Revolution in the Library - .the electronic information revolution will alter library services, but hopefully not change the central role of libraries - author abstract - )

Library Trends, Spring, 1999 by Gertrude Himmelfarb

INTRODUCTION

Historians are notoriously wary of the word revolution. Unlike journalists, who find revolutions in every twist and turn of political events, intellectual movements, technological innovations, sartorial fashions, historians like to think that their revolutions last more than a month or two, or a year or two, or even a decade or two. Indeed, some historians--older historians like myself--are so sparing in their use of the word that they reserve it for changes that dramatically alteer the course of entire centries. Thus the Cromwellian revolution in England, complete with the decapitation of the king, is said to be not a serious revolution; at best it was only a civil war. Nor was the so-called Glorious Revolution that altered the succession to the throne; that was entirely too peaceful, too "glorious," to qualify as a revolution.

But there are, even the most cautious historian will agree, genuine revolutions. The French Revolution surely was one such, and probably the American Revolution (although this is still disputed; a colonial revolt, the English prefer to call it). And finally, after decades of indecision, the industrial revolution has been admitted into the pantheon of revolutions. When I was in graduate school, the term "industrial revolution" always appeared in quotation marks to suggest that it was not really a revolution. Today, even the most skeptical of historians agree that it was a real revolution. And having conceded that, some of us are prepared to say that we are now witnessing another revolution, a post-industrial revolution, the electronic revolution. Like all revolutions, this has ramifications far beyond its immediate context, for it may prove to be a revolution not only in the library itself, the way books are catalogued, stored, and circulated, but in the nature of learning and education.

The library is, and always has been, the heart of a college. I recall witnessing a demonstration at a university in the late 1960s, when the students demanded to be "empowered," as they said, and the professors protested: "But we are the university." In fact, librarians have as much right to make that claim. For professors--professors of the humanities, at any rate--as much as students, are the creatures of the library. Just as the laboratory is the domain of the sciences, so the library is the domain of the humanities. For it is the library that is the repository of the learning and wisdom that are transmitted from the professors to the students.

If the library is now in the throes of a revolution--if desks and carrels in the library are being transformed into "workstations," and students and scholars find themselves consulting the Internet more often than books--something momentous is happening, something far more consequential than a mere technological innovation. The last time we experienced such an event was the invention of the printing press almost half a millennium ago, and that, as we now know, had enormous consequences. Among other things, it was responsible for the creation of libraries. There had been libraries, to be sure, before Gutenberg's invention. The most famous was the library in Alexandria founded by Ptolemy I in the fourth century B.C.--famous partly because of its infamous destruction by the Roman emperors in the third and fourth centuries A.D. But other libraries, public and private, survived and flourished in Jerusalem, Greece, and Rome. At about the time that Gutenberg was perfecting his printing press, the Vatican Library was formed; its first catalog listed 2,500 volumes. Today, thanks to Gutenberg, a good many scholars have that many books or more in their home or office.

The print revolution is the perfect exemplar of the principle of quantity transmuted into quality. The quantum leap in the number of books now available to each individual or library is almost the least of the consequences of that revolution. More significant is its democratizing effect--the liberation of the culture from the control of clerics and scribes. The relative ease and cheapness of printing transferred the production of books to artisans and merchants, who were responsible neither to ecclesiastical nor to secular authorities but only to the dictates of the consumer and the market. Thus ephemeral popular books could be produced as cheaply as classical ones, and heretical tracts as readily as canonical ones.

Not only could numerous copies of each book be produced, but they could be produced in identical form. Thus every literate person could have access to the same text of the Bible, and could interpret and judge it without benefit of the mediating authorities of church or state. It is no accident, some historians suggest, that the print revolution preceded the Protestant Reformation; were it not for Gutenberg, they say, the Reformation might have petered out or been suppressed, as so many medieval heresies were.

Now, with the electronic revolution, we are taking that democratizing process a giant step forward. It is not only the library catalogue that is computerized; the computer can call up a variety of other catalogues, indexes, databases, CD-Roms, the Internet, as well as books, journals, news-papers, archives, even manuscript collections from other libraries. Potentially, at least, the electronic revolution makes even smaller libraries the equivalent of libraries in major research universities and scholarly institutions. And it can do more than that. It can make those books, journals, databases, and so on, "talk to each other," as cyberspace aficionados say. All you have to do is type in your request for information and the computer will collate the sources, synthesize them, and present the results for you on your screen.