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Sanctuary through Technology
By Joseph Janes
American Libraries Columnist
Assistant Professor, Information School, University of Washington.
intlib@ischool.washington.edu
Column for December 2002
Recently, at our faculty retreat before the start of the school year, my colleague David Levy led a fascinating discussion based on his interest in the theme of “information and the quality of life.” I can’t do justice to the subtlety and depth of his ideas here; read his excellent recent book Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age (Arcade, 2001) to get a fuller appreciation of his thinking.
In laying out his thoughts about information overload, fragmentation, busyness, coping strategies, and the occasional need for refuge from the information firehose, Levy described his personal desire for a place of sanctuary and silence where he could contemplate and make sense of it all. He named that place “the library,” and of course he’s right on that count: Libraries have traditionally been places where people have gone to read and think, somewhat apart from the world outside. This is one of the things many regular library users value greatly.
Since the retreat, I’ve been struck by a couple of other experiences. The two-year renovation of our university’s Suzzallo Library has just been completed. It’s one of those great old gothic piles with the giant reading room, stained-glass windows, and huge wooden tables. Indeed, when it opened in 1926, it was described as “a cathedral of books.” The wrought-iron lettering over one of the rooms particularly grabbed me: “Reading giveth vigor to the mind.”
Boy, they don’t write ’em like that any more. It put me in mind of Thomas Jefferson’s “I cannot live without books” quote that sells all those mugs and tote bags at the LC booth every year at ALA conferences, and further made me wonder whether anyone will ever write that kind of paean to more recent technologies. (“I cannot live without my PDA/cell phone/DSL connection,” anybody? Kinda falls flat to me, but I’ll bet there are people who feel that way.)
Connection vs. contemplation
All this got me to thinking whether there were ways in which technology, and particularly the Internet, could be used to help achieve Levy’s objectives. We think of the Internet as a place for connection, sharing, and finding; how does that mesh with these notions of contemplation and refuge? And moreover, where does that leave our increasingly technological libraries?
We’ve emphasized reading—rightly—for a long time (and the ALA Read posters are very powerful and choke me up every year). The broader mix of media made available by the Internet means that in addition to reading, people are listening, viewing, and experiencing. Surely there’s a place for all of that in the library context as well.
Perhaps, though, the Internet simply doesn’t lend itself to the contemplative. Maybe we do need comfortable and quiet physical spaces for that. If that’s the case, then we have to resolve and accommodate both of these urges within a single organization and a single building, while still maintaining popular support as well as that of funders and governors. We can’t tip the balance too far in either direction for fear of losing somebody, right?
I had gotten to this point, wondering how I’d round this all out, when I went to my local public library branch this morning to pick up a book they were holding for me (and, yes, to pay my $1.60 fine—c’mon, we all do it). I stopped to look at their Banned Books Week display and saw the old standbys: Brave New World, Don Quixote, Little House on the Prairie. That’s when it hit me.
When Levy was discussing the library as sanctuary, it occurred to me that I never really thought of libraries in that way. I’ve always thought of the library as a place of activity and energy, one where ideas can be challenged or even threatened, where people come to engage with those ideas and with each other. To be sure, a lot of quiet reading and thinking goes on, as there was when I was at my library today. But I’d hate to think of libraries as passive or stagnant or merely a place to hide. And as Levy said, contemplation isn’t always simply passive; it can be the basis for radical revision and reconstruction.
The banned books display crystallized it all for me. The discussion on what libraries are for has so often recently been cast in technological terms: How much of our scarce resources should be spent on computers and networking as opposed to books and staff? How do we handle inappropriate use of the Internet? Should we maintain print subscriptions to expensive journals or just pay by the drink online? Maybe that’s the wrong way to think about it.
Maybe instead the conversation is about vision and outlook. Rather than striving to find the right balance of technologies, perhaps we should strive to find the right balance between giving people a place to read and think and shaking them up a bit.
Making the discussion about contemplation and catalysis, rather than “online versus print,” puts it on a much more human footing, and, I’d say, leaves us in much better shape. After all, that’s what we’ve been doing for generations, isn’t it? It’s just that newer technologies require us to rethink and restrike this balance, probably on an ongoing basis. I know, I know—here we go again. We do seem to be rethinking all the time, which probably ought to tell us something. But that’s another story.