The human problem
I know of one semi-barbarous zone whose librarians repudiate the ‘vain and superstitious habit’ of trying to find sense in books, equating such a quest with attempting to find meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines of the palms of one’s hands. –Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel”
I stood outside the Northside branch on a recent Monday, waiting for it to open. By the time the librarian turned back the deadbolt to let us in, at precisely noon, a crowd of 13 people had gathered. I followed six of them back to the dozen computer stations in the rear, and, unsurprisingly, everybody went to their e-mail immediately.
Don’t worry, I couldn’t see any details, just the familiar Yahoo and Gmail interface logos. I got up and milled around the stacks for a few minutes, before looping back around to check the progress. Everybody was still either in their e-mail or they had moved on to Facebook. One woman briefly checked Craigslist, spent maybe 30 seconds there, and then went right back to Facebook. After the library had been open about 20 minutes, I gave the computers a last pass. Half of the terminals were still available, one person had left and been replaced by a new visitor. He was checking his e-mail.
Libraries have captured our imaginations ever since, well, we don’t remember exactly when. The great library at Alexandria, Egypt and the venerated libraries of Timbuktu have held up through time as citadels of knowledge, where the scientific, literary, and ecclesiastical wisdom of the ages has been filed document by single document since we began writing things down. In other words, libraries have always been both repositories of information and physical symbols of knowledge.
New York City recently dropped $50 million on an overhaul for the 42nd Street library’s 100th anniversary, testament to both its symbolic value and architectural presence. While the impetus for the Crozet library seems to reflect the same value system, the motivations for updating the Northside library are more prosaic: basically a real estate predicament crossed with a current lack of adequate computer terminals at the JRML system’s busiest branch.
Local numbers show that people aren’t abandoning books and there hasn’t been any taxpayer outcry about the allocations of money. Ann Mallek, Chair of the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors, said that the original impetus behind the new Crozet library was “considerable citizen agitation.” Mallek also said there was interest in having space for homeschooling programs. “All the public libraries around here—the Waynesboro library has a whole series of classrooms on their lower level and has become a real mecca for homeschoolers, said Mallek. “There is a room [at Crozet] that can be used for those types of programs.”
Certainly, people who don’t have computers need access to their e-mail and the ability to find and apply for jobs, but could the goal of providing that service be accomplished another way? For $12 million dollars, is there no way to double or triple the number of computers in an adjacent rental space, take a hard look at the existing collection and see where it can be improved, or trick out the JMRL website so it’s ultra-interactive, serving the county’s residents from home like Charlottesville’s GIS mapping system does?
While it is exhilarating that we live in a community that can spend almost $20 million to have two community centers that provide Internet access to lower income people ringed by meeting rooms for homeschoolers and an outlet for old-fashioned stragglers like me, the whole thing makes me wonder if we’re planning for the future or burrowing into an esoteric alternate reality.
In the 1941 short story, “The Library of Babel,” by Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentinian writer famously uses his dystopian library as a metaphor for a random and infinite universe. In this library/universe nothing is certain; all “knowledge” is just as likely to be nonsensical as essential. Borges’ vision of a vast information bank, where truth is filed alongside gibberish in a transcendent index, is a direct allegory for the cacophonous clatter of our information age.
“‘The Library of Babel’ is in itself one of the greatest criticisms of presumed knowledge,” said Argentine filmmaker and Albemarle County resident Eduardo Montes-Bradley, who made the 1999 documentary film, Horta Borges, about the enduring perception of Borges in the Latin world. “Things have changed a lot since this day of ‘Babel,’ this infinite library. I don’t know if we can find an argument in defense of the new library in Crozet or Charlottesville from the Borgesian perspective. I think that we’ll probably find it in the way that American society is organized. Public libraries here are a place, and have always been a place, of refuge for people that cannot afford a similar environment at home or anywhere else. The cultural activities that surround the public libraries are fantastic. It’s a cultural center and that should be sufficient to justify their existence. But on the condition of having books themselves, no.”
To that end, there are trends at university libraries worth noting. The University of Virginia libraries have stored many volumes in closed and remote stacks for years. Other large university libraries, such as the ones at the University of Chicago and North Carolina State University, are employing closed stack systems with robotic book retrievers, or bookbots. These libraries hold millions of volumes while only a tiny fraction is available in open stacks. To get their books, the students select from the library’s website, and then the bookbot—a mechanical grabber contraption that glides up and down a 50′ tall poll—speeds through the narrow slips of the closed stacks, picks the selections from the bins, packs them into smaller bins and it’s all waiting for the students when they arrive at the library. The bookbot system uses one-ninth the space of conventional stacks.
“Paper is still the most stable preservation form we’ve ever invented. Bits on a server are necessarily temporary,” Vaidhyanathan told me. “Right now I could not pull up the electronic version of my dissertation. I finished it in 1999 and it sits on a collection on three-and-quarter-inch floppy discs that are unreadable by most computers these days. There are lots of people spending millions of dollars trying to make sure we have open standards and good metadata so that this stuff doesn’t get lost. But it’s going to take a tremendous amount of vigilance to keep all of this digital material safe and accessible and backed up and it’s not necessarily cheap over the long run either. It’s good that we have digital copies of all this. Digitization allows for text search and better indexing and hyperlinks and all sorts of advantages, but it also threatens preservation, given our current technologies.”
The bookbot also challenges one of my own core reasons for visiting libraries—curiosity and incidental discovery. With an automated system, you have to know exactly what you are looking for before you can get a book, so there is little chance you will stumble upon anything by chance. The system is designed to deliver exactly what you ask for, and you’ll ask in a Boolean search window that takes words literally and may be reading your cookies to determine what you really want.
“I think anyone who has spent any significant amount of time in libraries knows the joy of finding something you didn’t even know you wanted on the re-shelving stacks or cart,” said Vaidhyanathan.
Which brings us back to Google, the only place to begin a quest for information. That singular portal to the universe of the limitless information of the Web is being rigged, Vaidhyanathan explains, by a for profit company whose proprietary software controls the way we find information.
“The problem with that search engine mentality is that it fools you into thinking that that list of links is comprehensive and accurate,” said Vaidhyanathan. “That list of links is a function of Google knowing what you’ve already been interested in—that really rich list of search terms that you’ve already used over the years. Google is always going to give you what it thinks you want and it more often than not is what you think you want because Google knows you better than you know yourself. But that’s not necessarily good for learning. That’s really good for shopping; but it’s not so good for learning. And part of the problem is that we’re so spoiled by Google, by the convenience of Google, that we’re missing out on the richness of encountering material that was not meant for us, or marketed to us. We’re missing out on material that was written from a completely different political point of view. Google’s not going to serve you much material that doesn’t already reflect your biases.”
Back to the library. An undergraduate student these days who Googled her way to term paper subjects in high school and attends a university whose stacks are searched by a bookbot via a data entry terminal has to know the exact titles of the books she is seeking to research her papers before she ever walks into the library, and she’ll get them either on the recommendation of her professors or by Googling them. She may never happen accidentally upon a book, a subject, or a concept that isn’t generated by a search protocol based on information she already possessed.
“And the only way to correct for that is to make sure the faculty and the students are aware of that problem and can correct for it intentionally,” said Vaidhyanathan. “Which means engaging with librarians to seek advice on the best resources. And that’s hard work. By going to closed stacks, they solved some problems, but they’ve created other problems, which is going to be that much more work to make people aware of the most appropriate resources.”
In other words, we’re caught in a feedback loop, a particularly Borgesian nightmare.
If, as JMRL Director James Halliday said, a public library’s primary literary responsibility is to make available current, useful information in addition to an appropriate mix of popular and important literature, then all of that type of material is becoming more and more readily available online.
If, instead, we are building fancy Internet cafes, sans le café (there is, however, already talk of a coffee shop for the new Northside branch) while spending that kind of money, shouldn’t the computers themselves be the focal points? Shouldn’t they have creative software suites through which patrons can access video and photo editing programs, graphics and illustration software? Or have access to in-depth online training courses, such as those at Lynda.com, where people can pick up valuable computer skills, from acquiring proficiency in Power Point to becoming self-taught computer programmers? Or be linked to every library in the UVA system?
But, to riff on Borges, we are not trying to solve the problem of libraries, we are trying to solve a library problem. Mallek and Halliday say that the cost of the new Northside library will be offset by the savings of not having to shell out non-recoverable rent payments. “When you look at the rent payments compared to paying off a [mortgage],” said Mallek, “the two lines on the graph cross at about nine years out. In nine years we will be paying less on our mortgage than we would be paying in rent, for 100 percent more space.”
Mallek figures at $500,000 a year saved in rent, it will take a little over 20 years to cover the cost of the $11.8 million Northside upgrade.
In The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry), Vaidhyanathan lays out a utopian vision that reflects the new media principle of convergence, in which all libraries and information will exist in a decentralized and integrated network curated by professional librarians.
“I would like to see a plan to fund and support a global network of libraries, staffed by trained professionals, equipped with durable and flexible technology, open to assist people in every situation with their inquiries,” he writes. “There is no ‘global library system’ per se. There is not even a standardized national library system in the United States. However, high standards of professionalism and technologies are upheld by professional schools of library science and information in the United States. To realize this global project, the noncommercialized physical space of public libraries and the high ethical and technical standards of professional librarianship are more needed than ever.”
Will our library, I wonder, be part of that network, or will even the poorest members of our society have chips embedded behind their ears and wear rose-tinted Google Glasses?