“Libraries Beyond Books: A Call for New Paradigms”
By James Tracy

This is an edited and revised version of a talk given to the “Learning in Action Library Symposium,” held at Noble and Greenough School, May 14, 2009

I want to start with a thought experiment, describing to you a very surreal science-fiction sounding futuristic world, maybe one outside of our comfort zones.  In this future world, physicians are able to conduct full diagnostics and get three-dimensional images of our internal organs without any excisions, as a result of machines that can provide what are called CAT scans MRIs, PET scans, and so forth.  Also, as opposed to the phones with which we’re familiar, attached to a wire in our homes or offices, the people in this world are able to make calls from tiny devices they bring with them, even when they’re driving down the highway.  In fact, these “cell phones” are getting smarter and smarter, allowing you to send and receive something called “e-mail” and to search an enormously vast source of information called the “internet.”

There are many other astonishing things in this world.  There are in vitro fertilized humans.  There are transgenic species that are partly human.  In fact, right near where we are meeting, this future world will have goats that are forty percent human and which will secrete human proteins in their milk that can be manufactured into anticoagulants by pharmaceutical firms.   

There is much more that could be described, but, of course, I’m describing not a future world but the world of today, in 2009.   But what would you have thought in 1984, just 25 years ago, had I described this world we now inhabit?  Absolutely shocking!  Had you predicted what actually exists today, they would have put you in a straitjacket!

I once pointed out to a world-renowned physicist, that, in lecture he delivered 1984 predicting the next twenty-five years in science, he never mentioned the internet.  In the early 1980s, I saw a computer scientist from MIT confidently predict that the average person would never be able to make meaningful use of the storage capacity of the personal computers then being sold.   In 1996, a prominent geneticist at Princeton predicted that scientists would not be able to map the human genome until at least 2010; in fact, we had the rough draft in 2000, just four years after his prediction.

There is no indication that we are reaching the limit to Moore’s law, which roughly states that computing power at a given price will double every 18 months or so.   The speed and miniaturization of computing power has continued at an exponentially expanding pace since before Moore first promulgated his proposition, so that, for instance,  from 1940 to 1980  the miniaturization of the same amount of computing power has been on the order of a billion to one.   That rate of expansion will continue for the foreseeable future.  As we reach the physical limits of silicon chips, new technologies, such as quantum computing, will come on line to keep Moore’s law alive and well for years to come.

Given all of that, my question to you is:  Will libraries survive the next 25 years, and, if so, in what form?

Well, we’ve looked back 25 years.  Now I’d like to shift us back to 1439.  That shouldn’t be too difficult, since we have already looked back 25 years – because, in fact, there has been more change in data accumulation from 1984 to 2009 than there was from 1439 to 1984.  So if we can go back to 1984, the shift thence to 1439 is actually less dramatic.  It has been said that there is more data in a week of the New York Times than the average person encountered during a lifetime in the 16th century. 

I want to tell you about this wonderful scriptorium that we have at Cushing Academy in 1439.  We have scribes working full time to illuminate and copy the central texts of western civilization, especially Aristotle.  We now have a remarkable library collection of 200 manuscripts, of which we are justly boastful.  Now, I just learned some guy named Gutenberg claims to have perfected a method of movable type, which he thinks is the next big thing.  I’m skeptical.  I don’t see how this is ever going to replace the beautiful illuminated scripts that we have.  So much of value will be lost if we move to these ugly, nondescript, black and white, uniform looking things called printed books.  It surely will never compete with the aesthetic value of illuminated vellum.  Compared to the human, personal expression of handwritten texts, where’s the individualization in printed copies?  Also, these books are not going to be safe for society, because we won’t be able to control information from getting into the hands of troublemakers and even well-intentioned people who can’t handle it responsibly. 

You see the point I’m making?  Similar things are being said to try to forestall the demise of printed books in 2009.  There is some legitimacy in these concerns.  Each major technology transition does entail both loss and gain for those who live through the liminal period, but few of us in 2009 would choose to return to the time when intergenerational transmission of culture was limited to handwritten texts.

Let me push us back still further in time to one of the late Platonic dialogues, which was certainly more a reflection of Plato’s thinking than that of Socrates.  Plato describes Socrates lamenting the invention of writing, because, with the onset of this new technology, people lost some of the organicity and immediacy of verbal expression.  The written word reifies ideas, and they become less fluid as a result.  In fact, our idea of the relationship between the written and spoken word has shifted over the centuries to give more primacy to the written word as the centuries have passed.  We today would consider it very odd for someone to read aloud to themselves, but as late as the Roman Empire that was the norm.   St. Augustine, in his Confessions, describes his surprise at happening upon St. Anselm reading silently.   He’s struck by the fact that Anselm is reading without saying the words aloud.  So even for centuries after the printed word emerged, reading text had still not shifted to an entirely private, inner experience, as opposed to a public, social experience.

Plato recognized that there is some tremendous loss to a certain aspect of a fundamentally human experience with the emergence of this technology.  Yet he, ironically writing down a lament over the emergence of writing, must have seen more gain than loss to the development.

Before we return to 2009, let us push ourselves once more further back in time.  Humans existed for hundreds of thousands of years, trying to understand the world, before the invention of writing.  It’s a fundamental human desire to grasp the world around us.  Every child is born with a continuous desire to Braille the world.  It took an enormous amount of effort, with our 3 pound brains and our short life spans, to accumulate information and pass it on to future generations. For hundreds of thousands of years we did this by oral tradition alone – via stories, songs, and myths about animals’ behaviors, seasons, human aspirations and limits.  Homer’s Iliad, all 50,000 lines, was memorized and recited by bards in an oral tradition, a rather laborious method, even with its rhyme schemes and other mnemonic devices, compared to the eventual conveyance of Homer to written text.  When our ancestors developed writing some 5,000 years ago, it generated an explosion of cultural cultivation that writing made possible compared to the first several hundred thousand years of human discovery and transmission.  In fact historians now typically mark the beginning of history as coeval with the invention of writing.

On our way back to the present, let’s stop in once more at 1439.  At that time, it took an average of 8 months to make a copied manuscript in Europe.  In other words, a library of 12 volumes represented about 8 years of full time pay to copyists.  So to have a library of 12 volumes meant you were rich enough to pay for 8 years of labor hours.  Gutenberg’s innovation made printed texts, by comparison, remarkably inexpensive.  Gutenberg could never have anticipated that what he had invented would result in the Reformation or form the basis for the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, and ultimately, the industrial revolution in subsequent centuries.  With printing, we see an explosion of information dissemination that, in turn, fosters tremendous increases in data accumulation.  So you see a huge quickening of data along an S-curve.  Think for a moment about this S-curve: it begins very flat - there are dips, certainly, but, aggregately,it smooths out to a slow, steady rise from the invention of writing to Gutenberg.  Get to Guttenberg, and it starts to go upward much more sharply.  Get to computers, and the accumulation of data begins to look virtually vertical.  Will it eventually flatten out?  Yes.  You can’t accumulate more knowledge than the number of molecules in the universe.  There are fixed limits to the potential amount of data, but where and when it will flatten out is anybody’s guess, because it is very vertical still today.  And the social, political, economic, and cultural implications of today’s inflection in information technology will be commensurately greater and less predictable than was the invention of movable type.

What does all this mean for us?  First of all, I need to give you a disclosure.  I am the most avid bibliophile I know.  I just left my home where I have floor to ceiling bookshelves.  That said, if I made a list of today’s cultural endangered species, it would have to include print newspapers,  post offices, television, Hollywood, the music industry, and – yes -  libraries as we know them. 

I want to argue today that librarians must be their own internal disruptors, else they will become dinosaurs.   This need not mean the end of libraries, but it is essential that, for libraries to have any meaningful function twenty-five years hence, they must morph into a radically different vehicle for accessing ideas and information. 

This is why, at Cushing Academy, where we are dedicated to forging the most far-sighted pedagogies for twenty-first century education, we have decided to be bookless within a year. 

You know [holding up a book], if I look at this book I am struck by how limited it is.  This is pretty bulky.  I don’t mean to belittle or disparage it.  I love books, and I love the representation of culture that they embody, but, from an information perspective, this is a very, very bulky way to reposit data by today’s standards.

We should be able to hold not only this book but thousands of others in one hand.  So Cushing has decided to go from a library that right now is a warehouse of 20,000 books shelved in old technology to a library of millions of books utilizing far less space and with much richer and more powerful means of accessing that information.  If I want to research all the references to Churchill just in our little 20,000 volume library, it’s going to take me months and years, but I can now data mine every reference to Churchill in 7 million volumes in a matter of seconds using search engines.  Moreover, we find from a check of the records that our students aren’t really using the books extensively for research, anyway.  They’re already doing most of that online, and, in fact, they are checking out more music and films than books from the Cushing library.   

I’ll tell you that, with the financial crisis, as a Headmaster, I no longer see the point of maintaining this huge warehouse of underutilized space that we call a library.  Better to free up that space while at the same time expanding by many orders of magnitude the school community’s access to information, literature, art, music via terminals that I term “Portals to Civilization.” 

Rather than libraries becoming obsolete, we can transform them into vibrant centers of learning, giving ready access to everything humans have achieved, from every civilization, across an ever-expanding universe of culture.  At the same time, we can use the space now freed up from books to build convivial areas where students and teachers are encouraged to interact – yes, even talk -  about ideas, so it becomes a place of interaction – with a coffee shop, faculty lounge, shared teacher and student learning environments, a student area for study.  Teachers and students will interact as shared learners occupying a variety of spaces that will integrate departments, facilitate the interchange of ideas, all amidst a “Portal to Civilization” that provides ready access to the larger discourses across the entire globe.

In this scenario, librarians are far from obsolete.  Quite the contrary, because data bases will be so expansive, Cushing’s librarians will be more crucial than ever to help guide students and teachers ably through the myriad sources now available and rapidly growing in electronic formats.  Another benefit to this approach is that the “Portal to Civilization”, which within a few years will be co-extensive with all of human knowledge, is going to be decentralized so the librarian, as somebody who is particularly skilled in accessing this information, can go into the classrooms and have millions of volumes right there in the classroom.  So you can bring history’s largest library with you wherever you go and help students within any setting.

We are also excited about what this will mean for Cushing’s Academic Support program in terms of teaching students with learning differences, because those students will have multiple vectors and media by which to approach information at their fingertips.

There are some who lament the decline of the book.  I am among them.  I shall always treasure my books, but I shall do so for antiquarian reasons alone.  I am at the same time tremendously excited, as a reader and learner, by the possibility of someday soon being able to carry the equivalent of the Library of Congress in the palm of my hand.  That will be the realization of humanity’s dream since the inception of discovery hundreds of thousands of years ago.  And it is going to unleash social forces far more powerful and unforeseen than any that Gutenberg brought about.  This is the future. All those who fail to get ahead of this curve, embrace its possibilities, and try to optimize its potential for humane and humanizing contingencies, will face certain reduction to irrelevance within ten years.