When the School of Library Science at Rutgers University became the School of Information Science in early 2009, a change the Universities of Michigan, Syracuse, California–Berkeley, and others had already made, it was announcing that computers had taken over part of the curriculum. “Information science” is code for “don’t worry, we’re not dinosaurs; we’ve got the electronic age covered.” About a third of the library graduate programs in the United States have now ditched the word library. Not that librarians, as a rule, have begun identifying themselves as information scientists, or, for that matter, cybrarians—I use this last word to conjure up the new breed of tech-savvy librarians, part cyborg, part cat’s-eye reading glasses. Unless librarians take jobs with exotic and semi-contrived names like digital media specialist or metadata and information architect, or, as the city of Edinburgh tried to (seriously) rename its librarians, audience development specialists, they are, mainly, and I hope forever, librarians.
Although this book starts and ends in public libraries on the East Coast, where I live, the story stretches across the country and beyond. We’re all connected. What happens in one place is happening in another—or it will be. I walked into my local library one day to find it had come to a complete standstill while the cataloging software was upgraded. Remember libraries without computers? I could, but only barely. It was an eerie step back in time, and was, as it turned out, a fitting illustration of the intimate and sometimes strained relationship between professionals who serve the public and professionals who serve machines. No matter how tech savvy my local librarians have become, like the rest of us, they rely on computer technicians to cope with the frustrations and challenges of ever-evolving software and hardware. Incorporating the new technology while keeping the old material useful and accessible—this is just the latest task in the long list of librarians’ tasks. That they manage this while holding firm to principles of free speech and the right to privacy is remarkable, which is why I wanted to visit the Connecticut librarians who challenged the FBI’s right to examine the records of their patrons’ computer searches. Theirs is a story not only about the triumph of the First and Fourth Amendments but also about what can be accomplished when librarians and computer experts work together as a team. They can stand up to the government.
This book can be read as a journey into increasingly activist and visionary forms of library work. The walls of the library have grown porous now and in some cases are merely virtual, as librarians have come out from behind their desks to serve as active enablers in the digital age. I found librarians who took to the streets alongside political protesters in order to provide them with immediate, vital, and reliable information, and academic librarians who have reached out to students halfway around the globe, teaching them the computer skills necessary to link them and their villages to the international human rights movement. But no matter where or how they use their training, members of this once quiet and private profession have taken to talking—and gossiping—on the Web. Early on, many of them recognized the potential of blogs as sources of information and training, and became bloggers themselves. Passionate, funny, and often profane, this crowd of computer-age librarians vent about their patrons while making wicked sport of themselves and those old jokes and stereotypes.
On every level, the field is bending and broadening, especially as it moves into cyberspace. Librarians are collaborating to create a universal network of virtual library services on the 3-D web. At the Library of Congress, with the largest holdings in the country, the staff continues to expand its collections with digital initiatives. Librarians there welcomed the first “born-digital” collection when they took charge of a trove of e-mails, voice mails, and other electronic artifacts gathered after the attacks of 9/11. Another behemoth, the New York Public Library system, is cooking up all sorts of digital projects, and at the same time addressing the needs of those who seem overwhelmed by technology. These include, perhaps surprisingly, artists and writers, whose works fill the shelves and archives of libraries everywhere.
At the often forgotten edges of library work, the archivists, those trying to capture history before it dissolves into the unrecorded past, toil in this transitional period that’s turning out to be something of a dark age. It’s not just mock wiki entries about chin vaginas that disappear almost as fast as they’re created; hundreds of days of electronic messages from the Bush White House went missing for years, and only 14 million were recovered. Only 14 million! How do you manage such a massive and slippery outpouring? Fortunately, there are heroic archivists, librarians, cybrarians, and computer scientists determined to save the world, or at least a corner of it, whether it appears on an elusive flickering webpage or a sheet of dead wood.
This is a story about these professionals and their world, researched partly on a computer in mazes so extended and complex—every link a trapdoor to another set of links—that I never found a sturdy place to stop and grasp the whole. Information used to be scarce; now we’re buried in it. We can copy the same piece of information in endless files, duplicating with abandon; we can have our info everywhere we want it, on little data sticks, on hard drives with remote backup software, in clouds in cyberspace. And yet, whole chapters of contemporary history are disappearing into the ether as e-mails get trashed and webpages are taken down and people die without sharing their passwords.
We know the first words uttered on the telephone, because Alexander Graham Bell wrote them down: “Mr. Watson. Come here. I need you.” The first e-mail? As one of the digital histories points out, “In 1964, the first electronic mail message was sent from either the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Carnegie Institute of Technology or Cambridge University. The message does not survive, however, and so there is no documentary record to determine which group sent the pathbreaking message.” Its contents are a mystery, a little smudge where history has been erased.
So where does one go in such a wobbly, elusive, dynamic, confusing age? Wherever the librarians and archivists are.
They’re sorting it all out for us.
2.
INFORMATION SICKNESS
Late in the 1990s, I saw my local public libraries shake off their dust and stir to life. The new hardware was a crucial component, but no, really it was the librarians themselves who were making the difference.
I’ve lived in my house for ten years, and the books are crushing me. I’ve given away carloads, and still they reproduce. Somewhere in these disorderly shelves is a novel published in 1981 called Easy Travel to Other Planets. The novel, by Ted Mooney, was notorious when it came out because one character, a female marine biologist, has sex with a dolphin. For me, though, the most memorable passage is the description of the affliction from which the denizens of this slightly futuristic world suffer: information sickness. There is too much to take in. Their brains overload and they lose their senses.
If you don’t know where to find a book, it might as well not exist. I couldn’t find Easy Travel in my house. Ordinarily, if I wanted to consult a book I owned but couldn’t put my hands on, I’d go on Amazon and use the neat Search This Book function: I would simply type in information sickness, and all the pages on which this phrase appears would be revealed. But this worked only for recently published books with cooperative publishers; Easy Travel was too old for that. So I went to the supercatalog at WorldCat.org, where, as promised by the obituary of Frederick Kilgour, the man who first combined the records of multiple libraries’ catalogs, librarians were busily compiling one giant digital catalog of the world’s books. You type in a title and get back a list of hundreds of libraries where that title can be found, beginning with the closest. I found 532 libraries that owned Easy Travel, listed in a concentric circle from where I happened to be, the “New York Public Library—Research,” as WorldCat called the majestic library at Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue. I could follow the digital breadcrumbs and track copies of the book through all five boroughs of New York City, moving on to the U.S. Milit
ary Academy Library at West Point (forty-four miles away, it informed me), followed by locations in the Midwest, the West, and the South. Then the list fanned out to Canada, Europe, and beyond, until finally, having exhausted all the closer possibilities, WorldCat found the book in the holdings of the University of Tasmania, more than ten thousand miles away.
Because I happened to be embedded in that big library in Manhattan, with access to a quiet room for writing this and maybe a million items tucked away on the other side of the wall, I checked its online catalog and verified that it owned a copy of Easy Travel. Oddly, the novel was on microfilm, and the librarians in the microfilm room had to light the lamps on their miners’ hats to find it. Though it’s a literary novel, Easy Travel had been stashed on a reel with a bunch of science fiction. Was there a shelf of sci-fi being dumped and this someone’s defiant protest? No, it seemed I was holding a relic from the days when a former administrator, obsessed with space to store books, had the bright idea to throw batches of books together, patch up their contents on homemade reels of microfilm, then dump the physical books he’d had copied. He is not the hero of this book.
A typed list of a dozen or so novels appeared at the beginning of the microfilm reel and Easy Travel was among them. There were squiggles of dust on my viewing lens and the light in the room was dim; the pages had been microfilmed hastily, a few of them duplicated. I would give anything for one of those trademark library moments, sitting in a polished wood chair while sunlight slanted over my shoulder and I turned the pages of an old tome, blah blah blah. But here was my space-saving substitute, which required no fewer than four librarians and clerks to fetch and help thread into the machine. Squinting, I was able to make out the part where one of the characters in the book noted that “information sickness, like malaria, recurs unpredictably,” and speculated that the president himself might be suffering this particular affliction (“he’s certainly in the right risk bracket”). And then—oh joy!—there was the account of an information-sickness attack, a passage that has stayed in the back of my brain for all these years:
Jeffrey discovers a woman harmed by information excess. All the symptoms are present: bleeding from the nose and ears, vomiting, deliriously disconnected speech, apparent disorientation, and the desire to touch everything. She has a rubber mat rolled up under her arm and is walking around one of the soft new park benches recently installed by the city, palpating it hungrily. A small crowd has collected around her, listening to her complicated monologue: Birds of Prey Cards, sunspot souffle, Antarctic unemployment. Jeffrey hesitates. I’ve never seen one so far gone, he thinks. But, judging her young enough to warrant hope, he gently takes the rubber mat from the woman, unrolls it upon the pavement, and helps her to assume the memory-elimination posture. After a minute, the bleeding stops. “I was on my way to dance class,” she says to him, still running her ravening fingers over his leather coat sleeves, “when suddenly I was dazzled. I couldn’t tell where one thing left off and the next began.”
Ha! “I couldn’t tell where one thing left off and the next began.” No kidding! Just as the novelist predicted, we were bleeding information from the nose and ears, though dazed and disoriented was not how I experienced it. Most of the time, I felt like I was three years old, high on chocolate cake and social networks, constantly wired, ingesting information and news about information, books and books about books, data and metadata—I was, in other words, overstimulated yet gluttonous for more. I spent days in the labyrinths of the Internet, watching webpages multiply onscreen at an even faster pace than the books and papers proliferated under my feet. From the outside I’m sure it looked like I needed help assuming the “memory-elimination posture,” or possibly I needed an intervention, but I wouldn’t want it any other way. Information and new forms of information were washing over me in oceans and it was fun to splash in the wake.
I had my limits. I often felt baffled and frustrated. I understood—I thought I understood—then things changed, or I learned the next thing that made everything I knew before obsolete. When I worked in an office, there was always a computer expert or two on staff to keep us connected and to untangle the USB wires and bewilderments. Having a tech department to consult, it turns out, is almost as valuable as having a doctor. Now, self-employed and unaffiliated with any computer scientists, without a sheltering institution to guide or rescue me, I’m challenged, like most people who aren’t programmers. Where could we turn? Who could we consult who both understood and spoke our language?
Thank goodness for librarians.
I stood at the reference desk, my head buzzing. My old method of capturing the information on the Web wasn’t working anymore. I had been copying text on websites and saving it to text files, but sometime around 2006, the Web took a leap into jazzed-up graphics and I began crashing my word-processing programs. What could I do? It wasn’t enough to save the Web address; there was no guarantee I could get into the site later. How could I save content on the increasingly dynamic Web? The librarian I was consulting didn’t blink. “Have you tried this?” she asked, showing me the pull down menu of her browser and choosing the option to “Save Page As.” A box popped up, with the option “Save As Web Page.” Click. It was that simple. To someone who already knew how to do it, it was idiotically simple, but for me, it was the difference between romping on the Web and being able to snap and save faithful pictures of what I found there. It was the difference between playing heedlessly and working purposefully. It was, in short, a revelation—the right information at the right time.
I could have gone to Google and typed in save webpages and received similar instructions, and perhaps had an equally profound epiphany, except that I didn’t know that saving webpages was what I was looking for. I didn’t have the vocabulary to ask Google what it knew, or maybe I didn’t have the vision: it never occurred to me that you could save, not just the content, but the whole page, including the flashing ads and links. That’s the trouble with ignorance.
The librarian’s kindness was a bonus. She hadn’t laughed at me. If I had asked her how to make the little black mark in the middle of the screen move, she would have shown me how to use a mouse—and if you don’t know how a mouse works, the person who shows you is a genius.
I thanked her for the help. My gratitude was appreciated, but she hadn’t helped me as a favor. This was her job.
The Massachusetts Library Association developed a handy way to calculate the value of the services your public library provides. You estimate how many books you check out, how many newspapers you browse, how many hours you used the computer, and so on, and it puts a dollar value on those services and totes them up. According to this calculator, one question answered by the reference desk is worth $7. (Other states picked this up and use a version of the same formula, but value a reference question at $15.) But what if that question was hugely important to you? What if the answer affected your livelihood?
This testimonial appeared in Feel-good Librarian, a blog posted by an anonymous public librarian in the midwest United States. It appeared about a year into the economic downturn, soon after a tornado delivered another blow to the region:
Literally thousands of people are out of work in our tricounty area…. These former factory workers, some with limited English language skills, and very few computer skills, must use the internet to file for unemployment, get entered in our state’s required database and post a résumé. I consider myself fairly computer savvy and this is a cranky, confusing and unfriendly interface.
Many of our patrons do not know how to type and do not understand why they need an email address, much less how to establish one. Taco Bell, McDonald’s and Wal-Mart, as well as the larger employers in our area, all require applications to be filled out online. People who can’t even speak English well are required to make résumés without knowing how to say the word (“my rezoom” is how one patron referred to it), much less fill in the form with properly capitalized names. One man did not know what a capital
letter was….
Good public libraries offer computer classes for both rank beginners and experienced researchers, and good librarians have been showing people how to use e-mail for years—but how to use capital letters?! So when I hear this snarky question (and I hear it everywhere): Are librarians obsolete in the Age of Google? all I can say is, are you kidding? Librarians are more important than ever. Google and Yahoo! and Bing and WolframAlpha can help you find answers to your questions, sometimes brilliantly; but if you don’t know how to phrase those questions, no search engine can help provide the answers. It can’t explain in simple language how e-mails (let alone the rules of capitalization!) work, or how to navigate government websites. You can only get so far without human help.
Google couldn’t answer the question posed by a man who had been walking in the woods when he came across a stone plaque covered by strange marks. He copied out the marks and took them to the library, hoping to find out what they meant. Brian Herzog, who blogs as the Swiss Army Librarian, was working on the reference desk that day. He suspected his patron had stumbled upon a clue in geocaching, a kind of contemporary treasure hunt that uses GPS locaters. Where we’d see chicken scratches, Herzog saw an ancient language being used as a code in an outdoor game. Herzog’s account of his hunt that day to determine what part this plaque played in the literal treasure hunt involved good hunches, multiple resources, deductive logic, and the creative application of advanced reference skills. Ultimately, he figured out that the marks spelled out, in runes, a number; when plugged into a GPS device, that number would lead to the next clue. This was a hunt with a real treasure at the end, though as searches go, it was an exercise in curiosity and not a matter of whether the patron’s family would eat that night. Still—what price could you put on the professional who took up your whimsical search with enthusiasm and spent his day ensuring its success?
This Book Is Overdue! Page 2