Introduction - continued relevance of libraries

Library Trends, Spring, 1999 by Janice J. Kirkland, Michael Gorman

ULTIMATELY, LIBRARIES ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR gathering, selecting, organizing, disseminating, and preserving recorded knowledge and information in all forms and for providing assistance and instruction in their use. Is technology, as some allege, going to make some of these tasks unnecessary and others solely the result of interaction between individuals and machines? In short, will electronic technology supplant all other means of communication of words, images, and symbols, and will libraries and librarians reside only in the faded memories of the old?

The first step in approaching these questions is to appraise our current reality. One aspect of that reality is that, collectively, libraries contain hundreds of millions of nondigital carriers of recorded information, and only a minute fraction of that recorded knowledge and information is available in digital form or will be made available in digital form (to understand the latter point, just consider the relatively tiny scale and immense costs of today's digitizing projects). Those enamored of technology have come to call this vast well-organized global resource of the records of humankind "legacy collections." The term is intended to be dismissive, but human beings turn their backs on, and close their minds to, their intellectual and cultural legacy at their peril. There was a reason that the epoch in which learning was lost was called the Dark Ages.

"Books," said Barbara Tuchman, "are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill" (in Maggio, 1992, p. 34). Societies entrust their books and other tangible documents that record human civilization to libraries. Those who care for the contents of libraries know that they are under our jurisdiction only temporarily and that we must pass them on intact. We are not the owners of library collections but merely their trusted custodians, adding to them the record of our own time, facts so obvious as to be often overlooked or forgotten. In fact, to be responsible for a library or part of a library at any level is a weighty matter because it is a responsibility to the past and to the future and not merely to the people who walk through library doors this week, this month, or this year.

When the hero of George R. Stewart's (1974) novel Earth Abides enters his university's library after most of the human race has been destroyed by a plague, he is suddenly overcome by a strange new sense of awe:

   Here rested in storage the wisdom by which civilization had been built, and
   could be rebuilt. Now that he knew himself soon to be a father, he had
   suddenly a new attitude for the future. The child should not grow up to be
   a parasite, scavenging forever. And it would not need to. Everything was
   here. All the knowledge! .... After looking into the main reading-room and
   then wandering through two levels of the stacks, he became so excited that
   he left the building in a frenzy of imagination .... He drove home in a
   kind of trance. Books! Most of the knowledge was in books, and yet he soon
   saw that they were not all. First of all, there must be people who could
   read, who knew how to use the books. (p. 132)

Today the wonderful resources in libraries are being endangered by technology. When we tamper with access to the records of the past in such a way as to change them or make them less accessible, and when we digitize and discard the originals, whatever we may tell ourselves we are doing and whatever our reasons for doing it, we betray the trust which we assumed when we accepted responsibility for them. When we do not answer questions about sources with the full range of possibilities, but instead suggest only a search of the Internet, we abdicate our central role as intermediaries between the records and the users. When those of us who are school or college librarians forget the essential links between the library and the education of students, between the curriculum and their minds and futures, when we substitute training in the use of electronic sources for help with analytical skills to find and evaluate ideas, we are betraying our students and betraying society.

Libraries contain the records of human life and human lives. When we open a book, we open someone else's life and someone else's thought. Technology in libraries may help us to retrieve those records of life and thought, but the truly human lies in the appreciation of them, the understanding of them which allows us to use them to create further lights of understanding.

People who purchase and implement library technology often make changes without asking if they provide better service or improve access for library users. They tend to lose sight of the basic fact that people and their real needs are at all times more important than are the artificial methods, including technological methods, that we devise for organizing information.

In early history, there was the earth in space and the people on the earth. We began to measure time by rotations of the earth around the sun (although we thought it was the reverse) and thus created time. Then, although we had created time, we began to obey it and to regulate our lives by it. We also began to record our lives and thoughts in words and images--the age of miracles had begun.