BackTalk: Now, We're Just Like Them

By William H. Wisner -- Library Journal, 8/15/2006

I have worked in a single community college library for almost 20 years, witness to the information explosion at close quarters. When I first began answering reference questions, there was not a single computer in our public area. Today, there are nearly 60.

In my career, I have seen the advent—step by step—of citation searching, Boolean searching, full-text availability, and the Internet. Somewhere along the way, I can't say just when, the card catalog vanished.

Today, ecstatic library users have begun to vector away from books, browsing, and deep reading, previously among our core commitments of the past. Although at first I was furious with librarians for yielding to too much technology too fast, I believe now this is an intellectually adolescent view.

There is no controlling a fireball. And no way to slow it down.

Such knowledge, however, will not save libraries. It was a Faustian bargain from the beginning made with the “front men” for information technology: the corporations. They were quick to test their new devices on us. We embraced them enthusiastically.

In retrospect, it was like kissing a shark. Once our corporate allies have digitized all the books, they will put them into pocket readers and jerk the rug out from under the libraries they cannibalized.

If, for the philosopher, existence precedes essence, and choice precedes being, for the bibliophile, the tactile always precedes the virtual. It is no wonder that people print out emails that are important to them. The physicality of paper is a more certain hedge against mortality than pixels on a screen.

The presence of a beloved book in our hands has no virtual equivalent. It should not come as a surprise, according to one study, that depression levels rise with the more time people spend chatting online.

Nothing in all the trillions of dollars spent on computers and peripherals can compare with how I feel when I open my copy of Nikos Kazantzakis's small book Journeying. My father loved this volume, which we often discussed. He signed his copy for me, and it came to me upon his death. The signature raised the book out of the common world for me. And the book, in turn, raises the signature, and all is now raised to a higher plane for me with two daughters of my own.

I never told my father I loved him. What an inefficient son I was. But books, because they are tactile, because they are filigreed and encased in abiding leather, can carry such meanings. They always have. Only our era assumes they are prior to nothing and that computers are prior to everything.

Today, the intractable book, with which libraries as we know them began, is the only thing that still makes the continued existence of libraries necessary. Everything else can already be accessed from home, from journal retrieval to paying fines. Libraries and librarians have entered into that sense of belatedness that adheres to all fin de specie institutions—a deep, autumnal sadness of finality.

Every day, everything we know becomes more efficient and more impersonal. As administrators discover, expensive, degreed librarians are no longer needed to answer the fewer and fewer questions that come their way. They perceive a huge building with a huge staff as a costly artifact from the ancient past. They think that everyone knows that primary student research activities can be completed at home, with a pizza, rather than at the library itself.

The monolithic edifice that was the “heart of the university” will one day be abandoned as suddenly as we abandoned the card catalog.

We took no thought of the morrow when we pitched the cards—with a strange mania—into waste bins. It was the gravest turning point in the profession's history, a dreadful swerve from paper to screen. We seemed so certain we were doing the right thing.

We abandoned touch, the feel of the well-worn manila tags. We abandoned the human, like everyone else. Innocence preceded our Fall, the innocence of the Geek, the Awkward, and the Shy. We believed we must stand only for the truth, for the efficacy of knowledge, for the rationalizing power of the intellect. The corporate suits with their neat haircuts welcomed us. They offered us calendar cards and tote bags and beguiled us from our dignity.

“Now, you're just like us,” they all said.