Military Librarians Workshop, 18-20 Nov 97, Dayton Marriott Hotel, Dayton, Ohio
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© November 1997
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Dr. Len Simutis
Director, Eisenhower National
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| Military Librarians Workshop '97 program. | |
I have been asked to speak with you today about how changes in technology and society may affect librarians and educators as we move into a new millenium. I do so with great interest and enthusiasm, but with some trepidation, since so much seems to be changing so fast in so many areas of our lives, that it might be good to come to a conference to hear about what's going to be about the same for awhile at least, thank you, rather than what may be profoundly different in the coming years.
In fact, many library professionals are quick to point out, some even quite proudly if somewhat defensibly, that most of the previous predictions about how technology would transform libraries have been well off the mark. But I would argue that techn ology has not had much impact as yet because libraries have largely used technology to automate tasks they have done manually for a long time rather than using technology to perform fundamentally new tasks. The same is true, even more so, for elementary and secondary school teachers, and for many college and university teaching faculty as well .
For both librarians and educators, well all right, for nearly everybody, there is still a profound fear of the long-term implications of doing things in fundamentally new ways in the work setting, particularly when it involves technology, since one's c urrent job may be lost over the long term and most don't believe they can ever be truly proficient in a technologically intensive workplace. This is a variation on an often-told tale, but the fear still rings true--the library of the future will have com puters, a single staff person, and a dog. The purpose of the staff person is to feed the dog; the purpose of the dog is to keep the staff person away from the computers.
But it is not just fear that holds us back with using technology--it is the reliability and functionality of the technology itself which makes us pause--like today, like me, for example. Here I am, talking about how technology will transform libraries and schools, and I'm doing so without using the technology itself. Why? Have you ever tried to connect a computer to a projection system in a strange hotel on the road? Have you ever worked with hotel staff to get a phone line working with a modem? Hav e you ever tried to have computers sent to a conference and have them set up for you? But let's not pick on hotels only--what about in your work setting--are the networks reliable? Are the connections stable? Would you schedule a briefing for your boss using a Power Point file delivered from the network using a computer projection system? In many professions, this is mission-critical event, but not for schools, and not for libraries, so it doesn't really need to work, yet.
The last foot is always the kicker--the last foot from the computer to the projector, or from the modem to the phone line or network adapter. The technology is still not reliable enough yet--still not ready for prime time. No wonder teachers don't wa nt to build their day around computers and connectivity to the Internet! No wonder we keep print directories and microforms even when the same materials are on databases! So we continue to try to define our work in such a way that we are not entirely dep endent on the technology for our success, and frankly, many hope that they will be able to retire before that day of full dependency really comes.
It often takes a long time for society to become truly dependent on major technological innovations in reasonably user-friendly ways. In the early 1900's Daimler-Benz commissioned a study to determine the world-wide demand for automobiles. The numbe r turned out to be about one million, and the controlling factor was the number of households that could afford chauffeurs, since in those days, one could not drive very far without needing the services of a mechanic as well as a driver to keep "the machi ne," as they called it in those days, running. How many of you today are absolutely dependent on the technical support staff, our computer chauffeurs, to keep our "machines" running, to deal with "crashes" on our disks and "collisions" on the network, an d to "tune" and provide maintenance for our servers? Hard drives, indeed!
There are other good reasons why we are reticent to push the technology along any faster, for we genuinely fear the loss of human contact, the loss of being able to provide and receive a useful service from a caring and dedicated professional, and ulti mately we fear the loss of community in the workplace--no matter how fragile and maddening it may be at times. We also genuinely resent the simplistic reductions and mis-characterizations of the work we do. Presentations about the future of computing oft en include "agents" who speak from some popup video window to show the potential of artificial intelligence to deal with user questions. While I agree that artificial intelligence may be better than none at all, I've never meant an agent I really liked, w hether "secret" or "insurance, " or Arliss on HBO for that matter.
But unfortunately, the future is changing more rapidly than many had hoped and most had planned. The old future was one in which technology would be introduced slowly--because of lack of training, or high cost, or system complexity and long lead time s, or the actions of latent luddites. We couldn't do very much about the OPAC performance problems, since the next vendor release was still 12 months away, and our problem isn't on the priority list yet anyway. We couldn't do very much about network doc ument delivery because the image servers were too expensive and the bandwidth wasn't available. And just think of all the materials not yet in the online catalog because of lack of funds for retrospective conversion. Besides, inflation is killing our a cquisitions budget, and we'll never have enough money left for user workstations in the library and still have a decent collection. We missed Windows95, might as well wait for Windows97 or 98....
The situation is comparable or even worse in the nation's schools. There is very little in the day-to-day work of a teacher that requires regular use of a computer, which is probably just as well, since the pace of wiring and acquiring networks and computers has been very slow in most states, as school administrators strive to retrofit buildings designed for 19th century teaching techniques with 21st century technology. Teachers desperately need training in the use of computers, and they need effec tive and engaging software for their students. So teachers struggle on, hoping someday the situation will get better, and that they will eventually have the time and training to use computers effectively. Until then, largely business as usual.
But that is the old future. The new future requires that teaching and learning be grounded in the community and not just the school, and libraries must become critical community centers, among many others, for active learning by school-age children. It is perhaps a radical statement, but I believe, deep-down, that schools as we knew them are broken and can't be fixed, and libraries as most of us remember them will never return. Both institutions are critical to our future, but they will become incre asingly irrelevant in their current forms if they both do not embrace emerging computing and communications technologies to genuinely transform what they do, and who they serve. They will need to be, to strain the phrase, very well connected. Perhaps mo st fundamentally, they must learn that what we now call the Web is not about finding things, it is about discovery and making connections, the essential elements of knowledge creation.
Now for a brief comic interlude, or at least one from the comics. The late Calvin and Hobbes comic strip (I will trade one for 10 Dilberts...) pictures, as usual, the tiger and the boy riding a sled downhill at breakneck speed. Calvin exclaims: "I t hrive on change!" Hobbes replies, "Wait a minute, didn't you complain this morning when your mother put a different flavor of jelly on your toast?" Calvin replies, "I thrive on other people changing!"
We are in the midst of profound technological transformations that are truly unprecedented in terms of their scope and rate of change. The watchwords are "faster, better, cheaper and more." The announcements of increasing processing power and storage capacity are dizzying and numbing after a time, since they seem largely irrelevant to everyday life. Who really needs a disk drive with 16 gigabyte capacity as announced last week by IBM? Or high resolution displays on digital cameras comparable to our current computer screens? Or streaming video broadcasts, or TVs with built-in digital modem circuitry? What does it mean to be able to transmit the contents of 300 years of a daily newspaper in less than a second across terabit fiber optics networks? Th ere is the story of Henry Ford telling a group of residents in a rural community in northern Michigan that someday, with good roads and reliable automobiles, people will be able to travel 50 miles an hour. And a voice in the crowd says--"Doesn't make any difference to me--I don't know anybody that lives 50 miles away."
One of the key elements of this revolution is that information itself is changing in form, in rate of transmission, and in rates of use--as the recent turbulence in Asian financial markets demonstrates so well. These, in turn, raise questions about d ata authenticity and integrity--the equivalent of "electronic" rumors, as well as how such data can potentially undermine the political and social stability of a nation--witness the efforts of the South Korean government to consider restricting data flows regarding currency exchange prices.
The real power of the new technologies is not computation, but communication of large amounts of information in a variety of formats almost instantaneously. This is also the downside, of course, since the technology for display and retrieval has lagge d beyond the capacity to produce the information in the first place. This is a familiar and persistent problem for librarians. For centuries, librarians have been dealing with the organization and management of information and new knowledge. But in the last 100 years, both the volume of information and the formats in which it is recorded have increased dramatically. These changes in volume and format can be described as a sequence of five waves, the fifth being the most ominous if you are familiar with the Elliott wave theory in the investment world.
The first wave began with the use of movable type for printing by Gutenberg, and this era lasted well into the 19th century. Information was stored in a relatively accessible format--the book--with only minor variations in size and content that made i t relatively convenient to arrange the materials for retrieval. As the volume and subject coverage expanded, more complex cataloging conventions had to be developed, of course, but the medium of the book was a stable format that continues today as the mo st popular and easily used way to share information and entertainment in written form.
The second wave--periodicals--increased the complexity of cataloging, storage and retrieval of information. Not only were periodicals used as a way for sharing scholarship and research, they also became a popular and accessible, if even more short-live d format than the book for storing and conveying information. With periodicals, third-party organizations and companies developed to assist in describing the content of some forms of periodicals, particularly scholarly journals and newspapers. With the wide variety of formats, periodicals were, and continue to be, troubling documents for libraries to store and retrieve for patron use. In some public libraries, they are thought of as perishables with a measurable shelf life. In more specialized librari es, they are often the heart of the collection. But as every librarian and patron know, periodicals are awkward to use in bound form, and because they are often printed on paper which is subject to greater deterioration over time, many collections of pe riodicals require special handling and limited access. In any case, most library catalogs are only able to describe whether a library "holds" a particular periodical title, and table of contents for some periodicals are only now being added to online vers ions of catalogs, again supplied by third parties.
The third wave of information for librarians is an even more recent phenomenon with the storage of information in image, audio and video formats. While this wave began primarily as a subset of disciplinary collections in music, art and architecture, f or example, the increased use and decreased cost of storage of information in audio and video formats have been extended to all disciplines. With these media, there is even less ability than in the first two waves to describe the subject and content of information, and retrieval is even more awkward and cumbersome, whether sorting through slide files, or trying to locate a particular audio passage or video scene. Storage of these multimedia documents is awkward as well, and storage and playback format changes put additional strains on library budgets to support the wide range of access equipment required, from film projectors to VCRs that can still play Beta formats, for example.
The fourth wave is largely a phenomenon of the last twenty-five years, but is increasing in volume and frequency. This wave is the storage of information in digital format on physical media for computer access and retrieval in the form of tape, "flopp y" data disks and multimedia compact discs that require a computer for access. Huge collections of documents can now be recorded and retrieved in digital formats, as well as instructional and research software for a variety of learning tasks. Storage a nd retrieval in these formats requires use of a wide range of proprietary products, whether at the level of computer platforms such as PC, Macintosh, and Unix systems, or filing and retrieval formats that are often both proprietary and expensive, increasi ng the cost and complexity for providing patron access.
The fifth wave, which is now still in its early stages, is the use of distributed computers in an international network for the storage and retrieval of information. In this wave, publishing has been transformed from being a way to provide long-term s table content in print form, to becoming the medium for frequently-revised, even dynamic formats for information storage and retrieval. On the net, as it is called familiarly, documents not only may change in format and content, but they may entirely dis appear--for the short term if the network is down, or longer if files are reorganized locally, and online filenames and directories are changed. Validating the accuracy and content of information, long the hallmark of librarianship, is all but impossible in the evolving world-wide-web, but it is increasingly the retrieval system of choice for many people, with search engines and browsing hierarchies provided by commercial companies such as Yahoo and Lycos.
The "web" has been described as a library with all the books scattered randomly on the floor. Finding what you are looking for tries to make use of earlier methods, such as "bookmarks" in web browsers, but these methods break down quite quickly with t he rapidly increasing volume of information on the estimated 160,000,000 web sites, and with the plethora of proprietary formats to retrieve image, audio and video data.
With each wave, the difficulty of storing and managing the information for patron access has increased. With each wave the ability to describe effectively the information in catalogs or directories has decreased. With each wave more difficult and comp lex technology has needed to be developed for retrieving and displaying information, as has the reliance on third-parties for describing the content of materials. And with the fifth wave, the integrity, stability and reliability of information itself has become more problematic and troublesome as librarians try to provide structured, organized systems for their patrons. At the same time, we are becoming even more dependent on automated approaches for storing and retrieving information in electronic for mats as Sven Birkerts warns us in "The Gutenberg Elegies:" "Once it dawns on us, as it must, that our software will hold all the information we need at ready access, we may very well let it. That is, we may choose to become the technicians of our auxilia ry brains, mastering not the information but the retrieval and referencing functions. At a certain point, then, we could become the evolutionary opposites of our forebears, who, lacking external technology, committed everything to memory. If this were t o happen, what would be the status of knowing, of being educated? The leader of the electronic tribe would not be the person who knew most, but the one who could execute the broadest range of technical functions" (p. 139).
With all the changes that have come about in the last ten years, from PCs to multimedia to the web, along with the difficulties of keeping up with the first four waves, why should librarians want, or be expected, to deal effectively with this fifth wav e? To frame this issue, I like to ask The Four Questions concerning the fifth wave:
First and foremost, librarians can bring their considerable knowledge, their craft, to organizing collections of materials that meet the learning or research objectives of their audiences. They can bring structure and coherence, along with increasingl y sophisticated search and retrieval systems and strategies, to build and sustain reliable, stable content resources for these virtual collections. They can continue to work with electronic publishers to argue for equitable access to important informatio n. To be effective with distributed audiences, they must increasingly become proficient in managing and delivering distributed information sources, whether to support "virtual" offices or distance-learning, or research collaboratives that may have member ship drawn from people on different continents. And because of the audiences they directly serve, it seems that military librarians can make a convincing case for using advanced technologies for mission-critical activities that depend on reliable and tim ely delivery of information.
So the opportunities for librarians at this time are extraordinary, but they depend on some very fundamental changes. These include:
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