Director of technology for the Shenendehowa Public Library in Clifton Park, New York.
kgs@bluehighways.com
Column for April 2000
Many of us yearn to reduce the number of formats we work with (though we all applauded when the Hudsonville, Michigan, library turned the Internet back on). However, according to a recent survey on the Web4Lib and PubLib Internet discussion groups, many of these tools—typewriters, for example—have a longer half-life than plutonium. As Nancy Young, director of the Stonington (Ct.) Free Library, says, some of these seemingly outmoded tools may be “minor things . . . but still needed by some people.”
Some formats are in the twilight of their existence—to everyone’s relief. Very few people will miss CD-ROM databases. Related candidates for intentional extinction include “entire CD-ROM networks with multiple CD towers running on Lantastic,” according to Marion (Midge) Lusardi, director of the Chesterfield Township (Mich.) Library. Some folks found new uses for old technologies: Executive Director Anita R. Barney says the Western Connecticut Library Council uses an Ellison Letter Machine to cut 5¼-inch floppy disks into small shapes for story times. More than one librarian said they were hanging on to an outdated format because the local school had an assignment based on it, and they had been unable to persuade the school that this format was outmoded. “See, students? Just hold the chisel thusly against the stone. . . .”
Typewriters and correction fluid, of all things, were cited by more than 15 respondents as crucial to good public service. You may think of your typewriter as a moldy old piece of equipment taking up space where you could put an Internet workstation, but it’s really a tool for economic justice. Respondents commented that many employment forms still require typing and that the library is the only place anyone can find a typewriter any more. This tells us, of course, that the forms need to change. If the Federal Communications Commission, of all cumbersome agencies, can come up with online e-rate forms, why can’t your local civil service department at least create a type-in print-out Acrobat form, for heaven’s sake? But that leaves us uniquely equipped to help job-seekers jump through arcane hoops!
After the typewriter, the next tool to be defended was correction fluid. Note the dependent relationship: If you have to type forms, this is the only way to correct errors. Shirl Kennedy, Web doyenne for the city of Clearwater, Florida, came up with the most reasons for retaining the little white bottles. Not only does this stuff do “a decent emergency touch-up job on leather Keds and other white shoes,” but Kennedy has used it to hide grout stains in her bathroom.
I suggested “thinning the herd” for microfilm reader-printers, but libraries with large genealogy collections—resources still heavily film-based—chastised me severely. John Richmond, of the Palestine (Tex.) Public Library, said “I would rather die than face the wrath of many of our local history/genealogical types when they can’t get on ‘their’ machines.”
Another vote for keeping the readers came from Eunice Borrelli, reference librarian at the Lansing (Mich.) Library and Information Center, who said that her newspaper of record wasn’t digitized, so the film-reader was really crucial. Don’t be silly, I thought; then I tried to download an article in a fairly recent issue of the New Yorker from one of several expensive databases we license. Ix-nay! I had to read it—oh, gross!—on a microfilm machine!
Several librarians were very defensive of vertical files. I backed off from these folks—clearly they’ve had this discussion before. But one renegade, Patricia C. Pettijohn, of Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, brought up an anachronism still clinging to libraries like Kate Winslet hung on to that piece of wreckage in Titanic. “What is it with the card files? Just because we gave up card catalogs doesn’t mean we haven’t hung onto those little wooden boxes and trays and 3-by-4-inch cards. Don’t believe me? Go into the technical services department and look around.” I looked—she’s right!
Some formats need a good shove. One of the great concepts about the Internet is the idea that documents should be shared in a common language, and that certain types of documents are best produced on the fly by databases. However, since the dawn of the Web there have been folks who merrily insist on ignoring that guidance. “There is a special hell reserved for people who build a bibliography not in a database but in WordPerfect, Word, or their cousins,” said Stephen Sloan, systems librarian at the University of New Brunswick Libraries in Fredericton. I’m not sure the punishment should be that extreme, but I feel his pain.
It’s interesting that in all of my responses, even the vertical-file-huggers were happy to tag gopher as a dead technology, proving again that the Internet is experienced in dogyears. But it rose from the dead: Respondents actually cited functioning gophers, albeit without enthusiasm.
Eventually, we are going to need a Web-based database of obscure library technologies. There will be no reason for every library in New York State to have a typewriter 20 years from now. But it makes sense that dwindling technologies (like rare blood types) should be recorded in a registry and that “last-format” guidelines could guide our equipment-weeding decisions. This might make it easier to get rid of something you’ve been hanging on to “just in case” it was useful to a patron—and to make room for the next soon-to-be-outmoded format!