Disclosure: the following is reposted from a 2/25/08 post on my personal blog, because I wrote it there long before Logical Operator existed:
One thing about libraries is that they engender a lot of doomsaying, from people saying “it’s all on Google” to things like Ross Dawson’s “extinction timeline” (which predicts the end of libraries as we know ‘em by 2019). This is compounded (or, let’s say, “spiced up”) by the internal, bidirectional doomsaying: the young Turks are looking at previous ways of doing things and saying “with modern technology, that old stuff is work-intensive and inefficient,” while the old guard says, “your new ways have destroyed the soul of librarianship.”* In the midst of this conflict, both groups are saying to everyone else “but despite the fact that we can’t get along, libraries and librarians are important and will always be here, because that is how it will be!”
I’m a young turk, as some of my colleagues remind me (in fact, certain of them never miss a chance to remind me about the failings of my generation and our weak library training), and I think a lot of the “old ways” (like, using books, like, omigod) are inefficient or being outpaced by life (okay, I’m not actually including “using books” in the list of inefficiencies). If I were to list things that I would put in that category, I would include:
- traditional reference desks - unnecessarily restrictive
- fragmented collections - if we can share our catalogs, why are we not literally sharing collections?
- microform - good for preservation, bad for usability
- selection processes - ours, at least, is slow and lumpy
As you can see, it’s only a few things, although they have a pretty significant impact on “traditional” librarianship. Of course, I think a whole lot of modern innovations are lousy, too. I hate databases, for instance. Certainly, they’re great sources and much, much faster than poring through a print index to the literature, but they serve only to fragment a search further. I have to remember different syntax and search conventions for each one; there are no less than four different steps I have to confirm the library’s possession of an item; interfaces are user-surly; and I could probably name a dozen other complaints once I have one open in front of me.
So I’m an equal opportunity turk - old and new ways both suck sometimes.
But back to the topic at hand - in contrast to the typical “innovation and the continuing exponential growth and pervasiveness of information technology will render libraries obsolete and put librarians out of a job” that is often bandied about by librarians, business experts, and “visionaries” of various stripes, Thomas Hecker’s article “The Post-petroleum Future of Academic Libraries” (http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/jsp.38.4.183) puts a strange new spin on the topic. Instead of predicting the end of traditional libraries due to technological progress, he predicts the end of tecnological progress and the salvation of humankind by traditional libraries.
The essence of Hecker’s article is that we are about 20 years past the point of no return with regard to stopping the oil depletion downslope, and that when oil/petroleum depletion finally catches up to us, it will be a rude awakening: the information infrastructure that has built an economy and culture based on information, technology, and increasingly specific occupational niches will collapse in a thrashing heap. Higher education will go out the window, as people will be forced to produce their own food and goods; transportation and easy access to products will cease; 2/3 of the world population will die; and - relevant to what I do - libraries that had the “foresight” to not destroy their print collections will become hallowed halls of learning that can keep the human race from falling into a new Dark Age.
Hecker’s article is fascinating, and some of the points he makes are good - we are likely facing a crisis in energy, as we struggle to find alternatives to oil and fossil fuels. Some of those alternatives look much better on paper than in real life. And if the technology infrastructure we have has one major vulnerability, it’s that when the power goes out, everything e or i is history.
On the other hand, Hecker offers no solutions except “hang on” - we’re 20 years too late to halt the slide. He also seems to regard a return to the simpler days of working in the fields and hoeing the beans with some sense of satisfaction. This may be linked to the fact that it will vault academic libraries back into prominence as Speakers of the Law (or, at least, of the Knowledge), a position that academic libraries have not been in and are struggling to regain as information technology causes centralized information to diffuse into the general population. He references Roberto Vacca’s The Coming Dark Age, in which libraries form the core of a “new, secular monastic order” that will be not only the “guardians of culture but will also…be the interpreters of culture” (Hecker, 194) (by the way, this “guardian and interpreter” idea of librarians is something I find repellent; we are not, in my opinion, gatekeepers - nor should we be). Hecker agrees with some of Vacca’s concepts, but not the entirety - believing that academic libraries may mollify the extreme end of Vacca’s ideas.
Overall, I thought the article was interesting, if a little stylistically overwrought and tending toward a satisfied “I told you so” tone. Perhaps I am naive to think we will not collapse into neo-feudalism, or that our information age days are numbered.
I do hope I can be one of Vacca’s warrior-monks of information, though. That would rule.
-Out
* Of course, this is a sweeping generalization. There are numerous forward-thinking librarians who’ve been in the biz for years, and I’m sure plenty of youngsters who like the old ways. As I mentioned, I’m a bit of both. But it’s no fun if you can’t use sweeping generalizations.
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change, Dawson, extinction, future, Hecker, library doomsaying, new, old