Walt Crawford: Mission, Media, and Users

Mission, Media, and Users:
Coping with a Complex Future

Original summary: Effective technical services have always been user-oriented in the best way: supporting not only today's users but those of a generation and five generations from now. The complex mix of media, digital resources, and technology in the new century's libraries will continue to change, and will continue to require flexible, sophisticated technical services. Coherent missions, reflected in library services and operations, provide the stability needed to cope with ongoing change coherently. This is the speech as originally written, and differs somewhat from the speech as delivered. (It's longer, for one thing.)

I'd like to start with the introduction from a speech I did in 1996.

Here we are halfway through 1996. Based on the projections of the late 1980s and early 1990s, print publishing is already pretty much dead--and libraries are well on their way to being virtual or irrelevant.

Most of us get all our information and entertainment from settop boxes and handheld wireless devices. The more advanced of you wear your computers. The rest of us enjoy the big flat screens hanging on the wall or the smaller cousins in the palms of our hands, with better ergonomics than books ever had. Commuters use half-pound 9-by-12 Dynabooks to peruse their customized newspapers on the way to work, updated instantly and offered in living color with stereo sound--that is, the few people who don't simply telecommute. These wondrous devices provide instant, easy access to all the world's knowledge at trivial prices, and make it easy for us to jump from one item to logically-related items as fast as we can say the word--for of course, our ubiquitous infotainment devices understand speech as well as they do handwriting. We're halfway to the great converged all-digital millennium. All but the poorest first-world residents already do everything digitally, with the rest of the world following soon.

Which raises a question: Since everything has converged, digital transmission has replaced physical distribution, and telecommuting is how we work--why did I spend a day flying out to New York to address you in person? Ah, but then, maybe you're looking at a live hologram, projecting my image while I sit at home in California. Yes, that must be it. Oh well, in another year or two you'll have a direct network-to-mind interface, and we can avoid the expense of the holographic projector.

Presumably, any of you with money to invest paid attention to futurists and market analysts. You avoided CRT manufacturers, since flat screens replaced them long before 1990. You got out of mass-storage companies in the late 1980s, since solid-state storage wiped out hard disks around 1992. And of course, you sold your paper stocks to buy into DynaBook, Eo, Go Computing and the rest of the hand-held crowd. After all, the digital handwriting has been on the virtual wall for years.

Why do I repeat material from four years ago? Because the pundits and futurists continue to tell us that everything will be transformed every day now. And why not? If there's one thing that pundits have learned over the last decade, it's that there is no penalty for being wrong, as long as you're provocative. But also because it's useful to be reminded just how offbase most projections have been. The millennium has arrived, half of us have access to the Internet at home (and we all could if we wanted it), and still we are not digital.

I'm afraid this won't be a straightforward speech addressing specific technical services topics. Those topics show up here and there, and I think the whole speech does speak to the future of technical services--but you may have to put the pieces together after I'm done.

Straw Men and Committed Futurists

I started speaking about complex library futures in 1992, because I had read too many confident projections about the end of print and the like. More recently, I'm told that I'm battling straw men--that there's really nobody out there putting down print and claiming that everything should (and will) be digital. God knows, I'm bored with the topic; it's absurd, and gets in the way of more significant topics for the future of libraries.

The fact is, however, that those straw men show surprising persistence. At each of the last three library conferences where I spoke, at least one other speaker offered inevitable futures that marginalized print with exactly the oversimplifications I've been attacking for most of the 1990s. I don't plan to spend much time on these straw men here--but damned if they don't have surprising powers of speech and pen, for people who don't exist. For that matter, I suppose it's possible that D-Lib is really about adding digital resources to print-based libraries--but it's sure difficult to figure that out from the articles and editorials!

Coping with the Language

Most library leaders now accept that print is part of the future--but many of them seem to regret this. That regret is flagged by the word "transitional" when speaking of tomorrow's complex libraries. The only way I can make sense of "transitional" is as a belief that some day, in a preferred future, we really will be rid of nasty old books and print journals. And, for "transitional" to be a useful term, that transition should be measured in years or decades, not centuries.

That strikes me as presumptuous, probably wrong, and ultimately self-defeating. I believe we can reasonably predict that healthy academic and public libraries will be acquiring large numbers of books and print periodicals for at least several decades to come. I think we can also predict that, given the difficulties of digital archiving, the relative ease of retaining print, and the importance of the long collection, print will be a substantial aspect of most libraries for at least the next century. For that matter, given simple matters of copyright, I can state flatly that most of the important writing of the 20^th century will not be available to all users at all times in digital forms during my lifetime--and probably not during yours either.

Complex libraries require continuing attention to a multitude of media and access techniques. Such libraries require more thought and more creativity than single-medium libraries. It's not a question of settling on a new paradigm; it's a question of continuing shifts and balances. If librarians succeed at supporting complex libraries effectively, it doesn't matter whether there is (or is not) an eventual transition away from print as an important medium, or as the central set of media for most libraries. It won't be a matter of librarians managing a transition; it will be one of librarians managing complexity. Complexity can't be planned out decades ahead--and neither can real-world transitions in media use.

Technology: Tools and Traps

Thoughtful people are well aware of the continuum from data, to information, to knowledge, understanding, and wisdom. I find that it's interesting to make that continuum even more confusing by inserting a critical third stage between information and knowledge: the stage I call "story." But that's another, well, story. Here, I'd like to discuss a different continuum that directly affects libraries and librarians, because I think too many of us get caught at different points in the continuum.

I'll call that continuum technology, media, meaning, services, and mission. Basically, technology provides tools--and, for libraries, those tools serve to create, distribute, and provide access to media of one sort or another. But media are also just tools, ways to package and convey meaning. Librarians add meaning by collecting, organizing, preserving, locating, and combining packages to serve users--both today's users and those of the long now. Finally, a library's mission serves to pull all the pieces together and to provide the platform that offers stability through the ever-changing future of technology, media, meaning, and even services.

I don't plan to say a lot about library missions. Libraries need to have them, they need to be maintained as living sets of principles, and they need to have direct connections to collections and services--and each library's mission is likely to be slightly different, although the broad strokes will be quite similar across libraries. Beyond that, I'm the wrong speaker to address mission--so I'll start at the other end, with technology. After all, that's how I make my living--and most of my writing is still about technology, at least on the surface.

Tool, Toy, Passion and Terror

Different people approach specific technologies--or technology as a whole--with different perspectives. Four perspectives that come immediately to mind are technology as tool, toy, passion and terror. I suspect most of us view some specific technologies with at least three of those four perspectives, and a few words on each may be useful.

Technology as Tool

The World Wide Web? It's a tool. Programs on personal computers? They're tools (which makes the PC itself an odd sort of toolbench). Online catalogs? Tools. XML? A tool. This may be the most useful perspective because it keeps the technology in the background. A tool is useless unless you have a task for it--and your quest is to find the right tool for the task, not (I hope) to find tasks to suit your tools. Most tools can be used for tasks they weren't designed for--but they're rarely the best tool for the task. Many tools aren't well designed for any task, and newer tools aren't necessarily better than old ones.

The problem with technology as tool is that it's boring. There is a Precision Toolmaker Magazine, but I doubt that it has anywhere near the readership of PC Magazine. So we move on to more exciting perspectives--but we should never forget that, in the end, if a technology doesn't work well as a tool, it's flawed (unless, of course, it's intended as a toy). We should also remember that, in a great many cases, tools should be nearly invisible: they should do their work without intruding on the task at hand. One mark of a well-designed socket wrench is that you pay no attention to the wrench at all: it just works. That transparency might be worth aiming for in our online systems and technology-based services as well.

This might be a good time to say a few words about online catalogs, although I may have more to say later on. Much as I hate to say it, maybe the best online catalog for most users is the one that's least interesting--and that's really hard to say, since I've spent years working on catalog interface design and wrote three books on the subject. It comes to the fore, though, when I read articles about how online catalogs should engage users in exploring ways to find the perfect result. I think I understand the thinking behind that argument, but it changes the online catalog from an effective tool to something else entirely--and to something that will turn off most users to benefit a few.

Most catalog users want to find something quickly, just as most screwdriver-users want to put something together or hang something on a wall. Would screwdriver-users be better off if they went through a learning process to determine the ideal fastening method for a particular job? Perhaps, but that's not what they're interested in. They want to pick up a tool that works, attend to the task, and move on. Most catalog users want to find a particular title (which they may remember badly), find things by a particular author (although they may not have the name exactly right), or find things on a particular subject (although they won't know LCSH). Scholars may need to find everything that meets a set of criteria, on those occasions when they're engaging in primary scholarship--but that's a fairly small percentage of catalog use even in academic libraries, and nearly nonexistent in public libraries.

Good online catalogs will have ways to support that deep exploration--but first and foremost, good online catalogs let everybody else get in, find something (that "something" frequently being a call number so they can go browse the shelves), and move on. And in most libraries, every step needed to get through the search process will lead some percentage of users to abandon the process.

That's reality. I'm fairly proud of Eureka, RLG's end-user search service. I think it's a better tool than most online catalogs--and I'm pretty sure that our innovations have improved some online catalogs. We'll keep improving it, and we've just added (I hope) ways for hard-core librarians to use it as a different kind of tool. But we look at how it's used, and we know the truth: even for a secondary tool like Eureka, most people want to get in, find something, and get out. They want a transparent tool, and we should make that transparency possible--while still having hooks for deeper exploration, for the minority that needs that exploration.

Technology as Toy

Now, back to technology. Is there a man in this room who doesn't treat some technologies as toys? I say "man" advisedly. Although many women are avid toy-users, there's a lot of truth in the twin sayings about adult males: "The difference between the man and the boy is the size of his toys" and "Whoever dies with the most toys wins." Solitaire is on every other notebook computer being used in flight. A big chunk of the craze for MP3, I believe, is that it's such an interesting toy to experiment--well, play--with. That's also true for scanners, HTML, digital cameras, electronic books, digital typography, CD-RW burners, image processing, Web sites, what have you.

I'm all in favor of delighting in technology--as long as it's balanced with the recognition that your toy is someone else's tool. It can be awfully easy to lose that balance, to develop a neat idea into a tool that insists on its own importance. One company that produces innovative image-modifying software insists on its own quixotic interfaces. Those interfaces make it clear that the company is building useful toys--but the toylike qualities get in the way of using the tools.

Technology as Passion

It's possible to lose perspective on a technology when you treat it as a toy. It's almost certain when that technology becomes a passion. The line between toy and passion can be a fine one and we probably all cross it at times. That's probably how sensible people come to say that all the information you could ever want is somewhere on the Web, if you just know how to find it: they've become passionate about the Web.

You can spot those who are passionate about a technology. They will ignore doubts and quite possibly assert that doubts should be ignored. They will assert universality and inevitability. They will almost always fail to see all aspects of the task at hand--because they're more interested in the tool than in the task.

Technology as Terror

There's a connection between passion and terror. Both represent unbalanced views of technology, but both can be plausible at times. Historically, the Luddites were right, albeit in a losing cause. I suspect that technological terror has declined these days, except in areas such as transgenic crops. But when someone becomes passionate about a technology, one natural reaction is to react negatively, particularly when that passion overrides reason and perspective.

Do we need to worry about technological terror in the library community? Not really. We do need to consider a much different issue, a fifth perspective on technology that you really should consider.

Technological Disinterest

There are people who don't use Web-based catalogs because they're afraid of them--although I don't see much of that in my own public library. Terror would be far too strong a word. More significant, and perfectly understandable, are those who just don't care about a particular technology--and won't use it unless they see a clear advantage for them. These aren't the people who will stand in line half an hour and pay a fee to use a cashier, rather than using an ATM. They're the people who don't have personal computers because they don't have much use for them. They're the avid public library users who rarely use the catalog or the reference desk--because they'd just as soon browse the shelves. There's nothing wrong with these people.

Most of us have areas of technology that we just don't care about, even though they affect our daily lives. That's healthy. That's also why technological tools should be subsumed to the tasks they serve. Most people are more interested in solving tasks than in trying out new tools except in their own areas of interest, and that's the way it should be.

Media and Technology

Most of us have moved beyond the simple-minded idea that technology is like a bulldozer, flattening everything in its path. In practice, the relationships between technology and media are remarkably complex and somewhat unpredictable. I already have two books and several articles out that discuss media and technology, and I'm starting to work on another book that focuses entirely on media issues. For today, I'd like to toss off a few examples and notions that you might find enlightening.

First, consider the interactions of digital technology and book publishing. The simplistic futurists have always said that digital technology would replace paper book and magazine publishing in its entirety: end of story. That's not quite what's happened. Instead, we've seen a series of interactions, including the following:

Late 1980s: high-quality desktop typography lowers bar for very small publishers, cost for many publications--includes my books.
Late 1990s: Web commerce: Amazon and bn.com mostly sell physical books. Possible negative effects on local retail (unclear); additional ordering source for libraries (but only for special items); primarily indicates sustained interest in print books.
For more than a decade, or Right Now: Portable e-book readers: niche, questionable ergonomics & readability, tough issues for libraries, no savings for readers: no clear winners, little probability of mass market appeal, problematic for archiving, may be good for specialized authors/publishers. Sales figures are so low that nobody wants to mention them--surprisingly, given that there really are significant niche markets for these devices.
The most interesting and surprising interaction:
Instant book operations combined with digital distribution: one-off book creation & binding, either in large retail operations or in regional centers, with the resulting book having all the normal characteristics of any other book. Archival qualities: should be as good as any book if the binding is done properly; black laser print is as archival as printing ink, may be more so. Additionally, if/when digital archiving issues settled, offers access route for those long items that can best be used in book form. Substantial new possibility for individual authors, very small publishers, books with small likely sales, and backlist/out-of-print items. Effect on libraries: new sources for materials, with no apparent negatives. Effect on traditional publishing: probably not much; instabooks are inherently more expensive to produce than traditionally-printed books of comparable quality, for reasons that technology probably can't fix--but the possibility of retaining a backlist without massive inventory may make this beneficial for traditional publishers as well.
But let's not forget pseudobooks: One big problem with e-books is that readability is nowhere near as good as real books. One supposed advantage of digital resources is that they can be used simultaneously by as many people as need them--they're never unavailable because they're checked out. Well, netLibrary has brought a dose of copyright reality to that advantage--while putting sort of an odd twist on the readability problem. With netLibrary, e-texts are checked out: a library is buying simultaneous-user rights, not full access. That's a sensible balance between authorial rights and the grotesque prices that big journal publishers want for completely open access. But the solution to readability problems is unusual: netLibrary e-books can't be printed out in their entirety--at least not easily--and the circulation period is normally fairly short. I think of netLibrary as offering pseudobooks: booklength texts where a library can assume that readers don't really want to read the book, but only extract a paragraph or maybe read a chapter. Unfortunately, netLibrary advocates aren't putting it that way--they're extolling the wonders of expanding their collections without taking up shelf space. Is there a real role for pseudobooks? Absolutely. Does that role endanger print books? I don't believe so.

Complement, Not Replacement: Bringing In the New

Talk of rapid convergence and the death of print began in the 1980s or before, and the peak of hysteria may have been 1992. At that point, one knowledgeable source asserted that a conservative estimate was that print would have lost half its market within five years: after all, print is the oldest and stodgiest of contemporary media.

It's been eight years now. According to the 1998 Statistical Abstract of the United States, book publishing in the U.S. had $12.6 billion in revenues in 1987, $16.7 billion in 1992, and $21.3 billion in 1996. The best estimates I've seen for 1997 and 1998 are around $23 and $24 billion respectively--certainly not the $8 billion that 1992's projections would yield.

What about other old-fashioned print media? In 1987, newspapers had $31.8 billion in revenues; in 1992, $34.1 billion. In 1996, that was up to $39.1 billion--and there has been no precipitous decline since. Magazines show a similar story: $17.3 billion in 1987, $22 billion in 1992, and $24.9 billion in 1996. None of the print media are fading away, even as new media enrich the landscape.

You can get misled by some of the numbers. It's true that total newspaper circulation declined a bit in some recent years--but that's mostly because evening papers are disappearing. In fact, morning papers show small but steady increases in total circulation for every year in the 1990s. When it comes to book publishing and the number of titles, the increases aren't exactly slow. Bowker reports that U.S. publishers produced 46,700 new titles and editions in 1990; 49,200 in 1992; 51,700 in 1994; and a staggering 68,200 in 1996. I'd lay odds that the figure for 1998 won't be less than 50,000--which would be more different titles than in 1992.

If we look at both old and new media more carefully, we can see that addition is the rule, not replacement. Consider just a few of the many new and old media:

Email is still the heaviest use of the Internet and, in its many permutations, one of the most intriguing "new media." You may not think of email as a medium, just as we never thought of personal correspondence as a medium. When you move beyond plain email to listservs, Usenet, and the many different bulletin board systems, you have a more complex picture. Are these media? Yes, I believe they are. Are they worthy of library attention? I'm not sure, and I think the issues deserve further study.
Most of what you think of as books are not likely to be transformed, although quite a bit of what now gets published in bound paper form might work better in digital form. For that matter, most magazines (as opposed to journals) aren't likely to turn all-digital any time soon. A more interesting note is that some scholars are building new media for scholarly output, media that may suit some of that output better than short-run scholarly monographs and narrow scholarly journals. If these scholars succeed, some of what's currently published in scholarly monographs and print journals will migrate to new media that do it better and that do things print can't do.

Digital publications and distribution have already replaced some areas of book publishing (partly or wholly). That's as it should be. I shed no tears when Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature is replaced by online and CD-ROM indexes. Most households are better served by $30-$50 CD-ROM encyclopedias updated every year or two than by massive $600-$1,500 print encyclopedias that the households will never update. While good print atlases continue to matter, the best CD-ROM atlases offer ways of seeing the world that a print atlas can't duplicate--and these days, most newer CD-ROMs also point to newer updates on the World Wide Web.

These changes--and others that move parts catalogs, submarine manuals and the like from print to digital form--will further increase the ratio of stuff that's only in digital form to stuff that's in printed form, but that's a pointless ratio in any case. Books matter, and will continue to matter, because people learn from them and enjoy reading them. Public and academic libraries will continue to rely heavily on printed collections because they work so well for the ideas of the future as well as the record of the past and present. Of course libraries will extend those printed collections with in-house media collections, borrowed physical resources, and an ever-growing array of digital publications and online retrieval: that's neither revolutionary nor even new.

Keeping It: Preservation and the Digital Quandary

If I didn't believe "born digital" resources were important, I wouldn't care about preservation of those resources--but they are, and I do. But that's a problem. It's partly a problem because we've been sold a bill of goods by the high prophets of digital technology. "Once it's in digital form, your problems are over--you can just copy it as required." Isn't that the promise you've heard--not only one reason that digital distribution is superior, but also a selling point for massive conversion of traditional resources to digital form?

It's a great promise. Unfortunately, it's also either a mistake or a lie. (You know the difference, of course: If a friend or a customer made the statement, it's a mistake. If an enemy or a competitor made it, it's a lie.)

I was privileged to attend (and speak at) the final 1998 School for Scanning in New Orleans. I came away from that workshop with a different sense of what the best people are thinking about scanning and other forms of digital conversion. To wit, you don't do it for preservation; you do it to create new publications, new forms of access.

The Pitfalls of Digital Preservation

Why don't you do it for preservation? Because we just don't know how to preserve digital resources in the library sense of preservation. That's a simple version of an extraordinarily complex problem, one that RLG has selected as one of our three major initiatives for the next few years. I'll mention just a few of the problems:

As noted in my May 1999 American Libraries article "Bits is Bits: Pitfalls in Digital Refomatting," many (perhaps most) commercially published physical digital media cannot be copied bit-for-bit to new media. That's quite deliberate (to protect intellectual property rights), but it means that these media pose a serious problem for long-term preservation and access.
Peeling off archival copies of traditionally-organized electronic journals is one thing. Peeling off copies of unified electronic publications is another. But what of truly new electronic media, ones that rely heavily on hyperlinking, dynamic growth, and changing structures? How do you archive those so they're accessible in any meaningful sense?
Two solutions that won't work are to "let someone else worry about it" or "let the publishers do it." Publishers go out of business, and publishers can't be expected to spend the money to provide current access to very old materials when there's no new revenue. Let someone else worry about it? We are the someone else.
We don't know how to make a true digital archive work. We do know that it involves a lot of money committed over a lot of time; we're pretty sure that you can't count on access fees to pay the ongoing costs; and we do know that the money needs to cover people as much as equipment.

RLG's new theme speaks of distributed digital archives. I haven't been involved in any of RLG's planning or decision-making at this level (I work at a much lower level), but this strikes me as exactly the right terminology. One Big Solution won't work for digital archives, just as One Big Solution generally doesn't work in any area.

"Scattering CD-ROMs"

There's a lot more to say about digital archiving, but I'm not the one to say it and certainly not as part of this talk. I'll end this section by mentioning a recent science column in Fantasy & Science Fiction by Gregory Benford, who is both a fine hard science fiction writer and a scientist. He was discussing the real problem of how we can pass our culture and history--or even specific notes, such as "this is a radioactive waste dump, keep away!"--for the real long term: that is, not only centuries but millennia (tens of them for radioactive waste). One of Benford's colleagues said, "why not just put it on CD-ROM and scatter lots of copies around? Someone will pick one up, be intrigued, and retrieve the information."

Benford was, I assume, polite enough to cover up his laughter--but when he discussed it in the column, he missed some crucial points. He said, probably incorrectly, that the bits will "peel away" from a CD-ROM's substrate within a few decades, making it useless. That's factually sloppy and may be incorrect in broader terms. The bits are part of the substrate, pressed into a sheet of polycarbonate, one of the sturdiest and least chemically reactive plastics known. What might peel away or degenerate is the sputtered aluminum or gold reflective layer. Without that layer, it would be more difficult to read the bits--but not necessarily impossible.

There are reasons to believe that a well-made CD-ROM or CD-R will last at least a century, and perhaps much longer. Does that make it a good candidate for truly long-term preservation, particularly across civilization gaps? Absolutely not.

For the next century, the problem is simple enough: will there be machines capable of reading CD-ROMs and making sense of what's on them? Will there be CD-ROM readers in two decades? Almost certainly yes, in the form of DVD-ROM readers. Will there be CD-ROM readers in five decades? It's possible, but they'll be very specialized items. Will there be CD-ROM readers in a century? The probability gets pretty small at that point, based on history.

But let's look at what happens across a civilization gap or across a millennium. We've burned critical records onto a CD-ROM, made ten thousand copies, and scattered them worldwide. Amazingly enough, after a thousand years the polycarbonate is still intact (plausible) and the aluminum is good enough (somewhat less plausible; the resin protecting the aluminum is more reactive).

Someone picks up one of these shiny discs. What do they do with it?

First of all, if you saw one of these things in 1965, would you have thought of it as a dense information storage medium--or as a really neat ornament, with those rainbow patterns on one side? Would you try to find a player for it, or would you treat it like a slightly dangerous Frisbee?

Let's be optimistic. The finder doesn't think it's a shiny toy; somehow, they think there's important stuff on it. What do they do next? Under a microscope or strong magnifying glass, the grooves are visible (actually, the single groove is visible, but never mind). If they feel the surface, they can see that it's not an engraved groove at the surface level, so if they understand laser technology, they might think that's a way to go. With enough investigation, they might be able to determine the bandwidth and depth of focus to be able to read the pits and lands. We're getting way out into improbabilities here, but they might even be able to get a stream of raw data.

So what then? That stream doesn't consist of words and music, or obvious numbers, or much of anything. It's not even an ASCII stream--not that that would help much, since the chances of ASCII being meaningful in a millennium are absurdly low. (After all, we're already beginning the move from ASCII to Unicode; how likely is it that we'll suddenly drop back to universal use of a terribly limited encoding set?)

What's encoded on a CD-ROM or an audio CD is very much the result of complex computer algorithms applied to source data. That's why you can put a strip of black tape a 32^nd of an inch wide radially on an audio CD, and good CD players will play the music with nary an interruption. Sony's encoding techniques, their part of the Sony-Philips CD partnership, provide for massive amounts of error correction, but as a result involve massive amounts of data manipulation and duplication. The basic technique is called a cross-interleaved Reed-Solomon code, and between it and other encoding techniques, data manipulation overhead accounts for fully two-thirds of the raw data on a compact disc.

Being able to read the pattern of pits and lands on a compact disc would tell a future historian nothing about what was on the disc. Without Sony-Philips' Red Book for audio CDs and Yellow Book for CD-ROMs, and without the computing capabilities to turn those extended specifications into programs, that pattern of pits and lands would be useless.

So there we have it: five levels of technological separation between a shiny 12cm. disc and useful resources from that disc:

Recognizing that it's a publication and not a plaything
Understanding the physical recording methodology
Being able to reproduce the playback methodology to retrieve a pattern of pits and lands
Knowing the complex computer algorithms required to turn that pattern of bits and lands into a readable set of data
Turning the resulting bitstream into intelligible content.

Anyone care to estimate the odds on that combination of five hurdles? Now: do you have a better way to communicate across many generations? And, if so, does it involve something other than ink on paper--or, better yet, lines cut into stones?

Digital archiving is tough. The easy solutions won't work. Such is life.

Packages of Meaning: From Media to Stories

If all you want is data, digital is probably the way to go--assuming you either solve or ignore the preservation problem. But data really isn't very useful for most of us, most of the time. We may get data and, God help us, information--but what we want and need are stories: narratives that convey meaning, helping us to build knowledge and understanding. I seem to be too busy getting old soon to cope with that last stage, getting wisdom--but one can always hope. A few more random notes, then, about media, meaning, and stories.

The Medium Affects the Story

Here's a shocker: you can't neatly separate medium and meaning. I'm not repeating McLuhan's simplistic message, particularly since I've read enough McLuhan to think he was somewhere between wrong and misunderstood. I don't believe in the One Great Medium, whether it's television, the World Wide Web, or even books. The medium isn't the message--but the medium does influence it. To put it another way, media perform differently for different kinds of stories--and the context for a story influences that story.

As a trivial example, the lyrics to Bob Dylan's All Along the Watchtower tell a different story when printed as a poem than they do when sung by Dylan--and the Jimi Hendrix version of that song carries still another set of meanings, whether heard on an LP or seen in live concert. Even the LP version and a CD made from the same master tape convey slightly different totalities, although the differences may be subtle.

Let's take another example. The San Francisco Chronicle frequently runs major original stories based on investigative journalism. The stories can run to five full newspaper pages or more--which is a lot of text, roughly 20,000 words. Remember the Pentagon Papers? Broadsheet newspapers can carry an enormous amount of text per page, roughly 12 times as much as typical books. Those 20,000 word essays, which typically address serious local problems that have been blown off by the authorities, reach roughly half a million people in broadsheet form on the morning they're published, not including pass-along readership. If you're a fast reader, you can read a 20,000-word newspaper essay in half an hour (that's 650 words a minute)--and I, for one, usually wind up reading those essays in full, albeit usually over dinner rather than breakfast. They combine the impact of the newspaper with the depth and breadth you can't get in USA Today--and, incidentally, they get results. Typically, by the end of the week, the problem is being addressed at some level. (They are essays, incidentally: the Chronicle deliberately abandoned traditional inverted-pyramid style as inappropriate in an era when you get your headlines on television, over the radio, or from the Internet.)

The Chronicle may also mount the essays on The Gate, their Web site (www.sfgate.com). Will anyone read a 20,000-word essay on the Web? Almost certainly not--and if you print it out, it will run to 40 pages or more, at least using typical Web printing techniques. It's no longer the same story; the flow is different, and the impact will be different.

Let's say the New Yorker picks up the essay--unlikely, since the New Yorker regards California as synonymous with LA, but just for fun. Chances are, in the small type used for lengthy essays, it would take up about 20 magazine pages. The story would be told as effectively, and it might even be easier to read--but it would no longer be the same story, because the context would have changed. The surrounding stories would be different, as would the ads. For some stories, a New Yorker reprint (or, realistically, a New West reprint, if that magazine still existed) would cause a different kind of impact that might even be larger--but it would be a different meaning.

Ten years later, you'd probably get to the story on microfilm--and the less said about reading 20,000 words from microfilm, the better. Or if the essay really had legs, it might be expanded into a book (with 40,000 words, you have a plausible book)--which would convey yet another story.

Turn the story into television? It would reach more people--but a typical 60 Minutes segment is unlikely to have more than 1,500 words at most. You'd lose every nuance in the article and probably most of the meaning; an accumulation of small points would have to turn into a few hammer blows.

Different media serve different kinds of stories. Michael Kinsley is a fine editor, and I suspect he believes in thoughtful, lengthy essays that establish meaning through careful narrative arc--but that's not what appears in Slate, the Web magazine that Kinsley edits. Few Slate pieces are more than 500 words or so, as far as I can tell--because that seems to be about the longest that will work on the Web. Effectively, Slate is an odd blend of Time and National Review, but edited for people with really short attention spans. I read each day's new mini-essays during a morning coffee break--that's one ten-minute break for the six or eight new pieces. Do I gain knowledge and understanding from Slate? Not bloody likely. Originally, Slate had a formatting option that made a week's worth into a nice printable magazine. They don't do that any more; I think that may be because it's a pretty pathetic magazine by print standards.

Context: Adding Meaning to Data

Context adds meaning to data. To a great extent, libraries help to add context--and librarians play key roles in that enhancement. Ideally, context helps users to move resources along the continuum from data to information, from information to meaning, from meaning to knowledge, and from knowledge to wisdom.

The Title, the Issue, and the Article

I'm pleased to say that my article on content and context has finally appeared in American Libraries, in the March 2000 issue. It wasn't time sensitive when they acquired it (in May 1999), so I wasn't sure when it would appear--but now it has. I'm going to summarize it here, because I think it's important to this discussion. The article is based on a case recounted by the editor of Library Hi Tech. A patron in his library found a citation for an article that looked interesting--and wanted to see the journal in which the article appeared. A librarian pointed out that this article was available as online full-text. The patron still wanted to see the journal itself. The editor felt that this represented a need for better user education.

I wondered, and continue to wonder. Taking Library Hi Tech as a counter-example to its own editorial, most issues of this journal are now theme issues: a series of articles on a single theme combined with an introductory essay, possibly accompanied by some independent articles and columns. I maintain that an article that is part of a theme issue is more meaningful when read as part of that issue; the context adds meaning. In such a case, the patron is exactly right to ask for the actual print issue.

Beyond that, however, if a patron isn't intimately familiar with a periodical title, that patron is also right to ask for a print issue or bound volume, rather than accepting an online full-text article as precisely equivalent. By looking through the issue or the volume, the patron can gain a sense of the whole--a sense of how the periodical works. That sense aids immeasurably in judging the specific article.

It's tempting to simplify my message here to say, "You shouldn't provide online full-text articles." I'm not saying that at all. I am saying that there are many occasions in which an online article does not carry the same meaning as that article would carry when viewed as part of a particular periodical and a particular issue of that periodical. Librarians should be sensitive to that, and should find ways to alleviate the problem. First, of course, is the advice that you shouldn't belittle a user's own judgment. If the user thinks that he or she needs to see the issue, there may be a sound reason--even if you would not feel the same need.

User-Oriented Technical Services

Libraries and librarians bring it all together. You acquire the packages (both physical and digital), organize them to make them accessible, use appropriate tools to put the right users in touch with the right packages, and try to assure that those packages will be around for tomorrow's users as well as today's. And, to be sure, you sometimes have to undo some of your work: getting rid of some packages because you don't have room or because they no longer serve your current and future users.

You're the experts on these topics; I'm an interested observer. I'll toss out a few observations, and if they seem obvious or ignorant--well, maybe they are.

The Long Now

Large, well-planned, well-maintained physical collections (not only of books, but of manuscripts, sound recordings, visual materials, and so on) provide the record of culture past, present and future. No single institution can maintain a complete record, and it would be dangerous to have the complete record residing in just one place under one control.

Despite protestations from some neomodernists, history is not dead, and we continue to learn much by studying the past in more detail. That past consists of more than the Great Books or even earlier years of the top journals. It is made up of all aspects of culture. Quite a few academic and research libraries have established niche collections that can come together to offer a richer picture of culture and society. That includes comic book collections, pulp fiction, "penny dreadfuls" and dime novels, just as it includes manuscript and archival collections, historical collections of important classical recordings (and folk recordings, and jazz, and popular music), and the "secondary" writings of significant authors.

Some library futurists have pointed out, correctly, that no library can collect everything--and have concluded that libraries should give up their attempts to build major physical collections. This is logically absurd, to be sure--the idea that nothing should be attempted if perfection can't be achieved--but it's also based on a false premise. That premise is that libraries could build complete collections until recently.

It's been a very long time since any library could even pretend to completeness in any but narrow areas. Even the Library of Congress does not claim to hold all American publications, much less all the publications of the world or all the gray material produced here or anywhere. It's been decades since even UC Berkeley strove for completeness in its serials program (if, indeed, it ever did): as long ago as 1974, I helped plan and carry out a 10 percent cutback in serial expenditures, which meant eliminating the only subscription to some serials.

No, Harvard doesn't own everything, and quite probably never did and never will. That doesn't stop them from acquiring large quantities of materials in coherent, planned fashion, to keep building a great collection that will bridge the ages. At another level, the College of Du Page in Illinois serves primarily first and second year college students--but its library quite properly builds significant long-term collections, both in special areas and to bridge the ages on a smaller scale.

Digital publications and online access already play significant roles in helping to bridge the ages and in providing greater access to special collections. That doesn't eliminate the need for ongoing collection development; it does add yet another set of tools to the toolkits of academic libraries.

Cataloging and Classification: Now More than Ever?

One aspect of context is arrangement, and it's something librarians do exceptionally well. One of the oddest notions of library futurists has been that cataloging doesn't matter any more. I would hope that experience with Web search engines would show just how nonsensical this notion is. Without cataloging, a library would be a heap of books and other materials; any library of more than a few thousand titles would be nearly unusable for most users.

It's tempting to say that metadata is just bad cataloging, but that's unfair. All cataloging is metadata; most metadata isn't cataloging. Good cataloging applies human intelligence and several layers of normalization in order to provide not only order but flexible access. That's context, and it makes the resources in a library more useful.

What about cataloging nonphysical resources? Obviously it happens, for very good reasons. The last time I checked, there were more than 75,000 records in the RLG Union Catalog that point to Web or other Internet sites using Electronic Access fields, MARC Tag 856. That's a lot of cataloging--and those are pretty much all reliable resources, ones with stable addresses and enough worth for academic libraries to justify the cost of cataloging. None of those records were created because RLG mounted some special Web cataloging project; they were created because cataloging departments--at LC and elsewhere--could and did justify creating them.

I think Thomas Mann will have more and better things to say about cataloging and classification. I'll just say that it's just as important for the future as has been to date--and that the future builds on an incredible resource that catalogers have created.