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From the Other Side of the Rubicon
By Joseph Janes
American Libraries Columnist
Assistant Professor, Information School, University of Washington.
intlib@ischool.washington.edu
Column for November 2005
As I write this, several weeks have passed since Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. Long enough for the stories of shock and compassion and befuddlement and disappointment and hope to come out in their dozens and hundreds. Long enough perhaps to take a deep breath and begin to imagine and come to terms with the enormity of the tasks ahead for that region and the country. Long enough for the response of the library community to manifest itself in myriad pride-making ways.
There’s no way for me to do justice to any of that here, nor to the larger implications for the internet in the wake of the disaster, so I won’t try. Instead, without in any way intending to diminish the scale of the human and societal tragedy Katrina’s legacy represents, I offer a question and experiment.
This was inspired by a newspaper article detailing the extraordinary trials faced by medical personnel working without the sophisticated technologies and tools they are accustomed to, let alone power, electric lights, air conditioning, clean water, food, and all the rest. They were forced to fall back on their training, gut instincts, and memories and flew by the seat of their pants. I can imagine that younger, newer staff learned a lot in those dark days; the most important thing, said one doctor, was to listen to the patient.
So I ask: What would it be like for a library to be without the internet?
For the majority of libraries, I would suspect it would mean no access to the catalog, no licensed databases that give access to the serial literature, no downloadable works, no search engines or web-based resources, as well as extremely limited communications.
Reference librarians would be forced to rely on the truly local—tangible things at hand in print or other analog media, analog finding tools, memory, and experience. Technical services and acquisition folks would lose the ability to contact vendors. Lots of circulation records are maintained on remote servers. Union catalogs and shared borrowing privileges would evaporate. And what would systems librarians do?
Those of you who are able might even try it. See if you can go a day without using the internet in any way. (Don’t get in trouble, of course; maybe it’d be wise to let your colleagues know first, or pick one staffer to be the guinea pig.)
In a small library, with a more compact collection, it probably would be easier to lay hands on stuff; but obviously only a limited selection would be available. The larger the setting, the more you have and the more spread out it is, so it would be harder to find any particular resource.
There’s a fairly evident trade-off. Print resources can be stolen or lost, destroyed or damaged by flood or fire, although most could be replaced with time and money, and at least they’re there when the power goes off. Digital or networked resources require power, but if storage is remote or distributed, recovery can be much quicker.
Too pervasive, too expected
To be honest, as we all know, it’s not like we really have a choice any more. To use a perhaps all-too-appropriately watery metaphor, we have crossed the Rubicon, and we did so quite some time ago, probably unconsciously. In all but the most specialized of settings, you can’t have a library or be a librarian without the internet. It’s too dominant, too pervasive, too useful, too expected. Too deeply insinuated into the fabric of our culture and profession. “Librarianship without the internet” is so unthinkable now that searches for that phrase come up dry in both Google and Yahoo.
We’re beyond even asking whether this is a good thing; it just is. As we are now all too aware, that kind of reliance on a technology is fraught with peril, especially one based on a telecommunications infrastructure that is still potentially fragile.
In important and far-reaching ways, then, we’re beholden to a specific technology, without which our institutions and professional work are severely impaired. Of course, that was true decades ago, when our world was dominated by print resources. Now we have both, and that combination presents unique challenges and opportunities.
Some wonder if libraries are still necessary because “everything’s on the internet.” Feh. We know that technologies supplement rather than supersede; the challenge for the next generation of librarians is to responsibly recognize and quickly adopt the next vitally important one . . . but that’s another story.