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Article Excerpt
Research libraries take up a vast amount of physical and psychic space. They inhabit spectacular buildings, old and new, which occupy prime real estate in cities and on campuses. They mount costly, splendid exhibitions of everything from ancient manuscripts to 1960s comic books. Every external clue suggests that they matter deeply, both to individuals and to institutions with deep pockets. And the story told by the buildings is confirmed and enriched by their collections.
American research libraries are the envy of the world: for complex historical reasons, our monoglot and often xenophobic society has created some of the biggest and most cosmopolitan collections of texts of every kind the world has ever known. Do you want to pore over incunabula? You can find thousands of them in the Northeast at Harvard's multiple libraries; in Washington, D.C., at the Library of Congress; in the Southwest at the Huntington Library; and dozens of points between. Care for Tibetan religion? Your best bet is Bloomington, Indiana. The manuscripts of James Joyce? Shuffle off to Buffalo. General collections are in some ways even more amazing. Anyone who has done research in the greatest European libraries--libraries whose collections of manuscripts and rare books dwarf American ones--knows that not one of them offers an open-stack collection of books and periodicals from the last two centuries to rival the top ten or twelve university libraries in North America. The American model--easy to enter and simple to use, powered by vast resources and vaster ambitions--has played a major role in the current dominance around the world of English-language scholarship.
Yet the styles of our great libraries vary radically, and meaningfully, and even the quickest look at the contrast reveals that they are more labile institutions than they seem. Behind the glorious facades, a strange kind of war is being waged: a war between styles of repository, reading, and research. Older libraries--the New York and Boston Public Libraries, Beinecke at Yale, Butler at Columbia, Widener at Harvard--and newer ones in the traditional style, like the Chicago Public Library and the new library of Rhodes College in Memphis, proclaim their allegiance to ancient cultural traditions. The names of dead white male authors, incised in stone, parade across their facades. Columns, pilasters, Gothic curlicues, and Roman triumphal arches reinforce the sense of solidity, history, allegiance to an older world. So, even more, do their contents: the endless rows of books, their spines appealingly faded but still colorful, which march down the equally endless Borgesian labyrinths of their stacks.
Newer libraries, by contrast, scream their modernity. In Seattle and Salt Lake City, glass curtain walls surround vast open spaces. Gleaming banks of computers seem to be everywhere: books, not so much. The lofty atria are redolent not with the noble rot of ancient leather and buckram, but with the coffee and fresh baked goods on offer in their cafes, whose glitz has supplanted the seedy glamour of old-fashioned reading rooms. These newer libraries are cast in a radically different formal language, one that speaks not of books, but of information: pellets of useable data, as smooth, precise, and indistinguishable as the computer screens themselves.
To many observers, perhaps most, these contrasting aesthetics embody radically different visions of what a library is and does. On the one hand, there is the traditional citadel of manuscript and print, closed and guarded, a hierarchical structure as neatly ordered as a vast set of display cabinets for butterflies. Its expert librarians pin every document, book, and journal in the collection to its proper place, the precise category in which equally expert researchers will be sure to find it. They and their bosses assume that true knowledge exists between the covers of books and journals--those books and journals that have an acknowledged place in the world of scholarship. On the other hand, there is the gleaming spaceport of the information age, open and accessible, a vast docking station with thousands of air-locks, material and virtual. These give access, for anyone who cares to settle at one of them, to the vast buzz and bubble of electronic information. The funders and designers of these hyper modern libraries believe that the Web does a better job of finding and sorting information than old-fashioned methods of classification can. They invite users to click on a link and plunge into the virtual world, using a search engine rather than a formal catalog to find what they need. Crumbling leather and frowning curators confront Google and Wikipedia; Gormenghast duels with Starbuck's. Right now, Starbuck's seems to be winning.
These contrasting visions are stereo types, of course: real libraries do not split neatly into reactionary temples of leather and vellum and hip, accessible banks of humming computers--though many journalists, even a few librarians, write and speak as if they did. The stateliest of paneled library halls gleam with rows of computer screens, and the glitziest of pseudo-malls still contain thousands and thousands of books. But stereotypes matter even when they don't match the facts. They frame much current thinking and writing about libraries, and they render public discussion, and the decision-making based on it, less productive than it should be. The ground is really trembling under the great libraries; everything about them, from the form of books to the ways of readers, is changing rapidly. But there are more things in heaven and earth than most of those who write about or build--libraries seem to realize.
Most of the recent public discussion, especially in mainstream magazines, has concerned the rise of electronic media--and with good reason. One of the main things libraries now do for their readers--and one of the main things library budgets now pay...
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