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November 06, 2007, 02:48 PM ET
Thoughts on the 'Patchwork' Library of the Web
The New Yorker‘s Anthony Grafton begins a rumination on the future of the library by evoking “an old and reassuring story: bookish boy or girl enters the cool, dark library and discovers loneliness and freedom.” Now that many librarians are tasked with putting books online, not just depositing them in stacks, is that notion of the library as public space still resonant?
Mr. Grafton attempts to answer that question by tracing the intellectual history of Google’s and Microsoft’s library-scanning projects all the way back to the third millennium B.C. It’s an interesting tactic, and it leads the writer to a less Utopian take on the Web-as-library than some digitization advocates have posited:The supposed universal library, then, will be not a seamless mass of books, easily linked and studied together, but a patchwork of interfaces and databases, some open to anyone with a computer and WiFi, others closed to those without access or money…. Though the distant past will be more available, in a technical sense, than ever before, once it is captured and preserved as a vast, disjointed mosaic it may recede ever more rapidly from our collective attention.
With corporate projects battling over the book-scanning market and nonprofit groups pursuing valuable but predominantly local digitization efforts, Mr. Grafton’s vision seems quite credible. The Web’s “disjointed mosaic” contains an astonishing amount of information, he says, but researchers and students who want that information in a meaningful social context must still follow “the narrower path that leads between the lions and up the stairs.” What role do today’s bricks-and-mortar libraries play in turning a mosaic of data into something more meaningful? —Brock Read
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