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PART 1.
STRATEGIES FOR ACCESS AND PRESERVATION
Partners and Alliances
Robert C. Berring
The theme of this conference is digital information and the future. It brings together librarians, vendors, and information specialists. The opportunity for both reflection on the past and projection into the future is irresistible. My topic, the potential for future cooperation between librarians and vendors, seems the perfect taking-off point.
My talk is divided into two parts. The first consists of three premises that describe the situation today. The second offers an assessment of where the future may take us.
The premises are three crucial facts we must assume if the purpose of this symposiumâindeed, if the field of librarianship-is to move forward. Some may question the truth of one or more of the premises, but we no longer have the time to argue about them. If you disagree with one or more, if I cannot convince you of the validity of each one, there is little point in continuing the discussion. Time is too precious.
Rather than dispute one or more of the premises, one might instead criticize them as self-evident. Such criticism may be valid since basic premises by their very nature should be clear. But there is still virtue in restating the foundations of the current situation in information. If we can agree upon them, we will have a basis for moving forward.
The second part of the paper concerns the paths that are open to librari-anship. It will set out alternative responses to the future and alternative futures. It will search for the best strategy for coping with the future.
Before beginning the discussion, however, it is important to address the question of the intended audience for this paper. This is a paper by a librarian written primarily for librarians. Its context will be a colloquy among colleagues. Rather than assuming a neutral, objective stance, the paper will be subjective and blunt. The times dictate prompt action.
THREE PREMISES
1. The Digital Revolution Is Over
Given the trenchant immediacy of Douglas Van Houweling's paper,1 this may be the simplest of the three premises to accept. He painted a compelling picture of the digital revolution and the fact that it is upon us. His picture of a seamless, easy-to-use information universe is one that every librarian should take to heart.
Librarians are the information professionals. For millennia, they have gathered, organized, and protected information. They have been the forces in society that have preserved the cultural heritage, protecting it sometimes from the very society they served. At the most basic level, librarians are guardians. They guard the treasures of the society.
Much of this function is built around the physical nature of the books and manuscripts librarians are preserving. Books are much more than vehicles for the delivery of information; they are cultural icons. They symbolize more than just data; they symbolize knowledge and culture. A person who holds a book is not just holding a collection of data encoded on paper and bound together; the person is holding a symbol of learning and intellectual progress.
Three quick examples make the point. First, consider the emotional baggage that travels with the words book burning, a term that has taken on such power in society that it is even applied to the destruction of nonbook media. To charge someone with being a book burner is to make an emotionally charged statement. The accused is someone who is vilifying culture and meaning. The book burner is a barbarian.
Second, consider the fact that many religions build dogma around a book. The book becomes the expression of the words of the deity made tangible. The book takes on an existence of its own. To destroy it is blasphemy, to alter it a sin. This sanctity of the written word affects the general perception of the book as well.
Third, consider the way our language uses the book as a metaphor for knowledge and meaning. A bookish person is one who is learned, a scholar. The book is a symbol of great power.
This feeling about books is part of the old paradigm of information. It is part of the life of most people in this room, and is likely a part of the experience of most people reading this essay. It is generational. I understand this feeling at a very personal level. I love books.
The love of books awakened in me in my early years has only grown with the passage of time. I love to read, and I collect books as a hobby. What can give greater pleasure than to hold the first edition of a great work like Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England in one's hands, to know that it was issued when Blackstone was still alive, and to think of the owner reading it in the late 18th century?
It is that love, that irrational attachment, that seems so natural to those who grew up as a part of the book-based culture that is now on the road to extinction. The law students I teach consider information on a computer screen as completely natural. They are comfortable at a keyboard, and much of the accouterment of book researchâindexes and tables of con-tents-and the inconveniences imposed by the physical attributes of a bookâits limitations-seem to them not the necessary parts of a central element in life but the unfortunate drawbacks of an old form of information. They do not hate books, but books do not hold magic for them.
For those of us on the book side of the generation gap, this may be difficult to understand. Some of us see books as having inherent intellectual legitimacy. Digital information is associated with television and low-brow or, at best, middle-brow culture. How many conversations have I had with faculty about the comparative merits of digital- and paper-based information, conversations in which I could demonstrate that one can accomplish digitally everything that can be accomplished with paper that ended with the faculty member simply saying, âWell, it just isn't right to only do it electronicallyâ? And to each of them I reply that of course they are correct-for them, for their part of the generation gap. One learns the habits of research in one's youth, and for most it is very hard to change. But the change is coming.
As a law librarian I have had a chance to see this principle in application. Two commercial databases, LEXIS and WESTLAW, have made the full text of most relevant legal information available online. The amount of information, legal and nonlegal, that is available in full text in each of these systems boggles the mind. When one turns on a terminal and logs on to either system, one has access to the virtual equivalent of the old Harvard Law Library ideal: everything.
Both systems enable the full text of these materials to be searched through a variety of methods ranging from Boolean searching to WEST-LAW's new system that allows natural language queries. Even more important, as a marketing maneuver, both database producers give a free, 24-hour dial-up access number to all law students at accredited law schools. If the student has a modem, he or she can use the databases at any time. They can download information as well. The vendors provide a wide range of training materials, research manuals, in-person tutorials, and even an 800 telephone number that students can call anytime to ask for research help.
For the database vendors this massive investment is part of a marketing campaign, but for those who watch information and its use, it is an experiment of enormous proportions. There are more than 120,000 law students currently enrolled in accredited law schools. Each one has unlimited personal access to a system of legal information that begins to approximate some of the capacities that Dr. Van Houweling described. The systems are relatively easy to use, and the information is valuable.
The students do use the systems. For many law studentsâin fact, mostâ the search strategy of choice is to go online. In the advanced legal research course I teach, I see some 120 law students a year. I assign them open-ended research problems. Their default search is an on-line search. I can design a problem that compels them to use paper sources, but if I let them choose, they use online sources. They see the online systems as more efficient and much easier to use than traditional book-based sources.
This is especially telling because law was perhaps the most book-centered discipline. Legal education is consciously built around the use of the law library. Since Christopher Columbus Langdell, the Harvard Law School dean who created the modern form of legal education, declared in 1870 that the law library was the laboratory of the law, this has been the case. Legal publishers developed intricate systems of information organization and retrieval for print sources that were without rival. Therefore, it is significant that in this most traditional and book-oriented of disciplines, the change in information format would come first.
The change is generational. Older lawyers are still attached to the book. Some still view digital information as somehow suspicious or illegitimate. But the change is here. One still hears objections that the price of digital information is too much. Part of this problem can be laid at the feet of LEXIS and WESTLAW. When the systems were first marketed to law firms, the database vendors suggested that these systems did not replace books but were add-ons. They told law firms that the costs of using the systems could be passed on to clients, perhaps even surcharged. Thus, the new systems were not seen as central but as Cadillac systems capable of paying for themselves. When the market for legal services changed and clients grew unwilling to pay for add-on charges, law firms began to view the online systems as costly toys. But the systems are faster, and they produce qualitatively better results when used intelligently. The market will adjust to this fact; indeed, it is adjusting. Law libraries are beginning to cut journal and series subscriptions, and books are being taken off the shelves. The digital databases are becoming part of the center, not toys. If price is the only barrier, then one only has to adjust it and the change is here. The adjustments are being made.
The revolution is over. There will be years of adjustment to come, but the corner has been turned. Digital information is here.
2. Librarianship Is in Peril
These are difficult days for librarianship. Times of economic distress always press hardest on professions that cannot protect themselves with economic or political power, and librarianship finds itself with precious little of either. Librarianship suffers because it is one of the âhelpingâ professions-a service-oriented profession, largely female in composition, that has been undercompensated and undervalued for years. This is not the time or place to analyze how this came about. The point is that many in librarianship are beginning to lose heart. The reasons are easy to see and merit mention if only as place markers.
Librarianship's flagship schools are closing. Columbia University's library school, the school founded by Melvyl Dewey, the creator of the modern American profession of librarianship, is closed. The University of Chicago's library school, long a legend for its demanding curriculum and high-achieving graduates, is closed. The schools at UCLA and Berkeley, both pioneers in integrating technology into the curriculum, both homes of some of modern librarianship's great thinkers, are on the verge of extinction. What does this tell us? It is not the first time a professional school has closed, but it is the first time the most famous, the most prestigious of a profession's schools have shut down. There is no greater threat to a profession than to close down its elite academies.
It is also important to note that these schools were not closed down because of lack of interest by prospective students. More people than ever were applying to the School of Library and Information Studies at Berkeley. Nor are the schools being closed because of atrophy in the subject area. Issues of information are at the forefront of our social agenda. The future of information is the subject of cover stories in Time, Newsweek, and other popular mass information publications. The vice-president of the United States has a pointed agenda that included information policy. Indeed, this is information's day in the sun. What happened to the librarians?
The problem runs beyond the fate of library schools. It touches on the image of librarians. At a time when information is hot, librarians are not. Librarians have always been identified with books and buildings. Indeed, librarians have named their professional organizations after the buildings in which they work. It is not the American Librarians Association, it is the American Library Association. That identification with an edifice, with a building that is a repository of books, has linked the librarians of today with the books of yesterday.
Librarians have not penetrated the popular culture of today. If you disagree, take this test. Ask someone you know to name a librarian, real or fictional, that they do not know personally. Most Americans would fail to identify a single one. Some very informed folks might recall that James Billington is the Librarian of Congress, but those in the profession know that he is not really a librarian at all. The position Librarian of Congress is too important to be held by a librarian. If any one fictional figure is named, it might be Marian, the librarian from Meredith Willson's The Music Man. This musical, though extremely dated, contains the most recent librarian of importance in popular culture.
But the profession's problems are more than ones of popular perception. These are grim days for many organizations. Budget axes are out, and the green gimlet eyes of downsizing gaze upon almost every organization. Libraries, with their big collections, large overheads, and identification with the old system, are natural targets. We see them being trimmed on campuses and in organizations around the country.
Worse, librarians are losing control of their own fate. A new layer of administrative control is appearing in many organizations. As the function of information has risen in importance, structures have changed, but in many organizations, the restructuring has reflected the importance of information but the irrelevance of librarians. Nonlibrarians are brought in to manage things. An excellent example is our keynote speaker at this symposium. Dr. Van Houweling is in charge of information systems at the University of Michigan. He is not a librarian. Note carefully how in some parts of his speech he talked about us and at other points he talked about you. For all his talent and his marvelous speech, he is not a librarian. Twenty years ago if you had invited the person at the University of Michigan who was in charge of information to come speak, the librarian would have shown up.
The point is that a new layer of professionals is working with information. Librarians may remain the foot soldiers, but we have not been given command of troops, let alone foreign policy. Thus, librarianship is in peril.
3. Librarianship Has Value
Librarianship has value. Is this a controversial statement? There was something special, something different about this profession that called us to it. At the annual...
