Late in the 1990s, I saw my local public libraries shake off their dust and stir to life. The new hardware was a crucial component, but no, really it was the librarians themselves who were making the difference.
I’ve lived in my house for ten years, and the books are crushing me. I’ve given away carloads, and still they reproduce. Somewhere in these disorderly shelves is a novel published in 1981 called Easy Travel to Other Planets. The novel, by Ted Mooney, was notorious when it came out because one character, a female marine biologist, has sex with a dolphin. For me, though, the most memorable passage is the description of the affliction from which the denizens of this slightly futuristic world suffer: information sickness. There is too much to take in. Their brains overload and they lose their senses.
If you don’t know where to find a book, it might as well not exist. I couldn’t find Easy Travel in my house. Ordinarily, if I wanted to consult a book I owned but couldn’t put my hands on, I’d go on Amazon and use the neat Search This Book function: I would simply type in information sickness, and all the pages on which this phrase appears would be revealed. But this worked only for recently published books with cooperative publishers; Easy Travel was too old for that. So I went to the supercatalog at WorldCat.org, where, as promised by the obituary of Frederick Kilgour, the man who first combined the records of multiple libraries’ catalogs, librarians were busily compiling one giant digital catalog of the world’s books. You type in a title and get back a list of hundreds of libraries where that title can be found, beginning with the closest. I found 532 libraries that owned Easy Travel, listed in a concentric circle from where I happened to be, the “New York Public Library—Research,” as WorldCat called the majestic library at Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue. I could follow the digital breadcrumbs and track copies of the book through all five boroughs of New York City, moving on to the U.S. Military Academy Library at West Point (forty-four miles away, it informed me), followed by locations in the Midwest, the West, and the South. Then the list fanned out to Canada, Europe, and beyond, until finally, having exhausted all the closer possibilities, WorldCat found the book in the holdings of the University of Tasmania, more than ten thousand miles away.
Because I happened to be embedded in that big library in Manhattan, with access to a quiet room for writing this and maybe a million items tucked away on the other side of the wall, I checked its online catalog and verified that it owned a copy of Easy Travel. Oddly, the novel was on microfilm, and the librarians in the microfilm room had to light the lamps on their miners’ hats to find it. Though it’s a literary novel, Easy Travel had been stashed on a reel with a bunch of science fiction. Was there a shelf of sci-fi being dumped and this someone’s defiant protest? No, it seemed I was holding a relic from the days when a former administrator, obsessed with space to store books, had the bright idea to throw batches of books together, patch up their contents on homemade reels of microfilm, then dump the physical books he’d had copied. He is not the hero of this book.
A typed list of a dozen or so novels appeared at the beginning of the microfilm reel and Easy Travel was among them. There were squiggles of dust on my viewing lens and the light in the room was dim; the pages had been microfilmed hastily, a few of them duplicated. I would give anything for one of those trademark library moments, sitting in a polished wood chair while sunlight slanted over my shoulder and I turned the pages of an old tome, blah blah blah. But here was my space-saving substitute, which required no fewer than four librarians and clerks to fetch and help thread into the machine. Squinting, I was able to make out the part where one of the characters in the book noted that “information sickness, like malaria, recurs unpredictably,” and speculated that the president himself might be suffering this particular affliction (“he’s certainly in the right risk bracket”). And then—oh joy!—there was the account of an information-sickness attack, a passage that has stayed in the back of my brain for all these years:
Jeffrey discovers a woman harmed by information excess. All the symptoms are present: bleeding from the nose and ears, vomiting, deliriously disconnected speech, apparent disorientation, and the desire to touch everything. She has a rubber mat rolled up under her arm and is walking around one of the soft new park benches recently installed by the city, palpating it hungrily. A small crowd has collected around her, listening to her complicated monologue: Birds of Prey Cards, sunspot souffle, Antarctic unemployment. Jeffrey hesitates. I’ve never seen one so far gone, he thinks. But, judging her young enough to warrant hope, he gently takes the rubber mat from the woman, unrolls it upon the pavement, and helps her to assume the memory-elimination posture. After a minute, the bleeding stops. “I was on my way to dance class,” she says to him, still running her ravening fingers over his leather coat sleeves, “when suddenly I was dazzled. I couldn’t tell where one thing left off and the next began.”
Ha! “I couldn’t tell where one thing left off and the next began.” No kidding! Just as the novelist predicted, we were bleeding information from the nose and ears, though dazed and disoriented was not how I experienced it. Most of the time, I felt like I was three years old, high on chocolate cake and social networks, constantly wired, ingesting information and news about information, books and books about books, data and metadata—I was, in other words, overstimulated yet gluttonous for more. I spent days in the labyrinths of the Internet, watching webpages multiply onscreen at an even faster pace than the books and papers proliferated under my feet. From the outside I’m sure it looked like I needed help assuming the “memory-elimination posture,” or possibly I needed an intervention, but I wouldn’t want it any other way. Information and new forms of information were washing over me in oceans and it was fun to splash in the wake.
I had my limits. I often felt baffled and frustrated. I understood—I thought I understood—then things changed, or I learned the next thing that made everything I knew before obsolete. When I worked in an office, there was always a computer expert or two on staff to keep us connected and to untangle the USB wires and bewilderments. Having a tech department to consult, it turns out, is almost as valuable as having a doctor. Now, self-employed and unaffiliated with any computer scientists, without a sheltering institution to guide or rescue me, I’m challenged, like most people who aren’t programmers. Where could we turn? Who could we consult who both understood and spoke our language?
Thank goodness for librarians.
I stood at the reference desk, my head buzzing. My old method of capturing the information on the Web wasn’t working anymore. I had been copying text on websites and saving it to text files, but sometime around 2006, the Web took a leap into jazzed-up graphics and I began crashing my word-processing programs. What could I do? It wasn’t enough to save the Web address; there was no guarantee I could get into the site later. How could I save content on the increasingly dynamic Web? The librarian I was consulting didn’t blink. “Have you tried this?” she asked, showing me the pull down menu of her browser and choosing the option to “Save Page As.” A box popped up, with the option “Save As Web Page.” Click. It was that simple. To someone who already knew how to do it, it was idiotically simple, but for me, it was the difference between romping on the Web and being able to snap and save faithful pictures of what I found there. It was the difference between playing heedlessly and working purposefully. It was, in short, a revelation—the right information at the right time.
I could have gone to Google and typed in save webpages and received similar instructions, and perhaps had an equally profound epiphany, except that I didn’t know that saving webpages was what I was looking for. I didn’t have the vocabulary to ask Google what it knew, or maybe I didn’t have the vision: it never occurred to me that you could save, not just the content, but the whole page, including the flashing ads and links. That’s the trouble with ignorance.
The librarian’s kindness was a bonus. She hadn’t laughed at me. If I had asked her how to make the little black mark in the middle of the screen move, she would have shown me how to use a mouse—and if you don’t know how a mouse works, the person who shows you is a genius.
I thanked her for the help. My gratitude was appreciated, but she hadn’t helped me as a favor. This was her job.
The Massachusetts Library Association developed a handy way to calculate the value of the services your public library provides. You estimate how many books you check out, how many newspapers you browse, how many hours you used the computer, and so on, and it puts a dollar value on those services and totes them up. According to this calculator, one question answered by the reference desk is worth $7. (Other states picked this up and use a version of the same formula, but value a reference question at $15.) But what if that question was hugely important to you? What if the answer affected your livelihood?
This testimonial appeared in Feel-good Librarian, a blog posted by an anonymous public librarian in the midwest United States. It appeared about a year into the economic downturn, soon after a tornado delivered another blow to the region:
Literally thousands of people are out of work in our tricounty area…. These former factory workers, some with limited English language skills, and very few computer skills, must use the internet to file for unemployment, get entered in our state’s required database and post a résumé. I consider myself fairly computer savvy and this is a cranky, confusing and unfriendly interface.
Many of our patrons do not know how to type and do not understand why they need an email address, much less how to establish one. Taco Bell, McDonald’s and Wal-Mart, as well as the larger employers in our area, all require applications to be filled out online. People who can’t even speak English well are required to make résumés without knowing how to say the word (“my rezoom” is how one patron referred to it), much less fill in the form with properly capitalized names. One man did not know what a capital letter was….
Good public libraries offer computer classes for both rank beginners and experienced researchers, and good librarians have been showing people how to use e-mail for years—but how to use capital letters?! So when I hear this snarky question (and I hear it everywhere): Are librarians obsolete in the Age of Google? all I can say is, are you kidding? Librarians are more important than ever. Google and Yahoo! and Bing and WolframAlpha can help you find answers to your questions, sometimes brilliantly; but if you don’t know how to phrase those questions, no search engine can help provide the answers. It can’t explain in simple language how e-mails (let alone the rules of capitalization!) work, or how to navigate government websites. You can only get so far without human help.
Google couldn’t answer the question posed by a man who had been walking in the woods when he came across a stone plaque covered by strange marks. He copied out the marks and took them to the library, hoping to find out what they meant. Brian Herzog, who blogs as the Swiss Army Librarian, was working on the reference desk that day. He suspected his patron had stumbled upon a clue in geocaching, a kind of contemporary treasure hunt that uses GPS locaters. Where we’d see chicken scratches, Herzog saw an ancient language being used as a code in an outdoor game. Herzog’s account of his hunt that day to determine what part this plaque played in the literal treasure hunt involved good hunches, multiple resources, deductive logic, and the creative application of advanced reference skills. Ultimately, he figured out that the marks spelled out, in runes, a number; when plugged into a GPS device, that number would lead to the next clue. This was a hunt with a real treasure at the end, though as searches go, it was an exercise in curiosity and not a matter of whether the patron’s family would eat that night. Still—what price could you put on the professional who took up your whimsical search with enthusiasm and spent his day ensuring its success?
And how would you value the reference librarian who answered the question, “Where can I find a book on bootyism?”? Check Google for bootyism and you’ll find out all you ever wanted to know about booty shaking; Google didn’t prompt, as it occasionally does with presumptive misspellings, “Are you sure you don’t mean…?” But librarians are trained to prompt till they figure it out: Ah, not bootyism—Buddhism.
Mosman Library, located near Sydney, Australia, sponsored a contest involving two librarians, one armed with the library’s online reference resources, the other with Google and the free Web. For five days running, they were given forty-five minutes to solve a challenging question—one was about alternative therapies for Parkinson’s disease, another about women writers of the Beat Generation. I couldn’t wait for the answers to be posted each day. There’s something about the game-show format that sharpens the teeth and quickens the blood. No outcome could be as exciting as the race itself—the blink of the library’s webpage as it refreshed and posted the updated results with the latest comments from their colleagues scorning Wikipedia or applauding the contestants’ speed.
The librarian working the library’s databases was more efficient, accurate, and concise (she could find great answers in two or three minutes) than the one surfing Google, although he had been very resourceful wading through the junk to find authoritative answers. But the moderator of the contest declined to declare a victor. “You,” the patron, were the winner. And, yeah, we patrons are lucky; we get to use both the library’s resources and the Web. For my money, though, the librarians themselves were the winners, skillful jockeys who could tear through tracks of all kinds of information and race back with the prize, the right answers.
In late 1996, the Benton Foundation and the Kellogg Foundation released a joint report titled Buildings, Books, and Bytes that questioned the value of librarians. Both foundations have been leaders in researching educational uses for media and the Internet, and this report was a valuable sounding, an effort to get a sense of what the public wanted from libraries.
…the focus group participants placed libraries at the fringes of modern life, especially in relation to the technological revolution. Most telling, they did not see libraries leading the way in the digital revolution. In fact, they thought libraries should take a reactive role, adapting to new technologies. Libraries “should stay just behind the curve. We don’t need them to be on the curve because most people aren’t,” as one participant put it. Indeed, in a world of tight budgetary constraints, these Americans did not want to invest in libraries as technology leaders….
When asked to think about the role of libraries in the future, they placed libraries firmly in the past. In 30 years, they said, libraries would be relegated to a “kind of museum where people can go and look up stuff from way back when.”
The “public” the Benton report consulted were eleven white, middle-class, middle-aged people who described themselves as frequent library users. I’m guessing that these people had computers and cable television at home and lots of book and video stores nearby to provide entertainment and intellectual stimulation. To them, libraries were emblems of prestige, nice places to hang quilt shows; a library was like a pair of glasses their community wore to look smart.
The focus group participants…acknowledged that librarians could perform a useful role as navigators in the as-yet difficult-to-navigate universe of the Internet. Yet they just as easily sanctioned the notion that trained library professionals could be replaced with community volunteers, such as retirees.
It’s all too easy to picture, as their long discussion came to a close, the focus group relishing the piling-on phase. They had whaled and walloped on libraries for hours; it was time to go home. Replace librarians with community volunteers? I could see him, the smug citizen, leaning in to lob the last brick: “What’s the difference between a librarian and a retired volunteer? About $40,000.”
The Benton and Kellogg researchers didn’t accept the conclusion that people wanted nothing more from their libraries. After further research, they suggested that people were nostalgic for the libraries and the librarians of their youth. They were loathe to see librarians change, but as long as they didn’t change too much, well, a little technology in their libraries might be all right. Librarians weren’t all that enthusiastic, either, not at first. “They resisted Internet access—but it was the only service that took off without any advertising,” in the words of one young librarian. The experience of the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue was typical; there had been wifi in the periodicals room for years, but not in the reading rooms. No announcement had to be made when it was introduced there in 2007; within hours, everyone in the reading room was online. The wired library was inevitable. It was happening, whether people were ready for it or not. With Bill Gates seeding computers in libraries, and Al Gore pushing through legislation for federal funding for broadband access, the Benton Foundation prepared a briefing packet—and sample posters with slogans like “Surf the net, or dive into a great book”—to help librarians get out the message that there was room in libraries for both books and bytes.
Late in the 1990s, I saw my local public libraries shake off their dust and stir to life. The new hardware was a crucial component, but no, really it was the librarians themselves who were making the difference. They got computer training. They took charge of the machinery, the computers and printers and copiers that often broke down or ran empty and dry; they had a designated computer troubleshooter on staff, and teenage computer whizzes who came in after school to teach patrons and help the librarians. They bought computers through their consortium, which kept them serviced and updated them every few years. Instead of tearing their hair out about what else had landed on their plate, and what else could go wrong with the cursed machines, librarians added another responsibility to their set of jobs.
That spot behind the technological curve sucked, as anyone knew who had stared in frustration as impenetrable symbols cluttered the webpage, or watched his files disappear, or felt momentarily flummoxed when someone asked about his browser (Which one is the browser?). It felt like you were getting stupider. It felt like being trampled by horse hooves in the age of cars. And the experts, frankly, were obnoxious. How many times can you stand to hear variations on “You just don’t get it.” Really, it was simple: Where else could you go, who could you trust, what could you afford? For many of us, librarians are the best and sometimes the only answer.
That early focus group was wrong. Librarians need to be ahead of the curve. And it was their lucky day, and ours, too, when computers came to the library.
The silver-haired librarians who got their library degrees way back in the twentieth century came from backgrounds in history and literature. These days, it’s more likely to be computer majors wending their way through information science school—people like Jenny Levine: “Hi, my name is Jenny, and I’ll be your librarian today,” she announces on her blog The Shifted Librarian. Levine happens to be in Chicago, but that doesn’t matter. She lives on the Web, where anyone can find her. She has a following, built up over the years she wrote Librarian du Jour, a blog that sent those just learning how to use the social web off to explore new sites. Levine belongs to a new generation of librarians who proudly call themselves geeks. They pepper the Web with computer-savvy tools and techniques, and at every conference or gathering of librarians, Levine or her equivalent will be there to train, mentor, and troubleshoot. Welcome to Library 2.0, where librarians prowl the untidy streets of the Internet.
The annual American Library Association conference in 2007 featured 27,000 librarians pouring through the streets of Washington, D.C., descending on the Walter E. Washington Convention Center and filling every nearby conference room. There were multiple Library 2.0 sessions on the program, such as “Once Upon a Furl in a Podcast Long Ago: Using New Technologies to Support Library Instruction”—a sexy title for a librarian panel. It made my heart beat faster, because I knew about Furl (which has since morphed into Diigo), one of those free and ingenious bibliographic services that let you organize the articles you find online. The panel’s organizers had miscalculated the turnout, no doubt thinking, “Furl…podcast…how cute!” and had scheduled the panel in one of the smaller hotel conference rooms. The crowd was double what the space could hold. I had to step over librarians young and old in the hall and the aisles, then pick my way back through the tunnel of a room to find a chair. Of course librarians showed up for a presentation on using the new technologies. They need to know.
The panelists, all academic librarians, presented a unified front. They agreed that computer users could be divided into digital immigrants (those of us who were trying to catch up) and digital natives (younger people seemingly born hardwired for the new technologies, or maybe it’s just that they’ve studied computers in school). With the exception of a few very young, edgy-looking women, most of us in the room counted as immigrants—me and the silver-haired librarians. In spite of our best efforts, we were never going to master this language that those born after about 1980 speak so fluently. We could learn the lingo and tools of the digital age, but we would always have a thick accent when we spoke. We were babushka-wearers (I don’t deny it; I’m sure I sound like Borat talking about computers). It was too late already to be whiz kids, though we could be trained. And, by the way, if any of us ever thought of teaching a class by standing in front of rows of students and lecturing, we should hop onto the back of the next sled and roll off at the nearest tundra. Because the digital natives did not learn by being lectured to. They learned by collaborating, networking, sharing. They were not just consumers of information, literature, wisdom, history, all that good stuff—they saw themselves as creators, too.
In one of those sweet stories that transcend the divide, panelist Kathy Burnett remembered the class of library students she taught at Rutgers way back in 1990. It was a course in introductory programming called “Internet Interfaces,” and as part of their exploration, the students—all of them women over thirty-five—posted a notice on one of the early shared spaces on the Web, asking for help. They found it in the form of a knowledgeable guide who coached them online for ten weeks. He turned out to be fourteen.
You never know what shape your information guru will take.
I would not have pegged the fresh-faced young woman on the panel as a guru, and I doubt she’d describe herself as such; too modest. Neat, straight brown hair, and glasses, a black suit over white blouse, she looked like part of an army of young, smart preppies, her mouth often tilted with humor or in a dry aside. Kathryn Shaughnessy of St. John’s University in Queens (New York) was jetting off to Rome in three days, she said, to teach a class of twenty international students in the university’s new master’s program in Global Development and Social Justice. The students would be coming from India, Palestine, Thailand, Africa, and the Caribbean, and speaking English, their second or third language. Most of them would be on scholarship; at least one of these students would walk through the door and say, “Is that a computer? I’ve heard of these computers.” It was Shaughnessy’s job as an instructional librarian to give them enough information tools that they could return to their (certainly poor, possibly war-torn or disaster-trashed) home countries prepared to spend two years completing graduate school online. They weren’t just learning for the sake of their own educational ambitions; the students would be researching conditions in their country, experimenting with activist solutions, and posting the results to the bank of world knowledge. They needed to know how to use these tools to help their communities. Shaughnessy had conducted this immersion training the year before, for the first class of master’s candidates, and trying to keep the students all on track and online through the past year had been harrowing. But she and the program had survived, and now she was about to repeat the experience and double her responsibilities.
I’d never imagined a librarian missionary, or considered the concept of intellectual charity. And yet now, listening to Shaughnessy zip through a condensed version of her course for the benefit of the gathered librarians, my brain was doing cartwheels. The most important tool for the far-flung students was the RSS feed, the real simple syndication that brings to a single page all the sites you want to monitor. Why was that such a helpful tool? Because the computer didn’t need to be turned on for an RSS page to be updated; the most current news was always waiting there, a plus when their access to power was limited. And this was no joke: one of her students had had to use his motorcycle battery for backup when the town generator blew.
If Shaughnessy could get someone who’d never seen a computer before up and running, capable of using Skype’s free Internet telephone to talk with teachers and fellow students, monitoring world events through RSS feeds, posting statistics and photos on blogs and Flickr, making podcasts—in mere weeks—then wasn’t there hope for us all?