My first impression of Florida State University’s library was disappointment. The mental picture I had of "college library" was perhaps too unrealistic: rows of banker’s lamps lining mahogany tables managed by smallish women with their eyeglasses hanging below their neck line and their hair pulled above their ears. The Robert Manning Strozier Library is nothing like that at all.
Named for a former president of the university, the plaque which bears his name hangs precariously low. I think whoever decided to put it there was under the impression that it would look better below his portrait, but forgot that plaques are to be read. Who needs function, after all, when aesthetic value is available?
The thought that the plaque could have been put in a better place occurred to me when I was on all fours in the reception area of Strozier trying to read it. As I was sprawled out on the floor, modern university library patrons stared at me with either disbelief or disapproval. It was difficult for me to distinguish between the two. I have discovered that reading plaques is a somewhat abnormal social behavior. To most people, plaques are simply invisible and anyone who stops to read one gives the appearance of staring off into space: dazed, confused, bewildered.
Below the name and dates of importance was a quote. It was not, however, a quote from Robert Manning Strozier. I thought that odd.
I read a lot of plaques and there is a pretty reliable pattern that goes something like this: If you are important enough or rich enough (or perhaps, if fortune has smiled upon you, both) to have a building named after you which contains both a portrait of you and a plaque designating your name, rank and significance, then its reasonable to conclude that if the plaque does contain a quote, it won’t be from someone else.
Robert Manning Strozier’s quote is from someone else. Sir Walter Scott to be specific. It reads: "Without courage, there can be no truth. And without truth, there can be no virtue." What courage, truth and virtue have to do with either a university library or Robert Manning Strozier wasn’t specified on the plaque. I asked several people at Strozier. None of them seemed to know either.
But what they did know was that the Strozier Library has changed dramatically over the past few years. And it’s my contention that these changes aren’t all for the better.
Now that the dust from a recent $5 million renovation has cleared, a brave new Strozier gleams a garish ray of technology. But it’s not a beacon of hope. It does not elucidate the darkness of our collective ignorance. It does not, as the word library suggests, liberate.
What it does do, on the other hand, is undermine what is meant by the word "library." Since Benjamin Franklin donated 116 books to Franklin, Mass., creating the nation’s first public library, these buildings have commanded a certain position in society. Franklin declared that the purpose of his donation was to serve "a Society of intelligent respectable Farmers, such as our Country People generally consist of."
To Franklin, knowledge was not to be the possession solely of the monied class, who already had access to subscription libraries of their own, but to the common man. In a republic based on the individual, the individual should have the opportunity to educate him or herself.
One hundred years later when Andrew Carnegie donated $56 million for the construction of 2,509 library buildings throughout the country, he saw a library as a means of social improvement for "the best and most aspiring poor."
But 100 years after Carnegie’s donation to the social empowerment of the downtrodden, libraries have become brothels of technology. If you think that statement veers toward hyperbole, I invite you to ask a Strozier librarian to explain the lurid details of "full text retrieval." I thought I would need a cigarette after she finished the part about having the computer fax me at my convenience.
If ever anyone has blindly whored to such a manipulative pimp as technology, the librarians at Strozier have. Just because something is new does not mean that it is good. Just because a process is efficient does not mean that it is superior. Just because data may be retrieved electronically does not mean that it should be.
In their relentless quest to modernize, our well-meaning but short-sighted friends at Strozier have neglected to come to terms with the consequences of bringing all these computers into their library. Let’s start with appearance.
Walking into Strozier, one is immediately set adrift in a sea of monitors and mouse pads and central processing units. (mouse pads, I might add which contain advertising for a television show on ESPN called "Sportszone"). As far as the eye can see, a horizon of technology envelops a crowd of wayward travelers, students mostly, who have come to chat on the Internet or check their e-mail or play a role-playing game with their friend in Texas. These sailors braving the sea of progress on the first floor of Strozier have come for just about everything but research.
To them, a library is a place for fun, entertainment, social engagement and communication. Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not against fun or entertainment or social engagement or even communication. I just don’t think that the first floor of Strozier is an appropriate place for such activities to be transpiring.
Not only does it undermine what is meant by the word "library," but it also radically changes what is meant by the word "research." During my brief stint as a teacher, I was often struck by some bizarre behavior of the children who had the severe misfortune of my instruction. One of the most striking characteristics almost all of them had was their conception of the word "research."
When I told a student to research the influential 19th century novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, he was able to find little in the tangled web of information which, in our society, passes for a valid consortium of information. I found it odd that he didn’t just find the book itself or a book about the author or even an encyclopedia. But none of these things occurred to this student. Or to any of them. To children of the Internet, the word "research" is synonymous with the act of typing words into a search engine. And if nothing comes up in the first 20 hits, the information simply does not exist.
For hundreds of years, libraries have served a role as an institution that collects information which may be valuable at some point in the future. My own research has been greatly benefited by obscure pieces of historical documentation that must have seemed superfluous when they were purchased. But they’ve helped me out a great deal. This is what a library does best, what it was designed to do -- act as a place where culture is preserved as a record of life as it was. And as it may be.
But the great cultural exchanges which have been so delicately preserved in catalogs and on shelves are in danger of being lost in the ether of what librarians are all too eager to call "progress." The most important part of the cultural exchanges which are preserved in a library cannot be found anywhere else and will be lost if a library does not keep them.
That seems like a much more reasonable justification for a library than providing a location for freshmen to play "Doom" or chat online or surf the Web. The Internet itself is the seduction that has brought the masses to Strozier.
But it’s a Faustian deal. Bring in non-library users, give them a terminal with Internet connections and hope that they become "library patrons." What the librarians don’t realize is that instead of the patrons becoming library users, they are changing what it means to be a library patron. No longer can anyone in a library be expected to know anything at all about the actual physical collection contained within the building.
In fact, just the opposite is occurring. One librarian I spoke to told me that when she helps students do research, they invariably limit their search to documents that can be retrieved as "full text" through the computer. Library patrons no longer want to consider the selection, weigh the options or browse through the possibilities. The modern library patron wants only what can be linked electronically at that time in that place on that terminal. Their research suffers as a result and it is this very act of technologically imposed self-restriction that is perhaps the most compelling evidence that the medium has not only commandeered the message, but is now also its gatekeeper, censor and conductor.
A quick stroll through the rows and rows and rows of computer terminals in Strozier will illustrate this point. The first floor of Strozier has become a social club of sorts for the bored, techo-phile college student who is seeking to communicate, to be entertained or to simply languish. Research is the last thing that’s going on to students whose idea of reality is as mutable as an html document.
The Internet itself is perhaps the best symbol of the dangers of this new world view. While the physical document carries with it a sense of authority and permanence, the electronic document can be manipulated at any time. In some cases, this is beneficial. Web surfers don’t think twice about e-mailing a webmaster to suggest that a comma may have been overlooked or that a word needs capitalization. But the absolute black and white quality of knowledge has disappeared into the gray hues of technological progress.
No knowledge is absolute, no thought is final, all information is subject to later revision.
As a historian, not only do I find the modern library patron’s conception of what knowledge is to be repulsive, but I find that the new technology helps me the least. When that librarian was explaining the joys of full-text retrieval to me, she seemed to find my queries about articles from issues of Harper’s magazine from the ’70s to be quite displeasing. Why would anyone want anything other than the most recent, the most up-to-date, the most current? "Oh, you’re a historian," she said to me as if it were a condition of leprosy. The implication was clear: new is good, change is progress and technology will be the salvation of mankind.
The Internet will democratize knowledge. And that will not bode well for knowledge. For centuries, the writers we read have been filtered through an editor, a publisher, a distributor and a librarian before it got to us. For the most part, this was a beneficial process. It kept the low quality out. But when Matt Drudge writes his online column, he has neither an editor, a publisher, a distributor nor a librarian to judge value. And the quality of his writing illustrates this better than I ever could.
But quality is a much, much more relative concept to the Internet crowd. To the scholar of democratized knowledge, it seems elitist and wicked to classify one thought as superior to another. As a result, all thoughts are imbued with the same amount of relevance and we all swim in a sea of indistinguishable mediocrity, unable to discriminate the poor from the exceptional. And unwilling to try.
The democratization of knowledge can be illustrated by a recent American Library Association statement about what a library owes a nation: "all information must be available to all people in all formats purveyed through all communication channels and delivered at all levels of comprehension." I’m not making this up.
By trying to be all things to all people, libraries will cease to be a thing of importance to anyone. Instead, it will become an online whore-house to the many. While contemplating the impending and bleak future of Strozier Library, I was reminded of a story my major professor told me once about two Harvard professors who camped out on the front steps of that university’s library to prevent a possible bombing. They would have rather be killed than do without their library for one afternoon.
And I wonder what those two professors would do if the bomb was already inside the minds of the freshmen. If the bomb were plugged in, logged on, automated out: downloaded and uplinked like so much empty silicon. What will happen when that bomb explodes? Who will be there to stop it?
I wonder these things as I stroll past the aisles of computers in the Strozier Library. As I stare into the monitors of progress.
As I wish that none of it were there.