Three Courses

This weekend I attended the smart, erudite, and emotional conference in celebration of Daniel Traister. As usual, I walked away thinking Librarians are deeply learned, wildly valuable folk. In the first day Keynote, Roger Chartier tossed off a comment on one possible effect of digitization. He suggested that browsing in a library could become only a memory in the history of reading.

Think about this ye denizens of the second-floor of Stockton’s library (or of Reference South, for that matter). If libraries as we know them go away, if there are no longer books shelved in open stacks, then the serendipities and pleasures of browsing will disappeare — or surely be much changed.

You can set up an OLC to display neighboring texts — ours already does this — but these lists do not open themselves to easy, reach-out-and-open browsing. Even if full-text, will the experience approximate a walk through the stacks? Try to quickly flip through a full-text book on-line. At the very least, those quiet times, physically surrounded by books with multi-hued bindings, will disappear. But is this important? After all, electronic texts still present what is essential, right? They still present the text, and to a much wider potential audience.

Moving in a slightly different, though related, direction. Books in their current form reveal much about themselves — if we know how to look. Printed books reveal much about the culture within which they were (and are) made, sold, and consumed, that is read. E-texts, though without many of the physical components of printed texts, remain texts that are made, sold, and consumed. How do they reveal these transactions?

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about Andrew Carnegie lately. Specifically about the more than 2,600 libraries that he donated to various municipalities around the world in the first quarter of the twentieth century. What a thought: give a building to one town; its next door neighbor will surely want one, too. Carnegie thought of his libraries as cagey acts of philanthropy. When asked why donate a library, he replied: “I think it fruitful in the extreme, because the library gives nothing for nothing, because it helps only those that help themselves, because it does not sap the foundation of manly independence, because it does not pauperize, because it stretches a hand to the aspiring and places a ladder upon which they can only ascend by doing the climbing themselves. This is not charity, this is not philanthropy, it is the people themselves helping themselves by taxing themselves” (Koch, A Book of Carnegie Libraries, 8).

Robert Moore, in his recent essay “Bones of the Book,” mentioned in the previous post, suggests that libraries are on their way out. “If those noble institutions exist at all in thirty years, our children will probably know them as quiet places to use computers and read e-books. You can already walk into one of 11,000 public libraries, from Manhattan to Missoula, and have e-books loaned to your Kindle.”

I am not here to bemoan changes in the landscape of information technology — as much as I love libraries, they are clearly in a sea change. I met a lovely reference librarian the other day. When I asked her name, she replied, “Google.” No, what I’m thinking about is the spirit of Carnegie’s gift. What might we be building today (if not libraries) that “stretches a hand to the aspiring and places a ladder” that only they can climb? There must be something.