The Information Precipiceor, Preservation, the Internet and Youby Robert DeCandidoQ. How much can libraries afford to lose before our complex culture collapses from lack of intellectual infrastructure? How much can libraries afford to keep before our complex culture collapses under the sheer weight of its own complications? Commentary: (Not an answer) Just after getting hooked up to our library's new network I was demonstrating some of the system's capabilities to my staff. I opened our gateway to the internet and showed them how to access the catalogs of other libraries. I had used the gateway only once before so I was learning as I was teaching. Looking at the list of libraries we could access it dawned on me that there were a good many listed that were foreign--some very foreign--places like Australia and Hong Kong. Now, I knew intellectually about the global network, that such connections have been common for several years. Still, when I said "Let's try this one in Australia," hit a few keys and in seconds found myself interacting with a computer about as far away from me as you can get and still be on the planet, I was, well, awestruck, actually.
Looking over the edgeNo doubt many of you have already felt this frisson of emotion when you, too, first stood on this global information precipice. My own experience brought to mind the above questions that I posed a year ago in these pages.At the heart of both of these questions is the deeper question of how and for what we use libraries. To address this question I need to define some terms for the purposes of this argument.
Will our ability to achieve knowledge from information become harder and harder? Despite a great deal of talk about how we have become an information society, I believe that we are no more dependent on information today than we have ever been. What has changed is not so much the amount of information or its importance but the degree to which information has become public and shared. The days of the deeply guarded arcana are past. Scholarship is less and less restrictive. Knowledge is no longer considered a commodity that can be owned, hidden and withheld from others as it was in the days when guilds were called mysteries. Western civilization has been moving in this general direction ever since the Renaissance. In particular the philosophers and writers of the eighteenth century Enlightenment developed the intellectual underpining that still drives our attitudes towards information. It is not a coincidence that eighteenth century saw the creation of both the first lending librararies (the progenitors of public libraries) and the first ammendment to the Constitution restricting the government's control over free speech and the press. It is arguably at this point in the history of Europe and its colonies that the revolution begun by Gutenberg came to full fruition. We are sitting on the crest of a new wave of that ongoing revolution in information sharing, this one generated by another technological innovation, the personal computer. Suddenly the ability to share information at a personal level has taken a quantum leap because information no longer needs to be funnelled through a distributor but can be delivered from the producer to the user directly through a network. Where that leaves libraries as a distributor of information is a question we are probably all asking ourselves but that is a question I would like to put aside. I would rather examine the influence of networked information sharing on the information itself.
Networked and overworkedThe most obvious result of networking is the vast increase in the quantity of information pouring over my mental doorsill. Thoughts, questions, comments and opinions that always existed but which I would never have known, now wend their way onto my computer screen and entice my attention. The scary part is that I have only opened the spigot a little way--I haven't touched Usenet, I haven't used a WAIS, I haven't archied or gophered and I'm still an FTP virgin.The other result is a change in the quality of the information I am receiving. When you get an issue of CAN you know that the Kindly Editors have inspected, selected and rejected more than will meet you eyes. You know that (with the possible exception of this column) the contents will be worth reading and worth preserving. The same cannot be said about what you pull out of your electronic mail box. And yet much there, too, is worth saving. We once kept everything we could and that was too little--most of the plays of Aeschylus have been lost, Homer's comic epic (if it ever existed) and who knows how much more. We are still trying to keep everything, but now it may be too much. As we expose ourselves to and preserve more and more information, as our awareness spreads out further and further does our understanding become shallower and shallower? Will our ability to achieve knowledge from information become harder and harder? Will the children of knowledge--scholarship, artistry and wisdom--become so rare that life will become a burden rather than a joy? These are very real possibilities but I don't think they are inevitabilities. We could create the global city--an electronic community with all the virtues of a city: the richness of diversity; the opportunity to find other people who share your interests; the accessibility to art and knowledge; and, very importantly, the ability to ignore your neighbors if you wish to. We can no longer allow time to be the arbiter of what is to be kept in our culture. If choices are made with wisdom we can create a world in which the flux of interactions with our past and our present create connections and insights that enrich our lives.
Past, present, futureLet me end with another anecdote. A new magazine kiosk turned up one day outside The New York Public Library on 42nd street. There was room for ads on its sides. The first things that went up in these spaces were photos by Annie Liebowitz advertizing for the GAP. I first noticed them while walking down the block from where I could see a picture of a woman, Jane March, in profile surrounded by folds of sheer material. I was bemused by this beautiful woman, this beautiful image and I knew that if I ever got the opportunity I would describe her as looking like the BVM on a good day. As I walked past the kiosk the other ad came into view. It was a picture of Evander Holyfield sitting with elbows on knees looking off to his left with a thoughtful and fearsome scowl, the epitome of contained power and, in his own way as beautiful as Jane March. These images, so different and so alike rattled around in my head for at least a day before I realized their antecedents. There is a Fra Lippo Lippi portrait of the Virgin Mary that is almost a profile and in which she is surrounded by gauzy fabric. And there is a classical Greek sculpture of a boxer sitting with elbows on knees. Neither photo is a copy or imitation. Jane March is more sensual than Mary and Holyfield conveys an intelligence completely and intentionally lacking from the Greek sculpture to name just a few differences. What there is, though, is a resonance, a connection that reaches back through cultures and millenia to create an artistic statement that is rich and complex because it exists in a context--a context I knew only from books. These are the sorts of connections that twentieth century civilization has made possible. The kinds of connections we may make in the next century are beyond what any of us can now imagine.This is all to say that our task in choosing what to preserve is the most important decision we make. It will either be our greatest gift to the future or its greatest burden. This article first appeared Conservation Administration News (CAN) No. 53, April 1993 as the Feature "Out of the Question." © 1992 by Robert DeCandido.
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