Author of A Practical Guide to Internet Filters (Neal-Schuman, 1997)
Column for May 1998
According to the 1997 Survey of Public Libraries and the Internet, the good news is that over 70% of public libraries in the United States were connected to the Internet one way or another. (Understand that "connectivity" is an all-encompassing phrase that could mean anything from a dumb-terminal dial-up over a 14.4 modem or suites of Pentiums on a T1 line). The bad news is that 40% of public libraries did not offer public access to the Internet.
In 1926, ALA's Committee on Library Extension observed, "The problem . . . is primarily rural, for 93% of the people without public library service live in the open country or in villages of less than 2,500 population." In the online age the problem remains the same. Libraries that are unconnected or underconnected to the Internet are disproportionately rural and small; their obstacles are huge. Often we are talking about automating from the ground up, sometimes in a library that has only recently acquired other basic tools such as telephone or fax service. The funding, equipping, and training issues can be staggering. Very few libraries can connect without tremendous external support, such as a consortium that provides connectivity and basic network support services.
I know about this firsthand; I've just started working in a small, rural public library. We expect to go online early next year, and our ability to do this is made possible through our membership in a consortium, the Upper Hudson Library System. Like many pre-Internet libraries, we aren't entirely unconnected or without automation; we have one older machine we use to dial into our consortium system computer, where we check in-house e-mail and the holdings in the system catalog, and another computer for games and job skills. Nevertheless, I feel marooned on a desert island, particularly since I know what I'm missing. Is that a Web site I see before me? Alas—My parched brain hallucinates; it's only a mirage!
In theory, the focus of our big date is the availability of the online catalog, and I can't say we will miss the card catalog or that painfully loud card-charging machine, which one staff member vowed should sleep with the fishes as soon as our holdings are linked. (Don't you love people who fantasize about the mythical glory days before computers, when libraries were quiet havens? Let them stamp 50 date cards in a row or word-process a sheaf of catalog cards.)
In reality, the big deal is the Internet—not the backbone over which our catalog records will travel, but that tumultuous, disorganized trash barge of human information (and smooth toll road for fee-based magazine and reference databases). Marvin Scilken was quite correct when he pointed out that in New York City you hardly need the Internet to find a fact (AL, Dec. 1997, p. 116); but way out somewhere on Route 2 in Rensselaer County, a tiny, unconnected one-room library is not going to have access to extensive information on cheetahs, obscure tax forms from earlier years, or the EPA "maps on demand" tool, which automatically generates an environmental portrait of your area.
We're in a heightened state of preconnectivity; it's all I can do to resist knitting baby booties (one for each mouse). We have frequent automation meetings with the helpful folks at our consortium—perhaps we should call them Lamaze lessons. It's an eerie feeling. We know the Internet is out there, just beyond the farthest point we can see; we can even stare through binoculars at newly connected people waving from the shore.
Vicki Nesting, whose New Orleans Public Library branch connected after the 1997 survey came out, told me, "At my small neighborhood branch folks love it. . . . We haven't seen this much enthusiasm about a new library service since . . . well, I can't remember when!" Closer to home, every announcement of another library going online brings applause at meetings, and the database we know dial into gets fatter with each new set of records.
Somewhere, just across the horizon of time, our library will move into a new era. Yet even as I dream of fingertip access to tax forms, cheetahs, and search engines grinding through galaxies of information, I'm aware that we are very much a library—yes, limited, but still present in the here and now.
Children paw contentedly through shelves of picture books; serious bookaholics cruise the new-book shelves, heads tilted sideways; a young teen asks us for "something to read." The card-charger thumps, the word-processor chatters; we have another children's program, write another newsletter, raise more funds. Commuters check out piles of audio books; casual browsers leaf through our small magazine rack.
"When we go online," I tell them, "we will have access to this wonderful serial database with thousands of magazine articles," and they smile indulgently, thinking, no doubt, that the new librarian is a sweet but addled lady. Meanwhile, we work, and prepare, and wait, and wait!