Living and dying with "information": comments on the report 'Buildings, Books, and Bytes.' - Buildings, Books, and Bytes: Perspectives on the Benton Foundation Report on Libraries in the Digital Age

Library Trends, Summer, 1997 by Michael Gorman

Parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus--Horace

INTRODUCTION

The worthy Benton Foundation, funded by the equally worthy Kellogg Foundation, has produced a report on the future of libraries (not explicitly restricted to public libraries but clearly to be read as such) based on interviews with "library leaders," public opinion surveys, and colloquies to consider both. The result is, alas, replete with windy generalizations, unestablished premises, and specious assertions.

To begin at the beginning (with the opening words of the Executive Summary). "This report is about librarians and the challenges they face in the digital world." Which "digital world" would that be? The report offers no definition of this curious term and not even the sketchiest description of a digital world is given. It appears to stem from the implications of the pervasive notion, advanced by academics and some "library leaders" (many not librarians) and pushed by Big Computer Business, that the ubiquity of computers is changing society, life, and learning to a degree not seen since Herr Gutenberg. There is no evidence that this is so, despite all the pundits and prognosticators who have asserted it in thousands of books and articles (all printed on paper). As if the "digital world" were not enough, the third sentence of this report solemnly informs us that libraries face "the onset of the digital revolution, a seismic social shift." Wow!

The report is bedeviled, like most of its kin on the future of libraries, by the use of the word "information" to mean everything and nothing. In normal usage, "information" is taken to mean facts, data, small standalone texts, and images. There is another definition of "information," of course. In that definition, apparently embraced by this report, "information" is used to mean all human communication (a Rembrandt is "visual information," Citizen Kane "cinematic information," and Moby Dick "textual and nautical information"). The problem is that, in meaning everything, "information" means nothing. Information, as normally understood, is not even the primary good with which libraries deal or have ever dealt. Who goes to a library to find out about the weather, highway traffic reports, TV/radio schedules, or a supermarket sale? Library users do come to the library for information but, far more often, they come for what makes libraries special--literature, entertainment, learning, and recorded knowledge in all its forms. The reason why technophiles stress information is very simple: computers are very good at storing and transmitting information and no good at all when it comes to preserving and making available leisure reading, literature, and recorded knowledge in all its forms.

What are we to make of the use in this report of the term "paper information resources" (p. 4)? It clearly is intended to include, say, War and Peace, The Origin of Species, The Double Helix, The Guns of August, and, come to that, Library Trends. Do the authors really think that these, and a myriad other, publications are about information or is this a calculated reductionism to disguise the central flaw in their central notion that we live in an "information age"? If we librarians and library users can be persuaded that libraries are about information and nothing more, then we can be persuaded that real libraries, librarians, and library collections have no future, and we should resign ourselves to the oxymoronic "virtual library" and all the rest of the real agenda of reports such as this. The facts say otherwise. One odd contradiction in the report is a low-level anxiety about the "competition" for libraries from mega-bookstores (Barnes & Noble and such). This anxiety, however misplaced, betrays the fact that ordinary people know the difference between the kind of stuff (data, images, and other information) that they can find using a computer and, on the other hand, literature, leisure reading, and cumulative recorded knowledge--all of which are, and will remain, best provided by the sustained reading of books. Librarians with any sense of their history and environment know that libraries and bookstores complement each other and, far from being in competition, often increase each other's use. Also, who would not prefer a Barnes & Noble to a "virtual library"? Fortunately, that is not a choice we will have to make.

Given the inability of this report to define the "digital world" that it says, in some parts, is imminent and, in other sections, is already here, and its inability to recognize that information (as commonly used) is not the touchstone of the destiny of libraries, what remains is a collection of bits and pieces of varying interest and importance. For instance, absent these definitions, how should we construe: "Libraries are thus at a crossroads [sic], for they must adjust their traditional values and services to the digital age" (p. 7). My understanding of our traditional values is that they comprise, most importantly: service, intellectual freedom, a commitment to literacy, learning, democracy, and the preservation of the records of humankind. Even if one grants we are in a "digital age," which of these values needs to be "adjusted"? I do hope that we are not being told we must abandon our unique historic role as the preservers of the records of humankind just because electronic records are notoriously transient, mutable, fragile, and expensive to maintain. Perhaps we are to "adjust" our commitment to literacy because the "digital age" is also a post-literate age?