Helstien, 'LIBRARIES: ONCE AND FUTURE', Interpersonal Computing and Technology v2n04 (October 1994) URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/ipct/ipct-v2n04-helstien-libraries + Page 53 + ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ####### ######## ######## ########### ### ### ## ### ## # ### # Interpersonal Computing and ### ### ## ### ## ### Technology: ### ### ## ### ### An Electronic Journal for ### ######## ### ### the 21st Century ### ### ### ### ### ### ### ## ### ISSN: 1064-4326 ### ### ### ## ### October, 1994 ####### ### ######## ### Volume 2, Number 4, pp. 53-67 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Published by the Center for Teaching and Technology, Academic Computer Center, Georgetown University, Washington, DC 20057 Additional support provided by the Center for Academic Computing, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802 This article is archived as HELSTIEN IPCTV2N4 on LISTSERV@GUVM ---------------------------------------------------------------- Mr Helstein's article is introduced and commented upon by IPCT-J's Editor in Chief, Gerry Phillips. INTRODUCTION to Helstien's LIBRARIES: ONCE AND FUTURE by Gerald Phillips In the April 4, 1994 issue of New Yorker Magazine, Nicholson Baker, known more for his erotica than his scholarship, wrote an article called, "Discards." It was a fine Luddite article which deplored the destruction of paper card catalogs and their replacement with electronic displays. It raised a number of questions of considerable importance to bibliophiles. Major issues of librarianship that arose in this article are addressed by the following article. There are deeper issues raised, however, by Mr. Baker's comments. Chief among them is the way electronic media rearrange the mind. As a retired humanist, I have long been accustomed to browse through stacks of books. I remember many happy accidental encounters with writers like Ernest Becker and Stephen Jay Gould, whose works I would not have encountered had I not been wandering the dusty stacks. There were also fortuitous meetings with new journals representing obscure disciplines of which I had never heard. A most fortuitous serendipity occurs in libraries. It is like a great intellectual cocktail party in the course of which we encounter old friends and make new ones. This is not to argue against the speed and efficiency of electronic databases, catalogs and searches. But when one goes wandering off in gopherspace and encounters "empty" too many times, like a unrewarded dog, a mind stops salivating. One finds mostly what one is looking for in electronic catalogues. + Page 54 + So, as a superannuated humanist, I personally resonated to Mr. Baker's remarks. As a disabled humanist, I appreciate the electronic catalogues very much. They are more "than better than nothing." They are, in a way, "the best I can get." But the contrast between then and now is important, because I find myself thinking differently now and being much more selective about the books I buy. I buy books I am going to use again, and I find that I must make most of what is out in gopherspace redundant with anthologies and almanacs. I cannot think like a gopher. I can use it only to pick up this citation and that, and if I do not know the citations in advance, I simply do not know where to look. My library does not have an electronic "room" for me to browse. I cannot climb to the electronic equivalent of level three in the stacks and just pull books off the shelf and thumb through them in wonderment. That, and more, resonate from the Baker article. It opens the whole issue of what books, as opposed to a visual display. do to the mind. It brings us to the edge of CD-ROM. This editor would welcome your comments. He urges you to read the article. Drop me a note. And read the following article very carefully. It is by a veteran librarian with a very interesting point of view. GMP@PSUVM.PSU.EDU Gerald M. Phillips (Professor Emeritus), Speech Communication ******************************************************* LIBRARIES, ONCE AND FUTURE Brian Helstien University of Texas, San Antonio INTRODUCTION In a recent article in The New Yorker, Nicholson Baker laments the demise of the paper card catalog as a "paroxysm of shortsightedness and anti-intellectualism" on the part of over-zealous librarians wrecking destruction "in a class with the burning of the library at Alexandria." Baker's poignant plea on behalf of the venerable catalog fails to acknowledge or even mention the numerous benefits and advantages gained by libraries with online catalogs. In this article, Brian Helstien responds to Baker's piece focusing on issues not discussed by Baker -- authority control, collection preservation, access and costs. Vastly improved authority control is a major benefit of library automation, allowing library staff members to efficiently and effectively create and maintain large bibliographic databases with more ease and accuracy than was possible with paper catalogs. Technology and automation are providing essential methods to fighting the ongoing deterioration of acidic collections, preserving the very scholarly materials indexed in + Page 55 + catalogs. Without such technology, libraries (and scholars) can expect to lose large parts of their collections over relatively short periods of time. Rising collection costs facing by libraries is another issue unaddressed by Baker. The use of technology such as online catalogs by libraries is one way libraries are fighting the rising costs of acquiring materials and providing access to these materials; without the technology, libraries and the scholars that use them will acquire fewer materials at a higher costs. Baker's viewpoint evokes nostalgia, but ultimately fails to recognize the real issues faced by libraries of today. Nicholson Baker's article on the demise of the traditional card catalog brings to mind Clarence Darrow during the Scopes "Monkey" Trial. "Mister, you can conquer the air, but the birds will lose their wonder and the clouds will reek of gasoline." Baker's lament, equally poignant but poorly directed, also misses major issues. My late father, Dr. Melvyn B. Helstien, M.F.A., Ph.D., former chair of the Theater Division at UCLA, recounted meeting a puppeteer of the Bunraku in Japan. The Bunraku has puppets operated by three artists. The master puppeteer operates the head and right arm, the first assistant the left arm and body, and the second assistant, the feet. After twenty years, this puppeteer was quitting, because he had decided that he did not possess enough talent to ever become a master. My apprenticeship in librarianship is similar. Prior to obtaining my Master of Library Science Degree, I spent twenty-five years at the Louise Darling Biomedical Library, UCLA, the first eight years as a library clerk, the last seventeen as the Bindery Assistant. Not to boast however, but unlike the subject of my father's story, I possess enough talent to become a Master. I have performed library work at various levels, from lowliest clerk filing manual charge cards, upwards and have seen "the library" change. I want to first characterize Nicholson Baker's piece. Then, I will address three library-specific critical omissions; a) a discussion of authority control, b) a discussion of collection preservation and, c) a discussion of collection costs. I can characterize Nicholson Baker's piece, at best, as much that of the loving friend of a gunshot wound victim. Accompanying the victim into the Emergency Room, he has noticed that the finger nails on one hand have been clipped close to the quick while those on the other hand are several inches long. Based solely upon this observation, he attempts to dictate the course of treatment. The attending Emergency Room physician's best professional response might be, "Sorry, but would someone, please, escort this gentleman out into the waiting room." + Page 56 + Discussion of Authority Control Discussion of authority control begins when Charles Ammi Cutter first suggested in his Rules For A Printed Dictionary Catalogue [1876] (which was Part II of the U.S. Bureau of Education Publication, Public Libraries in the United States), the three "objects" of a catalog. "1) To enable a person to find a book of which either; a.) the author, b.) the title or, c.) the subject is known. 2) To show what the library has; d.) by a given author, e.) on a given subject or, f.) in a given kind of literature. 3) To assist in the choice of a book; g.) as to its edition (bibliographically), or h.) as to its character (literary or topical)." To achieve these goals, librarians have devised several tools. They are the subject authority list, the name authority list and the uniform title. Let's discuss each, in turn for a moment. A library adding its first book on an unpleasantness which occurred between 1861-65, might wish to list the subject as "The War Between The States," however the Library of Congress Subject Headings (16th edition) uses "United States--History--Civil War, 1861-1865." Before any cataloger can add a second title covering the same material, (s)he should have checked that library's unique subject authority list and (whichever choice originally was made), should have chosen the exact same subject heading for the additional material. A library cataloger adding the first book by a given author will follow the current Anglo-American Cataloging Rules, second edition, revised, and use information about the author taken from the volume. That information should be checked against the library's unique name authority file to verify that indeed this is the first piece collected by that author. Subsequent volumes collected by the same author also should be checked against the name authority file. Women authors get married and divorced. All authors die. Some authors use pseudonyms. Publishers make typographical and factual errors. Baker mentions the variant spellings, "Mao Tse-tung" or "Mao Zedong." He fails to mention that anyone can use both spellings, in one electronic record, and make either (or both) retrievable with proper name authority work on the part of the cataloging department. It would be necessary to produce and file additional cards sets to do that with paper cards. Uniform title is really the simplest of these three tools. No matter which edition of the material is referenced, The Holy Bible, for example, serves as the title access point for the piece. Subsequent notation on the record can specify translation or edition. There are many academic and public libraries that expend the time necessary to do very good authority control work electronically on their online public access catalog (OPAC) or on their paper cards. + Page 57 + There are many libraries that cannot afford that labor commitment. There are also those libraries that generally do good authority work, but have made random errors (cataloging staff tend to be human). In a good paper catalog, there are at least three cards for each piece, the author card, the title card and the subject card. They presumably contain much the same information. To change Samuel Clemens to Mark Twain, each needed to be pulled, then fixed and subsequently, each needed to be correctly re-filed. That takes staff time. It is entirely faster and easier to correct an error made in an electronic database, than it is to correct one made in a paper database and that correction can be performed by a professional, rather than paraprofessional or clerical worker. Fixing a typographical error, or updating information about an author can dynamically update the information and the access points for that record. Using linked name authority file, updating information about an author once, can update ALL the records ("Mozart, Johann" included) electronically linked to that name. Computers do other useful tasks for libraries. Books and journals arrive bound and unbound. They must be paid for, they must be marked, and frequently they must be bound. Ever wonder how all the issues of a journal title managed to get bound in the same color of fabric, with identical title markings? Ever notice that the issue covers or advertisements had been handled in exactly the same fashion from volume to volume, year after year? Well, it could be done with a manual file and a typewriter. Or a computer could save and reproduce those instructions to the bookbindery upon demand. A computer could even signal an appropriate time to collect and bind those materials (i.e., in an academic library, after, rather than during finals). Vendors must be paid for library materials. They send batches of ordered materials as randomly published accompanied by a numbered invoice. Funds to pay for those materials are spent from various accounts. Computers are exceptionally good at saving and linking that kind of information. So are accountants, at much greater expense. These are some of the more compelling arguments favoring "library automation" and while there are others, due to space restrictions, these are sufficient. There are other more important issues to be discussed here. Collection Preservation In my years as the Bindery Assistant, my responsibility was to assemble materials for (re)binding, and/or to repair many damaged library materials, in-house if possible. In addition, I was to maintain records, variously of everything pertaining to those operations. Converting manual files to computer records allowed me to maintain much greater operational control (i.e., materials sent for binding, were routinely unavailable for use, on average only sixteen calendar days). + Page 58 + The scope of the operation varied with fluctuations in annual budget, but we routinely bound over 7,500 volumes (top was 10,000 volumes) and repaired between 1,000 and 2,000 per year. With apologies to Ed Mabry who wrote "So, while these old pulp holdings rot, and cost considerable money to keep up in appropriate climate controlled environs ...," during the "United States--History-- Civil War, 1861-1865," paper producers discovered that if they used acid to "cure" or "size" paper, they could speed the paper production process greatly. That acid is not washed from the paper during production. A 1985-86 collection survey of Louise Darling Biomedical Library's 500,000 volumes (part of UCLA's six million volume collection), indicated that 7% of the collection was already embrittled. When I left in spring of 1992, my best professional estimate was that no less than 25% of the collection was so far along the course of embrittlement, that by the year 2000, the materials contained between the covers would be unavailable for routine use. Embrittlement occurs because the acid frequently used in paper production breaks the carbon fiber molecular bond within paper which allows paper to be bent or folded without breaking. When the molecule has been broken, the paper loses flexibility. When enough molecules have been broken, the paper breaks. It also yellows. Acid also migrates, so that am acidic volume placed on either side of a volume printed on acid free paper will infect the interleaved volume within a decade or so. The materials do not "rot." They burn and appropriate "climate controlled environs" merely retard this process. Well you might well ask, "What is being done about this?" The Library of Congress has produced an excellent film, "Slow Fires" discussing the problem. And they attempted to devise a means to de- acidify paper. They hired (probably the designers of the Challenger) engineers to examine the problem and devise a solution. The proposed solution was to build a big chamber, wheel thousands of books into this chamber, lower the humidity and then pump the air out. Next diethyl zinc (DEZ) would be pumped in, allowed to completely fill the chamber and then pumped out. Then gradually, air would be restored to the chamber and humidity conditions restored to normal. Powdered salts (formerly the acid), would flake out of the volumes and would be swept out of the chamber, after the books had left -deacidified (mind you now, previous acid damage would not have been repaired by this process). Estimated cost, in 1989, after construction of the chamber, $4.50 per volume. There was only a small problem. DEZ is pyrophoric (it explodes violently on contact with air or water). Needless to say, that after two explosions the experiment was dropped. + Page 59 + There are other methods of deacidification being examined, but as we approach mid-1994, within the U.S., there is none within years of being operational. Worldwide, all of the material produced in the last 125 years, interfiled with previous and more recent material is reaching approximately the same condition (i.e., all the volumes produced about the same time during an "edition" production of a title, everywhere, are about equally along the embrittlement process). Thus, a library may no longer own (or it may be unusable) a particular previously collected piece of literature. And soon, it may be unavailable from any other library, either. A printed catalog is produced on acidic paper stock, by the way. Until/unless we're adequately funded, librarians are fighting the acidification battle with several technologies not intended to resolve this problem. Included are microfilm, digital scanning, optical character recognition, and graphics files (choose your favorite format). Collection Costs The other important topic Baker missed, is that publishers have learned how to separate academia from its money. The periodical title _Brain Research_ costs $10,000 per year to purchase. A medical academic research institute must purchase it. It contains materials predominantly produced to develop new knowledge, to satisfy grants, and for the promotion and tenure of the faculty. Brain Research is merely the most expensive of titles; it differs from other titles in no other discernable fashion. When I left UCLA, the medical library subscribed to about 7,000 titles annually. When you read that the cost of periodicals has increased over 20% in a given year, understand that means an additional $2,000, just to purchase Brain Research, containing materials that the taxpayer has probably already paid to have produced in the first place and which the author surrendered copyright to get published, now routinely submitted for publication in electronic text format. If each academic institution mounted locally researched materials on a local gopher or Mosaic server, all Internet (admittedly not yet the entire world), could obtain access to it for free. Obviously, problems (not insurmountable), of peer review need to be resolved to continue to assure quality, but current authority and subject control files can be used to maintain indexing consistency. Collection money and collection preservation are the issues that Nicholson Baker should have addressed. Gutenberg wasn't Shakespeare, and no one expected him to be. Computer are tools, and still in development stages. More can be done with them, and it will be done in more aesthetic fashions. I am painfully aware that right now much of what we librarians are doing appears disorganized. Part of that is a result of variances in computer types, programs, etc. Part of that is routine human variances. I suggest to you, that what we librarians should be doing is to devise the best finding tools, the best preservation tools, and the best delivery tools for the materials that we can/have saved. In today's world, those tools will be electronic. I am not arguing that a computer is better than a book. I love books. + Page 60 + I am arguing that, within institutional budgets right now, it is more cost effective to use computers to store information that could also be stored upon paper (over $150 per volume for preservation photocopy, similar amount per microfilm). One can hide some of those storage costs in budgets by storing some materials on drives used for other purposes. One can print on demand and can use wire and electricity (part of the institutional infrastructure) to transmit information that might no longer even exist without these means. LEGALLY Internet does not exist. Congress has passed no law mandating the existence, the needed functions or any technical specifications for the Internet. Clifford Lynch, Director of The Office of Library Automation, University of California, has described Internet as an experiment gone operational. Yet Internet does exist. Of course, Congress never declared war with North Vietnam, but there was a war and our participation survived legal challenges because The Congress Of The United States Of America knowingly continued to supply FUNDS to the military and thus to the war. That same Congress knowingly continues to supply funds to the National Science Foundation (NSF), which supports the portion of the North American backbone network which is the core of The Internet. NSF has also produced acceptable usage guidelines (thus we know what is acceptable on The Internet and what is unacceptable). Until Congress gives us legal, defined limits, we will continue to be, I believe, participants in an experiment. In my current position, one of my duties is to aid physicians in South Texas to remotely connect with our locally mounted Medline database. I've used experimental Internet programs to enable them to access information necessary to deliver state-of-the-art health treatment in impoverished rural areas of the Rio Grande Valley. If TCP/IP, FTP, Gopher, Mosaic, Telnet, NDIS compatible IPX, LAT or Novell's IP Tunnel will connect someone to our databases, then that's what I'll use. We've an Internet FAX program developed by the Research Libraries Group, named ARIEL. It allows scanning of library materials. Most FAX transmissions are at 150 dots per inch, in black and white ONLY and print on curled, user-hostile paper. ARIEL has the capability of scanning at 600 dpi and transmitting and PRINTING a 256 shade grey scale on bond paper. This makes a scanned xray an almost usable image. However, it takes a huge file (perhaps four or five megabytes in size) to deliver needed information to a printer at the point of service. Congress has not yet fully funded the National Research and Education network (NREN). Congress knows about the acidification of library materials. Congress knows exactly what it has allocated to the Library of Congress (with a collection, incidentally, of over 102,000,000 items) for deacidification. Congress accepted the expenditure involved in waging a war in Southeast Asia. Congress + Page 61 + accepts that money is being spent to support interpersonal communication over the Internet. Congress accepts the fact that money is NOT being spent to preserve the heritage of our civilization (but then, in 1989 dollars, the estimated cost of just deacidifying the collection of the Library of Congress is a half billion dollars). Harkening back to the comment of Clarence Darrow, it was poetic, but failed to address the issues of C02 buildup, global warming or ozone depletion (obviously preceding them, by about seventy years). Nicholson Baker's piece suffers doubly by comparison. First, it is without any poetic evocation and second, he is raising much consciousness complaining about the wrong issues. I am a librarian, M.L.S. from UCLA. I am a "computer techie" (UCLA's M.L.S. is a two year program. My second specialization year would be an M.S. in computer science elsewhere). I have few enough tools at my disposal to fight against a foe that will make the Alexandria library fire look like a Fourth of July sparkler alongside a Southern California brush fire. With them I am merely doing the best that I possibly can, with the limited tools/money at my disposal. My best professional statement closing statement was going to be, "Sorry, but would someone, please escort this gentleman out into the waiting room." I've decided that I can't in good conscience close with that. "If this gentleman does not get out of our way, now, he may find himself covered with our footprints, going up one side and coming down the other as we attempt to get to what really needs to be done." ********************************************************************** HELSTIEN REDUX Gerald M. Phillips, Ph.D INTRODUCTION If Gutenberg had invented the word processor, someone would have had to invent books. The proliferation of information sources, has brought the internet to a point of critical mass (or critical "mess".) There is no place to stand where your shoes can stay clean. Information, must be sought in the muck. The orderly system of storage, so familiar in our libraries, has dissolved into a kind of Mandelbrot set of chaos. We have found way to link computers together so that they simulate thousands of minds acting in harmony. The cyborg at the console orchestrates intricate searches through mountains of data, always for a specified object, never for information. + Page 62 + We have forgotten that the human mind has finite limits and it must find an organizing rubric for all information. We have also forgotten the effect of ambiguity, innuendo, subtlety, figures of speech and tropes of thought, and all of the nuances that make our language so effective at duplicity and dissembling, and makes humans the complex creatures that we are. The computer is a straightforward base 2, digital machine. It cannot make subtle distinctions and it cannot free associate. It can do things by direction and can follow the "laws" of randomness, but it cannot be selective and it cannot act on inspiration. But we now have tools and toys to pile information into mountainous stacks. We do it with hypercard, CD-ROM, Nintendo, multimedia, gopher, WWW, Mosaic, all the marvels of storage, retrieval and manipulation. We have committed to the principle that information is valuable for its own sake. We have also forgotten that anything built by humans runs on human principles. So, we have built our storage systems without rules, making them available for the human mind to deconstruct. Each mountain of information and each small hypercard stack contains a hidden human hand. The aggregate of information sources and systems adds up to an imposition of a way of thinking on all humans. Once all information is made properly digital, we will be on the road to A. E. Van Vogt's WORLD OF NON-A, where all decisions are made by "machinery" cleverly programmed by the "masters." A PLEA FOR A BIT OF ANARCHY Some years ago, the following was found written on the walls of the men's room, at a computer center at a major west coast school. If this story is not true, it ought to be. I really hate this damned machine, I wish that they would sell it. It never does just what I want. Only what I tell it. This doggerel sums up the maddening perversity of the information super highway, the "net," or whatever one chooses to call it. It is like having all the riches of the world at your disposal. The catch is, you have to ask for precisely what you want. The machine only gives you what you ask for. What usually happens is you don't really know the name of what you want or you ask for what you want and get inundated with so much information it is impossible to sort it out. (Or sometimes, the lines are down.) Physicians have told me they often have to hire professionals to look for things on computer databases like Medline. Law firms have subordinates to search Lexis. I know librarians who get paid substantial sums to develop bibliographies for scientists. There is nothing wrong with this, of course, but for the ordinary researcher, + Page 63 + the only way to approach these systems is as a grand game. I am a writer. I am dependent on the computer, even more dependent on the library. I will focus this discussion on a simple premise, to wit, those of us who use the wonders of the electronic age often discover to our dismay that we must become experts in a high technology. It often takes so much time, that we are unable to do the work for which we acquired the skill. This idea of the instrumentality overpowering the object is an affront. I have searched many college catalogs looking for books I knew were there. I never failed in a search using a paper card catalog or eventually wandering the stacks. But the other day, I wanted a reference to an edition of _Pygmalion_ by George Bernard Shaw. There were several editions and I wanted to examine them all, so I asked for "George Bernard Shaw." I was told that he did not exist. I asked for "G. B. Shaw" who also did not exist, nor did G. Bernard Shaw. For some reason, the cataloguer had listed all the great man's works under "Bernard Shaw." I am told that when they changed over from the card catalogs, an effete Shaw scholar told them that was the proper way to refer to him. As if I would know that. When I sought _Pygmalion_, I discovered much to my amazement that it was written by "William Schwenck Gilbert." Now, I am alleged to be an expert on Gilbert and Sullivan, and I knew that William Schwenck Gilbert wrote _Pygmalion and Galatea_." This is a completely different work, you see, from the Pygmalion written by "Bernard" Shaw. But try as I might, I could not get that electronic catalogue to give me the Pygmalion from which they made "My Fair Lady." So I tried to find "My Fair Lady" and lo and behold, I was guided to "see also Shaw's Pygmalion." So I requested Shaw's Pygmalion and got the 100 or so editions I went looking for in the first place. Searches at two other sites were more rapid and productive, so I chalked this off to inadequacies at my home university. I also nodded in the direction of Nicholson Baker (See _New Yorker_, April 4, 1994.) My experiences with on-line abstract services have not been much better. For some obscure reason, I needed to find out if there had been any research done on the chemical composition of various members of the deadly nightshade family. I tried searching for "nightshade" in a biological index and got 748 article titles. I tried "solanum" and "nithscade," two other names by which nightshade is known. By the time I finished, I had nearly 2,000 entries. I had not realized the topic was so popular, but then I discovered that I had asked the wrong question. I had asked for anything that had "nightshade" mentioned in the abstract. I went back to "GO," collected no money and did a search on title only. I got one title. So I shifted to medline and found three articles on toxins in the deadly nightshade and two on what to do in case of ingestion. I + Page 64 + had limited time and patience, and did not want to smash my computer, which, in its alter ego, is a very efficient and valuable typewriter. I called our municipal library and asked the librarian if she could tell me what edible plants were in the nightshade family. She reported back in fifteen minutes that "tomatoes, potatoes, bell peppers, jalapenos, and eggplants" were in the nightshade family. Take note of this please, in case you are ever on Jeopardy, and be sure to phrase your answer in the form of a question. I asked her how she found out so quickly. She replied, "I looked it up in a book on plants." The problem with computerized card catalogs and data bases is that you cannot use judgment when you search them. You can only use code, in essence, and you can only guess what the computer will give you back. If you make the wrong guess, there is no default, no way to associate with your experience, to choose an alternative track. Furthermore, the computer has no taste. It cannot discriminate between true and false, good and bad, relevant and irrelevant. It gives you everything and you must look at it all. You cannot cue off a footnote or a significant line to confine your search to what you need. Nor can you expand, and follow a cue into a another dimension of ideas. Whenever you mention this to computer experts, they smile and tell you more about the quantity of information they can store and the wonders they can tuck away. They tell you about advancing technology, but what they are really telling you is that you must learn to think as a computer thinks, or you may never think again. It is a kind of horrible prospect to confront. The problem is magnified on gopher and World Wide Web. I have gone "a gophering" and the concept is marvelous. I participated in building the Gilbert and Sullivan gopher site, meticulously scanning the librettos for the 14 operas in the canon onto disk, correcting the errors. Now, any director, anywhere, can get a standard libretto. They can, indeed, but I am glad I kept a disk for myself, because I am continually blocked from access or told "empty site." No one seems to know why. I asked a friend about World Wide Web. He tried to give me a demonstration but nothing seemed to work. He smiled, "You have to have a lot of time to do this." We tried Mosaic, but it was pointless. I had neglected to buy a "graphics card" with my fancy new 486 computer. "There's not much out there anyway," he said. "Takes up a lot of bandwidth. But in the next generation...." I wondered. I had contemplated getting CD-ROM with my new computer, but I had the prescience to inquire what programs might be available. I found an _Encarta_ encyclopedia. I smiled at the clerk at the fancy computer store and said, "May I ask it for something." "Sure," he said, with that confidence that comes only with a newly + Page 65 + graduated, single man on his first job. So I asked for "sophist," a topic on which I write often. I was told there was no entry. I noted this to the clerk, who replied, "Well, that may be old stuff. This machine only has new stuff." I asked it for "nightshade" and got no answer to that one. There was a fairly long entry for "rock and roll." I wondered what was going to happen to the "public domain," those wondrous old books, now musty and dusty on the library shelves, with crackled paper pages and seasoned wisdom. Would they all be burned like the cards from the card catalogs. Would we have a sort of reluctant _Fahrenheit 451_ ritual, where, to make space for memory banks and terminals, we would have to dispose of history? Would we sack our own Alexandrian Library? As a person whose trade is plying discussion of old stuff, I conveyed gently to the salesman, that I probably had no use for CD- ROM. He told me, in response, that they would be having a sale next month and maybe I'd want to stop in then. The implication was, I was a tightwad, unwilling to spend my money on his wonderful technology. Alas, he may be right. I do not even own a Nintendo. But I did just pay over $100 for an old book with a broken spine because I loved the contents of its pages, contents I would never find out there in "gopherspace" or on the "Web" or brought to me in livid multimedia. WHAT IS THE POINT The point is.... Well, there are several points. When one works with books in print, between bindings, one needs no power source. They are portable and most are indexed so information is easily retrieved by turning the pages. I am disabled and cannot lift more than five pounds. It is awkward for me to examine Hurst's _Cardiology_, all 2289 pages of it, but I manage with some help from wife and friends. When I want information from a journal, I can read the whole article, not just the abstract. I can lay five or six journals next to the book and look at paragraphs on the same topic. Theoretically, I could do that with Windows, if the material was there and I had the right language to ask the genii to go searching. And also, if I didn't suffer from "mouse dyslexia." I recall one marvelous library system that I ask for topics, and it flashes on the screen "81 hits" and asks me politely if I want to see the largeness of riches contained therein. I always do, and generally, I can make no sense out of them. Even when I access them correctly, I am told that I need a Kermit or a Procomm to get the information. But why the metaphor "hits?" Why the implication that I am hunting, instead of browsing or searching? Why the implication that I must always know in advance what I want to find? And worse, on what grounds do they assume that what they have stored there is useful at all. + Page 66 + What it boils down to is that "what is there" is often an exercise in futility. You cannot find things, you cannot get to the gophersite you ask for, and when you get there, you are told it is empty. (That invariably happens to me with federal government gophers. Is there a message there?) And it occurs to me that when this system gets going, when it is advanced enough to meet my needs, I will have to acquire a degree in informatics to use it. Or hire a "ghost" researcher. No, thank you. I am eternally gratefully to J. Gutenberg. He makes it possible to go back to the seventeenth century and read _Aereopagitica_ in stick-set type. Or I can find a Modern Library version. Or a cheap paperback. It has a texture. I can write in the margins. And this brings up a final oddity. The designers of these miracle electronic devices cannot seem to escape book metaphors. Try as they might, they cannot warp our minds and make us complete cyborgs. They cannot teach us the digitality that is their very soul. They cannot force us to think in "on/off" pulses like a computer circuit. I think it is only a matter of time before we have two intellectual establishments. One will be made up of geeks with pocket protectors and pony tails, sending their little rodents off on journey down the information superhighway where they will likely be roadkill. The other will be the world where instead of burning the books, people will hold them, fondle them, read them and keep them. They will scribble in the margins and dogear the pages. The geeks will not care. They will be punching in code and making magical multimedia macros, and ignoring us. And the salesmen will be reminding folks there will be a sale next month. I will be smelling leather, reading words, getting ideas, and returning to my marvelous typewriter and its 948 page documentation program for word processing, and trying very hard to see if I can beat the spellcheck at its own game. Did you know that the word "bullshit" does not exist in the dictionaries of Word Perfect, MicroSoft Word, or DW4. What a wonderful world is Cyberspace! I do not know how my grandchildren will think, however. They will be citizens of this world. I buy them books, still, as gifts, but they think me odd. They want Nintendo cartridges and cybernetic toys. They want on/off and anatomically correct Barbies. I wonder who will be literate enough to design them in Cyberspace. Gerald M. Phillips ********************************************************************** + Page 67 + ---------------------------------------------------------------- BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Brian A. Helstien Microcomputer Systems Librarian helstien@uthscsa.edu Briscoe Library, (210) 567-2400 University of Texas, Health Science Center, San Antonio Microcomputer Systems Librarian, Briscoe Library, University of Texas Health Science Center, San Antonio. Born 1949, married with 5 children. B.A. Theater Arts Dep't., UCLA 1975; M.L.S., S.I.S.D. GSLIS, UCLA 1990. Worked at the Louise Darling Biomedical Library, UCLA from 2/67 through 4/92 and at the Dolph Briscoe Library, UTHSCSA from 5/92 through the present. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Interpersonal Computing and Technology: An Electronic Journal for the 21st Century Copyright 1994 Georgetown University. Copyright of individual articles in this publication is retained by the individual authors. Copyright of the compilation as a whole is held by Georgetown University. It is asked that any republication of t his article state that the article was first published in IPCT-J. Contributions to IPCT-J can be submitted by electronic mail in APA style to: Gerald Phillips, Editor IPCT-J GMP3@PSUVM.PSU.EDU