catego-ries relevant works whose widely vari-ant keywords could not be specified inadvance;

● The function of the library’s onlinecatalog as the main index to its classi-fied bookstacks, especially of the tech-nical linkage of the first assigned sub-ject heading to the class designation;

● The need of progressive, point-of-usereference assistance by professional li-brarians (not just better search soft-wares) at successive stages of anycomplicated research project;

● The impossibility of any online cata-log displaying every important re-search option that inquirers will needto be aware of; and

● The consequences of core catalogingin dumbing down subject access to ourcountry’s book collections.

This list could be extended consider-ably.32 That there are, nowadays, so manyof these “insufficient regard” problemsstems from the root cause that the wholelibrary profession is being conceptualizedfrom two different paradigmatic frame-works. In the widely dominant paradigm,electronic technologies set the agenda ofwhat is to be considered important andwhat unimportant. In the alternative view,the electronic technologies are mainlyad-ditions to, not transformations of,tradi-tional concerns that continue to be impor-tant to research libraries.

THE NEW PTOLEMAIC MODEL

In terms of a “paradigm shift,” the situa-tion of information technology’s domi-nance in the library field may be likenedto the discovery in the astronomical fieldof a new, tenth planet beyond the orbit ofPluto, a previously unknown body, say,twice the size of Jupiter. What is happen-ing, essentially, is that the existence of thenew and wonderful phenomenon is notmerely being celebrated; rather, it is asthough astronomers werealsoregarding itas thenew center of the whole solar sys-tem.In effect, however, viewing the newplanet as central throws everything into a21st century version of the old Ptolemaicmodel, for a change of center profoundlyaffects the way in which the orbits of all

of the traditional planets must be viewed.The new model is a universe in which thenewly positioned “outer” circles can onlybe regarded in terms of bizarre epicyclesand seemingly retrograde motions. In justthe same way in the library field, a con-cern for books, their acquisition, their cat-aloging, their shelving, their preservation,and so forth, becomes, when viewed fromthe new paradigm centered on electronicaccess, an orientation of superannuatedtraditionalists who are being “left behindin the dust” in contemptible “book muse-ums.” What is misperceived as a laggingbehind, or even a retrograde motion, how-ever, turns out to be what it has alwaysbeen, continuous forward motion, whenseen from a more sensible, and central,vantage point.

Any number of perceptions in the li-brary field are being skewed by the as-sumption of an incorrect vantage point.Again, in the online universe of the TCparadigm, copyright protection is viewedas a problem. In the real world, however,the fact is thatpiracy is the problem andcopyright is thesolution. (To save theparadigm, believers indulge in the wishfulthinking that the “copyright problem,” thelaw’s prevention of free access to every-thing on the Internet, will inevitably be“worked out” at future “high-level meet-ings.”)

Similarly, in the TC paradigm thewhere restriction inherent in real librarycollections is also regarded as a problem,but again, in the real world it is in factprecisely thesolution to the more impor-tant problem of providingfree access tocopyrighted works. (To save the TCworldview, of course, free access has nowbecome something that can be disregard-ed; that is, it has now become much moretheoretically acceptable to pass on directcharges at the point of use and to thinkthat libraries should act more like busi-nesses rather than nonprofits, regardlessof the effect such charges have in the realworld in actually discouraging use and indriving researchers to settle forany freesources as their alternative.)

Similarly, preservation does not “fit”well in the new model, and so for thatreason alone it can now be largely disre-garded in decision making. (To save thenew paradigm here, as with copyright, thenew tack is once again to appeal to thewishful thinking that such matters willinevitably be “worked out” at some pointin the future, in spite of the inherent im-permanence of electronic formats.33)

Similarly, the new paradigm’s encour-

agement of distance education now effec-tively precludes students’ access to thevast stores of copyrighted and otherwiseundigitized research materials that resideonly within the walls of real libraries. (Tosave the new paradigm in this area, thenew tack is simply to assume that suchresources are not really required, even forgraduate level education.)

These evasions, stretches, dislocations,and bizarre rationalizations are very sim-ilar indeed to the highly complicated epi-cycles and retrograde motions necessi-tated by the old Ptolemaic model inastronomy, all of which were appealed to“save” the basic idea that the Earth wasthe center of the universe. In the libraryfield, the fact that there are now so many“insufficient regard” problems new to theprofession is a strong indication that we,just like the old Churchmen who refusedto look through Galileo’s telescope, areresorting to willful blindness to “save” adominant TC information technology par-adigm that is in fact radically off-center.

WHAT IS AT STAKE

The library profession cannot continue todismiss these “insufficient regard” con-cerns with wishful thinking that they willgo away or that they can be re-defined, tobegin with, as unimportant simply be-cause they do not readily accommodatethemselves to our new electronic technol-ogies. Our profession cannot continue tolet computer technology determine its ba-sic agenda of what needs to be done.34

What is at stake is much greater than thesurvival of the library profession; what isat stake is the range of options our cultureitself will have in gaining access to itsown deepest wellsprings of knowledgeand understanding. What is also at stake isthe very survival of the ideal of a liberaleducation centered on the pursuit of un-derstanding rather than mere information.Librarians in college and research librar-ies will get the whole nation into troubleto the extent that we think the Internetpart of our business is more importantthan the book part of our business.

“Our profession cannotcontinue to let computer

technology determine its basicagenda of what needs to be

done.”


NOTES AND REFERENCES

1. Theodore Levitt, “Marketing Myopia,”Harvard Business Review38 (July-Au-gust 1960): 45–56. Reprinted inHarvardBusiness Review53 (September-October1975): 26–28, 33–34, 38–39, 44, 173–81.The statement on railroads appears onpage 45 of the original printing.

2. Levitt, “Marketing Myopia,” p. 45. Apage later, Levitt does quote a remark byJacques Barzun about railroads, that“[What is lacking is] the will of the com-panies to survive and to satisfy the publicby inventiveness and skill” (Holiday, Feb-ruary 1960, p. 21). This reference, how-ever, does not address the specific pointabout railroads confusing the railroadbusiness with the transportation business.Levitt again refers, on page 56, to thisBarzun article for its portrait of railroads,but the Barzun article itself is woefullyignorant of the real problems of competi-tion, subsidization, and government regu-lation that Levitt himself so cavalierly dis-misses. Here, for example, is Barzun onthe railroads’ competition: “Why then thegloom about the railroads? They havedone their part in educating and mobiliz-ing mankind. Is it not inevitable that theyshould be displaced by faster and bettermeans of transportation? Faster, yes, butbetter is still to be proved. For in thedisplacement, it is clear, the railroad’sspecial virtue is being lost and not merelytransferred. Nowhere in other forms oftransportation does the observant citizenfind in front of him the vivid and awe-inspiring lesson or order and rationalityembodied. Certainly not in the blithe an-archy of air and bus travel. The privatecar, which goes from door to door, com-pels work at the increasingly mindlesstask of driving while preventing any moreagreeable use of time. Who has ever reada good book on the New Jersey Turnpikeor enjoyed gin rummy while drivingacross the alkali desert? As for brute effi-ciency, the railroad is still supreme: fivemen running a fast freight will haul at lesscost a tonnage which it takes two hundredtrucks and drivers to transport” [Holiday(February 1960): 21]. This puff piece ishardly documentation that the railroadbusiness did not know what it was doing.It is interesting that Levitt himself ac-knowledges that Barzun is an “amateur”on the subject of railroads (p. 46). Ratherthan find a real expert, however, Levittattempts to justify his use of Barzun bysaying “Even an amateur like Barzun cansee what is lacking.” What is really lack-ing, however, is any substantive researchby either Barzun or Levitt on the genuinecomplexity of the problems of railroads.

3. Albro Martin, Railroads Triumphant(New York: Oxford University Press,1992), p. 360.

4. Wallace Patrick Mullan,Causes and Con-sequences of Regulatory Breakdown,PhDThesis. (Massachusetts Institute of Tech-nology, 1992.Dissertation Abstracts In-ternational,53–06A: 2028.

5. Mark Reutter, “The Lost Promise of theAmerican Railroad. WQ, The WilsonQuarterly 18 (Winter 1994): 26.

6. Don Phillips, “Life on the Mississippi: AVoyage of Commerce, Conflict,”TheWashington Post, Business section (De-cember 19, 1999): H1, H8.

7. Peter D. McClelland, “Transportation” inEncyclopedia of American Economic His-tory, Vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scrib-ner’s Sons, 1980).

8. Clarence B. Carson, “Throttling the Rail-roads,”Freeman20 (7–10) (1970): 686–687. See also John Stover,American Rail-roads, 2nd ed. (University of ChicagoPress, 1997), chapters 8–9.

9. For example, “Let us not repeat the mis-take of the American railroads, who forgotthey were not in the railroad business.Neither are we in the book business.”[Herbert S. White, “Libraries and Rail-roads,”Information and Library Manager2 (June 1982): 23]; and “[managementexperts] point to the plight of the Ameri-can railroad companies, which almost be-came extinct because they thought theywere in the business of trains, not realiz-ing that they were actually in the transpor-tation business. Most libraries and infor-mation centers now realize that they are inthe information business” [Robert D. Stu-eart & Barbara B. Moran,Library andInformation Center Management,5th ed.(Englewood, CO: Libraries Unlimited,1998), p. 100]; and “Railroads had beenso successful in the 19th century, that theythought they could just keep on with thesame business model in the 20th. . . . An-other thing we could say about libraries isthat we have tended to think of ourselvesas being in the book business, not theinformation business” [Marcia J. Bates,“Information Curriculum for the 21stCentury,” presentation before the ALACongress on Professional Education (May1, 1999). [Online]. Available: http://www.ala.org/congress/bates.html. (accessed May22, 2001).]

10. I would include copyrighted articles inserials as equally important; and more ar-ticles than books will be appearing in on-line formats. Even in the case of onlineserials, however, most readers will have tocontinue coming inside the physical wallsof libraries that subscribe to them; mostonline articles will not be available fromanywhere, at anytime, to anyone who issearching the general, “free” portions ofthe Internet. (By “free” I mean “withoutdirect charges at the point of use.”) Thecurrent literature does not really haveterms to distinguish the “free” portions ofthe Internet from the “fee” portions. My

experience, however, is that most re-searchers (especially students) use theterms “Internet” and “Information Super-highway” interchangeably—most, ofcourse, just say Internet—and that bothare understood to refer to the “free” por-tions of the Net. For example, when Ishow students a site-licensed databasesuch as Chadwyck-Healey’sPeriodicalContents Index,they usually ask “Can Iget into this on the Internet?” meaning canthey tap into it forfree from outsidethelibrary’s own onsite terminals.

11. In specifying “reasons or causes” I do notmean to limit valid understanding only tophilosophical or scientific matters. Thegrasp of unifying narrative structures ofbeginnings, middles, and ends, and thejudgment of their adequacy by theirranges of inclusiveness and complexity ofintegration, is also an important aspect ofunderstanding.

12. See “The Principle of Least Effort” andthe annotated “Bibliography” sections ofThomas Mann,Library Research Models(New York: Oxford University Press,1993), pp. 91–101, 221–42.

13. Walt Crawford, “Paper Persists: WhyPhysical Library Collections Still Matter,”Online 22 (1998): 42–48.

14. In The Washington Post(April 26, 2000,Section C), reporter Linton Weeks notedthe following: “In the August 1999 issueof Conservation Biology, David W. Orr, aprofessor at Oberlin College, wrote thatthe human vocabulary is shrinking. Byone reckoning, he observed, the workingvocabulary of 14-year-olds in Americahas plummeted from 25,000 words in1950 to 10,000 words today. ‘There hasbeen a precipitous decline in language fa-cility,’ says Orr. ‘This is nothing less thana cultural disaster.’ ” Weeks also quotedKeith Devlin, dean of science at St.Mary’s College in California and a seniorresearcher at Stanford. According to Dev-lin, “We may be moving toward a gener-ation that is cognitively unable to acquireinformation efficiently by reading a para-graph. The can read words or sentences—such as bits of text you find on a graphicaldisplay on a Web page—but they are notequipped to assimilate structured informa-tion that requires a paragraph to getacross. . . . Half a century after the dawnof the television age, and a decade into theInternet, it’s perhaps not surprising thatthe medium for acquiring information[that a large number of the 10,000 collegestudents surveyed] find most natural isvisual nonverbal: pictures, video, illustra-tions and diagrams.” See also Walt Craw-ford, “Paper Persists: Why Physical Col-lections Still Matter,Online 22 (January/February 1998): 47: “Many futurists. . .now admit that people will print out any-thing longer than 500 words or so. It’s justtoo hard to read from a computer, and it

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doesn’t seem likely to get a lot easier.”The dumbing down of learning, the loss oflarger knowledge frameworks in our cul-ture, is also commented on by Vladimir N.Garkov, “Cultural Or Scientific Litera-cy?” Academic Questions13 (3) (Summer2000): 63–64: “A report on the first na-tional assessment of our 17-year-old stu-dents’ knowledge of history and literaturefound that this ‘nationally representedsample of eleventh-grade students earnsfailing marks in both subjects.’ A morerecent study on cultural literacy, reportedin the Chronicle of Higher Education(14June 1996) found that only 7 percent ofour graduating college students answeredfifteen or more of the twenty questionscorrectly. The results from the NationalAssessment of Educational progress his-tory exam show that only four out of tenhigh-school seniors demonstrated even arudimentary knowledge of their ownAmerican history.” Garkov cites DianeRavitch and Chester E. Finn, Jr., “WhatDo Our 17-Year-Olds Know?, A Reporton the First National Assessment of His-tory and Literature” (New York: Harper &Row, 1987); Study on cultural literacy,Chronicle of Higher Education(14 June1996); and L. Hancock and P. Wingert,“A Mixed Report Card,” Newsweek(13November 1995): 69. Again, the dumbingdown of verbal, analytical culture cannotbe attributed solely to the Internet; but Ithink our profession would be more pru-dent to view the Net as, on balance, con-tributing more to the problem than to thesolution.

15. This from marketing consultant GeoffreyMeredith’s article in the October 1999issue ofThe Futurist[as quoted inAmer-ican Libraries (January 2000): 51].

16. Yet another response to the difference be-tween book and screen formats is to assertthat physical libraries are “evolving” intodigital forms, as though the process wereas inevitableas biological evolution. Thenaivete, and falsehood, of the concealedpropositions in this belief are discussed atlength in Thomas Mann, “The HeightShelving Threat to the Nation’s Libraries”[Online]. Available: http://slis.cua.edu/slislab/shelving.htm(accessed May 22,2001). Reprinted inCounterpoise3 (July/October 1999): 19–38.

17. The date 2047 is offered as the time bywhich, “All information about physicalobjects, including humans, buildings, pro-cesses, and organizations, will be online,”according to Gordon Bell and James N.Gray, “The Revolution Yet to Happen,” inBeyond Calculation: The Next Fifty Yearsof Computing,edited by Peter J. Denningand Robert M. Metcalfe (New York: Co-pernicus, 1997). Interestingly, this bookitself is unlikely to be digitized by 2047;the verso of its title page says, “No part ofthis publication may be reproduced, stored

in a retrieval system, or transmitted, inany form or by any means, electronic,mechanical, photocopying, recording, orotherwise, without prior written permis-sion from the publisher.” Under the 1998modification of the copyright law, workspublished after January 1, 1978, are nowprotected for the life of the author plus 70years. Anyone wishing to have free accessto Beyond Calculationitself will probablyhave to go inside the walls of a real li-brary, which is probably also the onlyplace that will have preserved a copy until2047.

18. One reason that the Judeo-Christian-Is-lamic world view has lasted so long is itsrealistic understanding of human nature.The biblical injunctions of “Thou shalt notsteal” and “Thou shalt not covet” wouldbe meaningless in any society that did notrecognize private property ownership.One reason that Marxism was so shortlived (less than one full century) lies in itsrejection of just this understanding. Somevalues, in other words, are not multicul-turally relative; some views of human na-ture are just unworkable as the basis forenduring social systems.

19. A further discussion may be found in“Reference Service, Human Nature,Copyright, and Offsite Service—In a‘Digital Age’?” Reference & User Ser-vices Quarterly38 (1999): 55–61.

20. Bates, “Information Curriculum.”21. See also Walt Crawford, “Bits Is Bits:

Pitfalls in Digital Reformatting,”Ameri-can Libraries30 (May 1999): 47–49.

22. An extreme example is MaureenBrunsdale, “From Mild to Wild: Strate-gies for Promoting Academic Libraries toUndergraduates,”Reference & User Ser-vices Quarterly39 (Summer 2000): 331–35. Nowhere in the entire article does theauthor mention the word “books.”

23. Quoted in Sylvia Moreno, “PresidentAims to Leap the ‘Digital Divide,’ ”TheWashington Post(February 3, 2000): B04.

24. Advertising revenues may defray the costsof mounting some popular sources forcurrent information, but they cannot berelied on to pay for ongoing access to thematerials that college and research librar-ies must deal with, nor can advertisingrevenues be relied on to pay for long-termpreservation of records no longer current.

25. In the real world of unavoidable trade-offsamong what, who,and where consider-ations, to gainfreeaccess to materials youmust always restrict one of these threeelements to loosen (or eliminate) the re-strictions on the other two. Save for trulyexceptional cases that cannot be general-ized into an over-all model, it is not pos-sible to eliminate restrictions on all threesimultaneously.

26. Tied to the continuing need for classifiedbookshelving is the continuing need forpre-coordination (rather than post-coordi-

nation) in the construction ofLibrary ofCongress Subject Heading Strings.Rec-ommendations for a post-coordinate sys-tem, as in Lois Chan’s article, simply,even incredibly, overlook the importantlinkage of post-coordinate terms to classnumbers, a linkage that makes the pre-coordinate terms in the library catalog thebest functionalindex to the classificationscheme.See Lois Chan, “Entering theNew Millennium: A New Century forLCSH, ” Cataloging & ClassificationQuarterly 29 (2000): 232–233; seeThomas Mann,Library Research Models,chapter 4; Thomas Mann,The OxfordGuide to Library Research(New York:Oxford University Press, 1998): 37–38,83–84, 175–77; and Thomas Mann, “IsPrecoordination Unnecessary in LCSH?Are Web Sites More Important to Catalogthan Books? A Reference Librarian’sThoughts on the Future of BibliographicControl” From the Bicentennial Confer-ence on the Future of Bibliographic Con-trol, held at the Library of Congress No-vember 15–17, 2000. [Online]. Availablehttp://lcweb.loc.gov/catdir/bibcontrol/mann_paper.html. (accessed May 22,2001).

27. Many studies have shown that people whotry to guess the same uncontrolled key-words to use in indexing a documentagree only about 20% of the time. SeeThomas Mann, “ ‘Cataloging MustChange!’ and Indexer Consistency Stud-ies: Misreading the Evidence at Our Per-il,” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly23 (3/4) (1997): 5–31.

28. “Fewer added entries are required and nomore than one or two subject headingsneed be added to the core record” [WillyCromwell, “The Core Record: A NewBibliographic Standard,” Library Re-sources & Technical Services38 (October1994): 422].

29. There is of course a distinction between“sources” and specifically “books.” Inproviding what I have called “referenceservice,” there is a further distinction be-tween “research” and “reference” ques-tions; the former seek an overview ofwhat is availablerather than just a spe-cific fact (the province of the latter). Intrying to provide an overview for re-searchers of “what is available” on theirtopics for research inquiries, nowadays,reference librarians need to try to indicatethe range of relevant Web sites as well asthe range of printed sources. But my ex-perience is that the process, in actual prac-tice, must necessarily be accomplished inprogressive stages rather than all at onceand that most researchers still wantfirst toknow which booksare available on theirsubjects. At the very least, they do notwant an overview of Web sites thatomitsa view of relevant books. (Researchers, at


least those who come into libraries, usu-ally seem to realize the quality controldifferences between books and Websites.) Service forresearchquestions, inother words, must still start with an over-view of books, followed by other formats.To the extent that such service should alsostrive to present an overview of Web sites,reference librarians must necessarily relyon avenues into the Web that are, for themost part, outside the reach of formal cat-aloging by librarians. One implication ofthis is that proper cataloging of booksought to be a higher priority for librariansthan cataloging of Web sites. Just as wedo not do subject cataloging of individualjournal articles ourselves, but rely onother groups within the information fieldto index such sources, so too, must we relymainly on channels other than catalogingby librarians for entry into the contents ofthe Web. The analogy to journal articles isnot perfect, of course; it is indeed desir-able that librarians catalog valuable Websites. But I think these sites should beidentified mainly through published re-views, not through catalogers spendingtheir own time surfing the Web for inter-esting sites. The main concern of catalog-ers ought to be with books. Most of ouraccess to the Web will necessarily have tobe through search engines created by oth-ers in the information field. (See Mann,“Is Precoordination Unnecessary.”)

30. This, again, is a major problem that is nowsolved by browse displays of pre-coordi-nated LCSH strings. That this problem

exists to begin with, and still requires asolution, is a fact entirely overlooked incalls for reengineeringLCSH into a post-coordinate system, as with Chan, “Enter-ing the New Millennium: A New Centuryfor LCSH.” Post-coordination ofLCSHwould sever the tie between the first as-signed heading and the classificationnumber, as well as destroy the possibilityof intelligible browse displays of subdivi-sions that are so necessary in alerting re-searchers to relevant options that theycould not specify in advance in post-co-ordination.

31. The use of published bibliographies andspecialized encyclopedias are other im-portant ways of searching that are, in gen-eral, neither duplicated nor superseded byonline searching.

32. Many of the blind spots of informationscience spring from a basic disregard, per-haps even ignorance, of the “traditionallibrary science” and the “type of litera-ture” conceptual models of research op-tions and of how well they continue towork in providing access to large portionsof the contents of research libraries. SeeMann, Library Research Models,espe-cially chapters 3–6 and 10.

33. On the matter of “inevitability,” see note16 above.

34. Let us especially heed the chilling warn-ing derived from a recent survey ofpracticing librarians: “Library educatorswould do well to remember that manyrespondents chose librarianship becausethey love books or libraries, while

few— even among younger, recent grad-uates— expressed a similar view oftechnology. Although most would agreethat libraries must integrate currenttechnologies, especially the Internet,into their mission,an overemphasis ontechnology in library schools at the ex-pense of more traditional courses maydiscourage qualified individuals from li-brarianship” [emphasis added]; RachelSinger Gordon & Sarah Nesbitt, “WhoWe Are, Where We’re Going: A Reportfrom the Front,”Library Journal (May15, 1999): 39.]. A concrete example ofthe discouragement foisted on studentsby inappropriate library school educa-tion may be found in Karen Elliott,“What I Really Learned in LibrarySchool,” MSRRT Newsletter12 (Spring1997): 1–2: “All intelligent and talentedlibrarians invariably wind up working inthe private sector, as well theyshould. . . . ‘Librarian’ might be a dirtyword. Use ‘information professional’ tobe on the safe side. . . . All good refer-ence librarians want to become informa-tion brokers or information consult-ants. . . . All good catalogers want tocatalog Internet sources and nothingelse. They should also be experts inSGML and metadata, otherwise they arenot to be taken seriously. . . . Don’t ex-pect any of your professors to haveworked in an actual library any time inthe past 20 years. Don’t expect any ofyour professors to have worked in anactual library any timeever.”

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Documents

The importance of books, free access, and libraries as places—and the dangerous inadequacy of the information science paradigm