A Personal Pantagraph

Denvention 3, the 66th World Science Fiction Convention, featured a panel by librarians discussing the future of libraries. This was an eye-opening panel. Who would have thought librarians could be so passionate? And that they had such large axes to grind against school administrators and local governments. But what concerns me here is what they had to say about technology. Let’s just say they weren’t fans.

One of the reasons is the impact technology has on the library’s budget. Libraries today (and likely in the future) are more than collections of books. They also offer services to their community, and one of the services today is free access to computers and the internet. But that entails continuous upgrades to those computers and software, using the same funds that would normally go to the library collection.

Another problem was the perceived competition between the library and the internet as an information source. When I was a student, my reference librarian was my primary source for obscure information; today, Google fills that role. What the librarians understand is that as Google continues to expand its search capability, there is less need for reference librarians. Eventually, they may disappear from your local library. The real tragedy (for us, not just the librarians) is that there are many things that Google can’t find. But since it is so efficient at answering many questions, it will drive out its competitors in the question-answering business. In the end, only Goooglable questions will remain. It is the same mechanics that drives out the local bookstore in favor of Borders and Barnes & Noble.

Computer technology is very good at solving one problem, namely moving and processing information quickly. Unfortunately, that’s no the only problem that people have, so adopting a technology solution usually displaces less efficient, but more powerful existing solutions. But sometimes technology really is the answer to the question. And that is partly the case here, just as Amazon and AbeBooks are the answer to Borders and Barnes & Noble.

You see, I really don’t need a local reference librarian anymore. But I do need one on occasion. What could be better than a nationwide reference librarian service, accessible through the internet? I would propose that the library of congress house the effort, although the individual librarians could live anywhere in the country, or even out of it. That is the power of the internet.

Another problem the librarians mentioned can also be solved by technology. Like many early adopters, the librarians have seen what happens to information when it is stored in old media. Here’s an example. As a graduate student, I worked as a system administrator for a few years. One day, I found in the computer lab an old magnetic tape with the label “DO NOT ERASE. LIFE’S WORK.” Presumably this was penned by an earlier graduate student, and presumably it had copies of his or her dissertation or lab results. I say “presumably,” because the tape was in a format that our tape drives couldn’t read anymore. And that was a long time ago, back when you could find tape drives in a computer lab!

Here, the pace of technology is clearly to blame. So can new technology help? I believe it can if we make a distinction between the content and the media. It’s the content that you want to keep. The media is just a way to store the content. As new technology appears, media may change, but it’s still the content you want. In my own time, my media has changed from cassette tapes to 5-1/4 floppies to 3-1/2 floppies to hard drives to zip drives to writable CDs to USB sticks, not to mention writable DVDs and assorted video and camera storage devices.

Where technology can help is with the cloud storage. That completely divorces the content from the media. For instance, Amazon S3 allows users to store their content on the internet. That means that the folks at Amazon take care of migrating the content from one media to another as the preferred media changes, while keeping the content always available to the users. That’s one problem solved.

There does remain another problem, however. What if that unknown student’s dissertation was written in, say, Scribe, a word processor from the days before WordPerfect and Microsoft Word? Even if I had the content, I’m not sure I could process it.

Today’s technology can disappoint us here, but the way out is clear. The answer is to use fully specified, open formats. That way, even if the software to decode the content is no longer available, it can, in principle, be recreated. For most information, the best format is something like XML that can be read by humans. (Note: binary XML or obfuscated XML (I’m talking to you, .docx) need not apply.) Even better, there should be free programs available that already understand the format. By “free,” I mean programs whose source code is available and unencumbered, not just zero-cost. That way the format can outlive any changes in software fashion or versions.

So the librarians have a clear reason to be mad at technologists. And some of their problems just won’t go away. But we technologists can help them with the rest. Let’s do that!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 13th, 2008 at 8:39 am and is filed under Computers, Society. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.