George Rebane
The future (and past) of libraries is the subject of Marilyn Johnson’s This Book is Overdue. I have just read a WSJ review of the book by Christine Rosen (‘From Wisdom to Wi-Fi’). Johnson covers a lot of ground in the book about libraries and, interesting for this day and age, librarians. The latter are represented as not the staid, visually impaired, prudish ladies that is their stereotype. Even their job title seems to be undergoing some renovation and hopes to emerge as “information scientist”.
But the more interesting part that libraries are shedding their research departments and seeing themselves morphing into “a place where parents and toddlers might want to pick up a DVD and a latte.” Research departments are being “jettisoned” because they actually employ people with some skills beyond a good Barnes&Noble clerk, and the mistaken notion that everything today is on the internet. Maybe it will be tomorrow or the day after, but not yet.
So we are at a crossroads that each community has to negotiate on its own. That is, unless your library gets its funding from a higher source, in which case they’ll make the decision for you. Here in Nevada County we have been going through some pretty serious soul searching on how to go forward with a greatly reduced budget for our county library system. It looks like our Supes will not hire out library operations to a private company. The community is stepping up with a lot of alternative ways to keep it open using volunteers and public contributions. There is something basically good in that approach – it’s our library, and we’ll keep it open with the wherewithal that we can muster locally, instead hoping the folks in Ohio will chip in.
But there’s more to libraries than possibly becoming a hybrid Blockbuster, internet café, and latte place. At least there was more to libraries in the past when people knew how to read. Rosen’s book report ends with a lament generalizing on the New York Public Library experience wherein she also quotes Google’s Eric Schmidt worrying about the public’s “loss of deep reading skills” as we spend less time with serious writing and concentrate on deciphering short, abbreviated pseudo-sentences on our monitors and mobile devices.
Nowhere is this loss of deep reading skills more apparent than in the comment threads attached to online articles and blog posts. Pick any such website and examine the heat-to-light ratio of the comments. Almost all of the heat is generated by commenters whose skills range from ‘not a clue’ to ‘what is a subjunctive?’, and forget about using counterfactuals if you want your scribbling understood. Which brings up the question – if not in an old-fashioned library with real literature, where do we go to learn how to dissect ideas the complexity of which matches that of our world?
Online ebooks is not yet an answer, because just because it is available online doesn’t mean that I know to access it. Someone/thing with enough smarts has to be available to identify and integrate my deficit and need, and then be able to direct me to the volume(s) that will serve. Today that is a learned human, and for most of us that human still happens to be a librarian.
rebanesruminations.com 
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