When I heard the city’s new science library had opened for business right around the comer from where I live in midtown Manhattan, I was very pleased and strolled over one morning for a visit. I was delighted by the sight of row upon row of computers and printers, all brand new, humming and blinking expensively. But as other visitors Filed in, I noticed the quiet hum was repeatedly interrupted by people frustrated by their unfamiliarity with computers, complaining about the bugs in the search software and griping that they couldn’t go to a librarian to reserve a computer-they had to go to a computer to reserve a computer.
I didn’t want a computer. I wanted a book-you know, hard copy. But when I went to get one, I was aghast at the poverty of the collection: its randomness, its sparsity, its age. A 15-year-old astrophysics book is good only for roasting wienies. For current information, you have to go to the machines. You can’t avoid them because there is no guide to the Dewey Decimal System at the main librarian’s desk on the main floor of the city’s main science library. This is progress?
When I went to the science-periodicals section and fined out a request ticket for a journal I needed, I was told to take a seat. “Excuse me,” I said. “A seat? How long will this take? …. Half an hour,” the librarian told me. Yes, half an hour to get one copy of one journal, whereas just a year ago in the old library I could walk up to the stacks and put my hands on dozens of publications in the same amount of time. And not by the farthest stretch of the imagination is any word-search software going to substitute for a quick look at a couple of dozen contents pages, especially when you have to boot up just to find out which journals the library subscribes to. Well, actually, that’s not true. Even if you do boot up, there’s no way to find out which journals the library subscribes to.
Let me say that again: neither man nor beast can compile, nor can you put together for yourself, a list of the science journals housed in this library. New York City’s new science library is also home to our business-and-industry research materials. Its proper name is the Science, Industry and Business Library, and its 10,000 periodicals are all mixed together in the print version of the journals directory. The directory is not alphabetical by name; it’s not arranged by subject; it’s not arranged by year. It seems to be random. “How does this index work?” I asked a librarian. “I dunno,” he said, “but I know it’s no good. You should go to the computers.”
“You mean I can get a list of your science journals on the computers?” I asked. “No,” he said, “you can’t.” The software cannot retrieve a list of the science journals.
I am reasonably at home .with computers, so I know that computer searches are so primitive they are best compared to a phone conversation in which the speakers have to hang up and reconnect every time one of them has completed a sentence. It has to do with a phenomenon called “connecting to server.” The scary thing is that library systems in other cities are going the same way we have in New York-making the counterintuitive, anti-intellectual decision that computers are ready to replace the printed page.
Who made the decision that everyone who is not computer-literate-very computer-literate, in the ease of our new library-could be left in the cold? Who is pretending that men and women from low-income neighborhoods, schooled without computers and without computers at home, can use this library? And how many decades will pass before everyone who graduated from pre-computer colleges is dead, and until inner-city and rural public schools have computers in sufficient numbers to teach all their children how to use them? Indeed, precious few minority faces are to be seen at the computer stations in our fancy new library.
And what about my mother? She has yet to conquer the ATM. Is she to be disconnected from all the world of science because technology is not among the sciences that interest her?
And what does all this technology have to do with reading? In my household, we read science books for pleasure all the time. We have Stephen Hawking on black holes and Steven Weinberg on the origin of the universe. We have Carl Sagan’s wonderful book about brain evolution. We have an excellent work on the history of surgery and another on the origin of species. We have taxonomic guides to birds, trees and flowers. But we can’t take our love of science to the library, because science there has been made into an unlovable search for “key words.”
Computers, in their prolonged infancy, are not ready to substitute for stacks of books. Personally, I doubt they ever will be, if for no reason other than you cannot take computers into the tub with you and you can’t balance them on a pillow when you’ve gone to bed for the night.
I hope the New York science library will store a couple of rows of its computers upstairs where the inaccessible science journals are, and make way for the science journals on street level, where the people are-the people who actually want to read journals.
I have another idea: why not print on three-by-five index cards the name, subject and author of all the books and journals in the library, put them in similarly sized drawers and place them where people coming to the library can have access to them? Someplace where the poor and the elderly, the hurried and the low-tech, my mother and the Luddites can make use of them? We could call it a card catalog.
In the meantime, this thing around the comer from me is not a library at all-it is a pit stop on the Info Highway, a bit of gossamer on the Web.
