more informed? What is the nature of human life today if, crammed with statis- tics and factoids, we know thousands of trees but have no knowledge of the infi- nite forest in which we, our ancestors, and our descendants live, whether we and they like it or not?
noted the way in which the “most advanced libraries” had been laying in large collections of photographs and gave his opinion that pho- tographs are to art what concerts are to music. Three-quarters of a century before the idea of the “media center” took hold, one of the great minds of American librarianship was not only aware of the value of image collections but also had formulated practices for making them available and useful.
Shelving systems (including moveable systems) abounded, and the Art Metal Construction Company, maker of the reliable Fenton Steel Stacks, was a frequent Library Journaladvertiser.
The Library of Congress’s Bernard Green presented a paper on the planning and construction of library buildings (March 1900) that gives a fine illustration of the dizzying pace of change at the time. He described the small, dreary libraries of a few decades before and went on:
Books have increased and multiplied almost beyond comprehension both in number and diversity . . . . Periodical and newspaper literature may yet swamp the world in print. The earth and the heavens are being traversed and surveyed extensively and the growth and value of maps and charts has already become voluminous . . . . Manuscripts are being collected and extensively studied and collated, requiring accommodations in safe, spe- cially constructed cases, while prints and the graphic art of illustration . . . have kept pace with and become an invaluable adjunct of the printed book.
Green went on to discuss the “special mechanical devices” such as auto- matic book carriers, pneumatic tubes for delivering messages, and elec- tric signals that enabled the Library of Congress to deliver a book from its shelves to a reader within four minutes of receiving a request.
In June 1908, John Fretwell reported on “photographic copying in libraries”
based on work done in Germany by a Professor Krumbacher. He con- centrated on the production of facsimiles of the book and manuscript holdings of great libraries and the copying of illustrations. There were many different methods available at the time, variously involving the use of a stereopticon, glass plates, bromide paper, orthochromatic emulsions, and reversing prisms. The impression one gains of Herr Doktor Krumbacher is one of a teeming, technologically oriented mind and a relentless bent for innovation.
Many letters, communications, and editorials in the Library Journal in the earliest years of the twentieth century were concerned with new techniques, methods, and applications of machinery. The same articles and pages also carry much rumination on the implications of what the authors saw as a great rate of
change in the profession and in library service to a growing and changing pop- ulation. The tone of these articles is very similar to the tone of articles today. Will libraries and librarianship survive? Will growth in the diversity and number of means of communication change libraries for the better or for the worse? Will a changing society value libraries in the future? All these questions we ask today were being asked 100 years ago. I will look at the present state of libraries in the next chapter, mindful of the fact that we have traveled a long road, but it is still the same road and we owe much to those who traveled it before us.
N O T E S
1. Murray Stein, Transformation (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1998).
2. The 1950s in America were a period conspicuous for the oppression of minorities and women and the suppression of intellectual freedom, savagely criticized by many thinkers of the time.
3. Carly Simon, “Anticipation,” 1971.
4.Los Angeles Times, January 11, 2002.
5. J. Richard Gott, quoted by Timothy Ferris in “How to Predict Everything,” New Yorker, July 12, 1999, 35–39.
6. Peter F. Drucker, “Beyond the Information Revolution,” Atlantic Monthly (digital edition), October 1999.
7. See www.ceip.org/files/projectsirwp/irwp_home..ASP.
8. Brian Winston, Media Technology and Society (London, New York: Routledge, 1998), 1.
9. Kevin Desmond, Timetable of Inventions and Discoveries (New York: M. Evans, 1986).
10. Many of the facts in this section are taken from chapter 5 of Thomas J. Schlereth, Victorian America (New York: HarperCollins, 1991).
11. Ruth Schwartz Cowan, A Social History of American Technology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 160.
12. Winston, Media Technology, 336.
13. James Moran, “Printing,” in A History of Technology, ed. Trevor I. Williams (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1978), 7:1268.
14. Ray Allister, Friese-Greene: Close-up of an Inventor (New York: Arno, 1972).
15. Cowan, American Technology, 275–76.
16. Winston, Media Technology, 91.
17. Schlereth, Victorian America, 171.
18. Warren Sussman, Culture as History (New York: Pantheon, 1984).
19. Dennis Fazio, verbatim transcript of a presentation at “The Great Internet Transforma- tion: The Telecommunications and Information Society Forum” (April 26, 2000), avail- able at www.hhh.umn.edu/projects/tisp/042600.pdf.
20. Schlereth, Victorian America, 187.
21. Doron Swade, The Difference Engine: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer (New York: Viking, 2001).
22. Florence Woodworth, “ALA Exhibit at Paris Exposition of 1900,” Library Journal 25, no. 3 (March 1900).
27
3
Britain’s libraries have been locked in a downward spiral so long that it’s hard to remember that they were once regarded as a vital
national institution, just as much part of an ambitious city’s civic arsenal as a successful art gallery is today . . . . [Libraries have] . . .
become the preserve of the old and the disturbed . . . . A generation of book hating, self-loathing librarians, nervous of literature and hypnotised by technology, combined with uninspired local authori-
ties who do not value their services, has only made things worse.
1THIS HARSH INDICTMENT OFBRITISH LIBRARIANS BY A RESPECTED ARCHITECTURAL CRITIC
(in an essay celebrating a new public library) could also be applied, with some truth, to many American librarians. It does sometimes seem as if a one-time bookish profession has embraced technology to the point that Internet resources are viewed as actually being preferable to books, which are becoming increasingly irrelevant. The sad decline of the British public library from a national ornament to “the preserve of the old and disturbed” has many causes, but the alienation of the library profession from the values of learning, culture, and civilization is one of them. If we are to come to terms with modern com- munications technology without losing our souls, we must see the role and nature of that technology clearly. Perhaps you might see these words as apoca- lyptic and overheated. If so, consider this pronouncement on academic libraries by an eminent figure in the field of “library and information management”:
Communications Technology
and Libraries Today
I have been amazed at how infrequently I need to use my university’s library . . . That is not to say that I don’t use library services. I do, and frequently, but almost always from my desktop—or rather from my laptop. I work from home, from the train, from hotels, from partner institutions, and even occasionally from my office . . .2
Now, if an eminent “information manager” has fallen for the idea that all useful documents (“information resources” in his jargon) are available electronically, what chance does the average person have in dealing with this preposterous idea? If what seems to be high-level research (the author is director of something called the Centre for Research in Library and Information Management) can be confined to digital documents, surely lower-level needs can be met from com- puter resources alone? I suppose one could trust in common sense and experi- ence to demonstrate that such opinions are not only fallacious but dangerous.
Opinions such as these are a threat to the funding of libraries and the livelihoods of librarians. Lest the latter be misinterpreted as merely part of a job-protection program, I hasten to add that the employment of librarians is vital to society and culture because the skills they have and the service ethic they embody are invaluable and irreplaceable. I have been accused in the past of tilting at windmills and straw men (I’m not sure that straw men are what one tilts at, but there we are) but never, to my knowledge, by anyone who works in a library and who knows about the real pressures exerted by misinformed purse-holders.3The nightmare of most working librarians is a university administrator, a chair of a public library board, or a school trustee who sincerely believes that “everything is avail- able on the Internet” and the digital library is just around the corner. Ignorance and lazy thinking fuel such beliefs, but they are also reinforced by writings, usually emanating from people qualified in fields other than librarianship.