What should librarians do to promote true literacy that goes beyond the mechanics of reading and writing? This question goes to the heart of the often- unspoken great divide in the profession of librarianship. That divide is often, though not always, generational. It involves a deeper issue than the usual divides between library educators and practitioners; and between information scientists and the library profession. It rests on the division between the people of the book and the people of the byte. This is a simplistic dichotomy, because many of the former are very keen on the use of computers when appropriate and at least some of the latter are great readers, but it does delineate the two ten- dencies. The people of the book are often seen as being opponents of the byte, resisting the inevitable as their “outmoded form of communication” is cast on the ash heap of history. In turn, they often see the people of the byte as vandals and technophiliacs who are indifferent to learning and culture. Most people see these as the stereotypes they are, but in doing so, they ignore the fact that the dichotomy is real; the lack of understanding between the (mostly older) people of the book and the (mostly younger) people of the byte is a threat to the future of the library profession.
Lawrence Clark Powell wrote:
As long as books are with us—and I see no end of books in libraries, as the basic stuff of librarians,no matter what supplementary media are present—as long as books are basic, the good librarian will maintain physical contact with books, handling them for himself and for others [emphasis added].12
To some, these thirty-year-old words will seem as if from a century ago. Only a person of the book can understand the tactility that is an essential part of the world of the reader and, still more, the idea that books are, and will remain, the basic stuff of the librarian’s work. The very idea of sustained reading for instruc- tion and pleasure must verge on the quaint to someone who believes that “infor-
mation competence” is solely a matter of navigating the Web and finding some- thing of value therein. Powell goes on to write in the same lecture:
librarianship is a learned profession, calling for intellectual skill . . . . Knowledge is truly power. As librarians we have close and constant access to the world’s knowledge . . . we must also penetrate the covers of books to the contents. We must know what it is that readers seek and where to find it. How do we gain such varied knowledge? By lifelong learning, by reading and study that begins when we are young and in school,and that never ends,if we are to become good, powerful, useful librarians. The good librarian is a reservoir of knowledge, a well of learning, a fountain of culture [emphasis added].13
There must be many modern librarians—people of the byte—who would find such sentiments eccentric at best and vainglorious and overweening at worst. It is true that few of us can be a Lawrence Clark Powell—scholar, librarian, writer, educator, and philosopher—but we can and should be able to aspire to his ideals. After all, few of us are latter-day Ranganathans or Deweys, either, but that does not stop us trying to catalogue well. I would dare to suggest that, more than thirty years after Powell spoke, the world of libraries would be a better place if more librarians strove for the ideal of lifelong learning through serious reading that he recommended. Recorded knowledge is to be found in books and other printed texts and not, generally speaking, on the Internet. Recorded knowledge is not easy to absorb even in the few cases in which it is found in the latter. The use of “e-books” (itself a revealing term) is concentrated on manuals, reference works, and other texts from which snippets may be extracted and used out of their context. There is, it appears, only a small hobbyist or cult market for even the lowest form of literature on the Web.
In response, the people of the byte will say, as they have been saying for many years, that we are in a transitional phase. Their line is that just as the horse-drawn vehicle was slow to give way to the horseless carriage and the scroll to the codex, the book is doomed to a lingering death at the hands of the com- puter. Analogies are to thinking what quicksands are to beach walking, and when the careful reader reads of the passing of the buggy whip industry, she is careful to ignore the facile and fatal charms of the common analogy. Such argu- ments and would-be parallels are sometimes advanced for negative reasons. We should not forget that some people of the byte are not at all interested in the book and the traditions of learning, authenticity, and civilization it embodies.
Take, for example, James J. O’Donnell, a classicist turned university administrator who has won some minor acclaim by airing his contrarian views to, among others, librarians.
Perhaps one way to make that self-awareness easier is to make ourselves delib- erately more conscious of the unnaturalness of this whole affair our culture has with books. We long ago ceased to see the oddity of textuality and its institu- tions—publishers who produce books, libraries who treasure and make them available, scholars who pass along the mystic arts of interpretation to students.
Is it not strange that we take the spoken word, the most insubstantial of human creations, and try, through textuality, to freeze it forever; and again, to give the frozen words of those who are dead and gone, or at least far absent, control over our own experience of the lived here and now? . . . . I have very little business caring for the future of the book. Books are only secondary bearers of culture. “Western civilization” (or whatever other allegorical creature we cook up to embody our self esteem) is not something to be cherished.14
All this from someone who claims in the same passage to have “passion and affection” for books! One hardly knows where to begin. Is not the whole point of what O’Donnell dismisses as “Western civilization” that we allow the “frozen words” of the dead to influence and inspire our life here and now? Is not the alternative a reversion to a savage state of experiencing the present and fearing the future because we have no collective memory to guide us? What would our lives be like if we lacked access to the frozen words of Darwin and Shakespeare, Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr.? Perhaps I am being duped and O’Donnell is a brilliant satirist of the fatuities of deconstructionists. I suppose that is pos- sible, but if so, it must be a brilliantly sustained hoax, since O’Donnell has written and spoken in the same vein many times. Let us assume he is serious and really means to criticize “textuality” as an aberration in human history. It may well prove to have been an aberration and we may be reduced by the death of the book to a state feared by another contributor to the symposium at which O’Donnell spoke:
What will happen, then, when children (and adults) find introducing a three- dimensional video of, say, a rhinoceros, into a discussion so easy that they increasingly lose the ability to formulate abstract or physical descriptions?
McLuhan has persuasively argued that written language had to exist before logical, causal thinking could become so widespread. If so, what will happen when we increasingly abandon alphanumeric text, when we would truly find ourselves beyond the book?15
These questions go to the heart of the problem. If we are to preserve our culture, we need both the frozen words in books and other texts and we need people who can interact with those frozen words in a complex and sustained manner.
In short, we need books and lifelong learning and true literacy if we are not to
regress to a state of sensation and the manifold distortions of the oral tradition.
It may be that O’Donnell and his ilk would prefer to exist in a world of myth and dimly apprehended reality—an ahistorical world of shadows and ignorance (a very odd stance for a classicist), but I stand with those who cherish the sta- bility, authenticity, and fixity of the frozen word and the onward transmittal of the human record.