A short personal history of library technology
Mike Furlough, Assistant Dean for Scholarly CommunicationsI am relatively new to Penn State Libraries, but my library career stretches back over 35 years. My first library job was in second grade, when for some reason I was allowed to skip parts of my classes to go work in the school library. I got to read a lot, but my main job was stamping the due date on the cards in the back of the books. I loved doing that—so much that my mother took me to the office supply to store to buy my own date stamp. I taped circulation cards in the back of my books and stamped them when I took them off the shelf to re-read. I’m sure this is why I work in a library now. I don’t remember if we had a card catalog in my elementary school. But I do know that whenever I first tried to use one to do real research, in eighth grade, it utterly confused me. The subject catalog didn’t make sense to me, with all those dashes and sub topics and so forth. I never learned how to use those things well, so I tended to avoid them.
By the time I went to university, my college library was still stamping some books, and they did so right across from the card catalog, one large enough to indicate that this was a serious research library. Three months after I graduated, I walked into my southern state university’s library (holding my new alumni member card that gave me borrowing privileges) to find that book stamps and card catalogs were out. My college’s library had implemented an “integrated library system” to manage the catalog, make it searchable, and track the circulation of books. Now I could search that card catalog by typing a name, title or phrase, and save a great deal of effort. Never again did I have to file through index cards. The subject groupings finally started to make sense.
Moving library services online has pushed changes great and small in libraries over the past two decades, including some you might not expect. For example, in many libraries, the layout of the building and services has now changed. Back in the day, card catalogs took up a lot of room, and were usually found near on the main floor, to make them as accessible as possible, and next to a reference desk, to make sure there were people to help. But once the card catalogs went away, libraries had more room for seating. Historically, the librarians who cataloged the books and maintained the card catalog had their offices on the main floor to be close to the catalog so that they could add or remove cards as needed. But if there’s no catalog to maintain, then those people can sit somewhere else in the library, and make even more room for the public and additional services at the entrances. When a library renovates, those important “behind the scenes” services usually move elsewhere in the building to make more room for patrons on the main floor. Usually these services bring together technology and library services to give students greater access to a range of support for their work. (This “knowledge commons” model is now being planned for Pattee and Paterno libraries at University Park.)
Automating the card catalog was just the beginning of moving libraries online. Specialized databases and indexes accessible only across a network were soon forthcoming. And then, in the early 1990s, came the World Wide Web. I was an early skeptic and technophobe, thinking that it was just a fad for toys, and I was about as wrong as I could possibly be. A decade after I left college, the way we sought, accessed and used information from libraries and other sources had undergone the most radical shifts since the invention of the printing press. And by then, I was working in a library again, redesigning the web pages for an online catalog to make it easier to use. A decade later, I’m working here at Penn State, the Web is omnipresent, and our incoming freshmen probably can’t remember the world without it.
Now it might be faster to get information, but it is possibly even more confusing and sometimes difficult to get an answer you can trust. We might only need information that is “good enough” for the moment (movie times, football scores, weather). If you’re not sure, you can start at Google, or maybe at Wikipedia to get a lead that might take you to something more authoritative. With some work, you can find some authoritative sources of information that matters to your life (http://www.cdc.gov/ or http://www.consumerreports.org/).
The whole world isn’t online yet, but our students are still surprised to find that this is so. Printed books and other materials are still the bulk of what the Penn State Libraries buy, but we also spend nearly $8 million per year to acquire, license, and provide access to online resources such as those you can find here in the Alumni Library. These tend to be highly specialized publications and databases that provide you with the complete text of the book or essay, or detailed indices that can help you find more resources, much like The CAT, the Libraries' online catalog. These tools can also be hard for the non-specialist to use. So access to authoritative information may be quicker, but it is not necessarily any simpler.
Our freshmen have grown up using computers to do their academic work, to stay in touch with family and friends, and to be entertained. But they are a lot like I was when I started college. My antipathy to the card catalog was well-established, and I also didn’t like asking for help—after all, I was 18. Once I figured out where the literature or history section was in the stacks, I was good to go. And I was unusual in that I actually went into the stacks to look for things. A good friend of mine is now a professor of American literature at a liberal arts college, and claims he never went into our college library when we were undergraduates.
In that respect, my friend was more like many of the students we meet who start with Google and might not go much further, much less into the stacks. And why wouldn’t you start with Google? We all do. After all, it’s easy to use, it’s fast, and you can usually find something. Besides, their website tells us “Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful” (http://www.google.com/corporate/). With a mission like that, they must know what they are doing.
But, wait a minute...isn’t that what a library does?
Yes, of course. But Google figured out, in a very short time, how to make the web much more accessible and useable by creating a method of indexing nearly all web pages, and also a method of predicting which of those pages are most likely to be relevant to your needs. It was like have a superfast librarian who knows everything at your disposal. Sort of.
Maybe you’ve seen The Desk Set, (link to http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050307/), a 1957 movie starring Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn. Hepburn manages the research department for a television network—in other words, she’s their librarian. In comes Tracy, hired as an “efficiency expert,” who brings computers to the network to help them manage their payroll, and.their library. What will happen? Will the computers, or “electronic brains,” as Tracy calls them, replace the librarians, as he arrogantly claims? Will they all lose their jobs? Will Hepburn’s fear for her job and dislike of Tracy’s arrogance prevent her from falling in love? No and no. The payroll computer makes a big mistake (it fires the company president), causing everyone to realize that computers don’t replace people, they help people, and they are only as smart as the people who use them. Then Tracy and Hepburn declare their love for each other.
Just like the “electronic brains” in The Desk Set, Google can get the job done, but it can do a lot more with human help. Google knows this: they have many librarians on their payroll. At Penn State and elsewhere librarians increasingly focus work not just on organizing information, and making it accessible, we also help people create their new work and manage it for themselves. We facilitate the process of research, as well as managing the end results. So today, in addition to showing students how to use the catalog to find books, or indexes to find journals and periodicals, we also show them how to use Google better. We have set up our catalog and many of our electronic resources so that they can be more easily found in Google, and to help users connect to the authoritative research services we have purchased. Some of our newer librarians have researched how well Google finds scholarly resources compared to the “official” indexes (sometimes better, sometimes not). Others have developed a number of classes and tutorials that show our students and faculty how they can use Google better. (http://alumni.libraries.psu.edu/newlibrarians.html). We’re teaching students to use Google in the same way we might teach them to use the catalog. Once they’ve found what they need, we can show them how to use some of Google’s less well-known features to save their results, and to create their own writings and presentations (see what else Google does besides search at http://www.google.com/intl/en/options/). Google is just the start: most of our students spend more time on their phones, or online on Facebook than they do in class. So, we’ve developed some interesting ways to link our catalogs into Facebook and let our students’ research from the spot they like to spend their time.
Similarly, libraries have learned a lot from Google. They have done inspiring work and solved some problems that threatened to make the Web unusable. By making it easy to search, they have provided us with ways to simplify access to our own collections. They have also had the vision (and the money behind it) to start partnerships with over two dozen libraries worldwide that will lead to having more than 20 million books searchable online in the next decade. Penn State is one of those libraries, and we expect that specialized researchers and the general public all over the world will benefit from these efforts.
Google casts a broad net, but it is not the whole world of information—only a large part of what is online. And in spite of Google’s efforts, it’s unlikely that it will ever fully achieve its mission: too much stuff will never be digitized, and will always remain hidden away in corners of the world. We are frequently asked if we will be closing some of our libraries down, or if we really need all the space we have, since “everything’s online now, right?” Wrong. It’s taken over 500 years to generate the printed history of the world, and printed materials are just the start of what libraries are charged with collecting and preserving. Libraries will continue to not only house print collections, they will also employ the people who can best organize information for long-term access, and who can help researchers ferret out those documents, records, and details that remain hidden away.
But it’s undeniable that as we have all moved online, the pace of research and scholarship has quickened, and that much of what we see today is “born digital,” not in print. Penn State's Libraries are not only a repository of materials and publications; they are also facilitators of learning and scholarship. As I hinted earlier, we teach our students how to use tools and systems that will not only help find information, but help them turn it into useful knowledge. Our faculty gets the same treatment. They are experts in their fields, but they increasingly turn to libraries to help them organize, manage, distribute, and even preserve the work they are creating in their offices and labs. Information technology has helped to link libraries directly to that process of scholarship, and it will now be our job to become active stewards of what our researchers create online to ensure its durability and longevity. Just how are we going to be sure that all those books we’re digitizing will persevere for the future? (Anyone who has ever changed computers more than once and now can’t find the document written five years ago, or look at the vacation photos from a decade ago will know what I’m worried about.)
What excites me now about working in a library isn’t the current version of stamping the book—a repetitive job that in a way signified the order and clarity of the library. I don’t really know if such jobs even exist in libraries anymore. Now I’m excited by the messiness of it all. We don’t really know what libraries will look like in ten or fifteen years, how search technologies will continue to develop and show new imperfections, or exactly what our student will create when they finish school and become researchers, public servants, and business leaders. I’m certain we will still be helping them, their children, and the faculty who teach them find the data and the information they need because machines, after all, are only as perfect as the humans who create them.