The Modern Library
The battle over Internet
censorship has taken up residence in your neighborhood public library.
Conservatives in Congress and elsewhere are demanding that libraries apply
"filters" to Internet terminals available to minors. Ernest Istook, a
Republican representative from Oklahoma, recently proposed denying federal
funds to any library that fails to use filters. Istook's amendment wound up on
the cutting room floor when the budget bill was finalized this week, but it may
re-emerge next year. Meanwhile in Virginia, someone has sued his local library
for filtering Internet content. In California, someone else has sued hers for
not doing so. The American Library Association, along with the American Civil
Liberties Union, takes the absolutist position that any restriction on library
Internet access--including one narrowly tailored to keep children away from
pornography--violates First Amendment freedoms.
This
debate became inevitable when public libraries began to get wired, a
development that Al Gore and Newt Gingrich both consider crucial to our
country's future, and which Bill Gates has set up a foundation to support. But
down the road, public libraries face a bigger and more vexing question than
this rehash of old censorship debates. Why, if libraries are growing more
concerned about the provision of Internet access and less concerned about the
circulation of books, must they be housed in buildings with walls? Someone who
uses his neighborhood branch to surf the Net doesn't really depend on the
library the way that someone who went to do research or borrow out of print
books did. He merely uses an inefficient subsidy for something that is
increasingly cheap and easy to do at home--and which could soon be subsidized
directly at far lower expense. In other words, if the public library of the
future is mainly about free online access, it's in a mess of trouble.
Another technological advance threatens libraries. On Oct.
23, a company called NuvoMedia rolled out the first, first-generation digital
reading device, a $500 appliance called the Rocket eBook. It's Version
1.0--expensive, a bit clunky and, according to previews, not really pleasant
enough for pleasure reading. But within a few years, such devices are likely to
be a viable, even preferable, way to read books. Dick Brass, Microsoft's vice
president for technology development, says that the technical hurdles of screen
quality and battery life have been largely surmounted. The question is how soon
a comfortable device can be built for $100 and how long it will take for a
large number of titles to become available. The probable answer is not long.
Already, a nonprofit organization called Project Gutenberg has digitized over
1,000 public domain works ranging from Paradise Lost to Tom Swift
& His Aerial Warship . Publishers are scrambling to put current books
on sale in electronic form. Brass predicts that you'll be able to get 50,000
titles electronically--more than you can find in an average Barnes & Noble
franchise--in two years.
Of course,
there are some big issues that need to be negotiated before e-books put
libraries and bookstores out of business. You may be able to digitize the 16
million books in the Library of Congress for a mere billion dollars, but much
of that material falls under copyright protection. While publishers accept
sequential borrowings a single copy of a book from a library, they can't very
well provide free universal access to everything in their catalogs. And while
e-books have tremendous appeal in theory--imagine an entire library that weighs
a pound, is word-searchable, and can be read in the dark (and, at long last, a
copy of
Slate
that you can take to the bathroom)--readers simply
may not cotton to them. The etopians who are certain that digital reading
devices are about to take over probably underestimate the doggedness of
ingrained human habits. So we should pose this as a what-if and not a what-when
question. If electronic reading supplants print as the primary means by
which people absorb written texts, what becomes of the venerable public
library?
Library workers, who recognize the possibility,
are doing what people in threatened professions do. They begin from the
assumption that they will always be crucially necessary and then try to figure
out what they will be necessary for. Unsurprisingly, librarians have reached a
consensus that technological progress demands an expansion, not a contraction,
of their role. The disciples of Melvil Dewey would have you know that they are
no longer underpaid scriveners on index cards. In fact, they no longer want to
be called librarians at all. They're now "information specialists," who
understand search engines and retrieval systems and sort out good information
from bad on the Internet. They aspire to the rise in status and income that
computer geeks benefited from in the 1980s.
It is
probably true that we will need skillful librarians, and maybe even more
librarians, in etopia. While doing research on the Internet can be vastly more
time- and cost-efficient than doing it in the stacks, it requires a good deal
of instruction. In an unfamiliar world, we need guides all the more. What is
less clear is that we will need libraries--or at least the same kind of
libraries we have now in the quantity we now have them.
There is little cause for anyone to fret about the high-end
institutions--academic, research, and specialized libraries will be no less
necessary. Those who seek to understand the past are always going to want to
examine original documents, manuscripts, and hard-copy publications. The
novelist Nicholson Baker, an eloquent critic of what libraries have done in the
name of modernization, is certainly right about how foolish many great
libraries were to destroy their card catalogs after transferring them to
electronic form. As Baker argued in a 1994 article in The
New
Yorker , the old cards are not just eerily beautiful artifacts but also
important historical documents. But Baker was on shakier ground in his 1996
article attacking the new, post-Gutenberg era San Francisco public library for
emphasizing electronic research at the expense of old books. Why must a
nonacademic library maintain, at great public expense, a vast store of volumes
that no one uses?
It is the more ordinary
libraries--the 9,000 public and branch libraries in American towns and
cities--that face a real threat of redundancy. That is not to say that these
institutions don't have functions beyond lending out books. A friend of mine
who used to teach in an overcrowded New York City school makes the point that
for a lot of poor kids, the library is the only place to do homework after
school. Public schools should provide an afternoon haven, but in the real
world, they don't. It would be terrible to get rid of an institution that works
without figuring out how to reproduce its effectiveness. Libraries are also
places where immigrants go to take English classes and where illiterates learn
to read. They are meeting places that cut against the isolation of modern life.
In cities, the downtown public library is the rare place where social classes
mix.
But even with the reservoir
of good will public libraries have, such ancillary functions aren't enough to
keep them alive if their basic purpose fades. Our public libraries were built
so that citizens, and especially young people, could enhance their lives
through access to the written word. The day may be not so far off when we can
accomplish this function better with a subsidized Internet account and a free
digital reading device.
