Last fall, I spent many hours in the QA stacks weeding the mathematics books. I ran across one 1964 title that caught my eye: Random Essays on Mathematics, Education and Computers by John G. Kemeny, the then chairman of the Mathematics Department at Dartmouth College. Flipping it open, I scanned the table of contents and was surprised to see a chapter entitled “A Library for 2000 A.D.” I turned to the chapter and began reading.
“Since I am about to propose a radical reorganization of university libraries, I must first establish that some such reorganization is inevitable. I shall argue that our university libraries will be obsolete by 2000 A.D.”
Kemeny’s reasoning is that at the rate libraries were acquiring books in the early 1960s, “the cost of building, of purchasing volumes, of cataloguing, and of servicing these monstrous libraries will ruin our richest universities.” (I guess he never considered that administrations would cut library funding long before that became a problem.) He then goes through a very logic/mathematic approach to solving the problem of libraries and providing a solution: a National Research Library that houses the entire body of knowledge and where users could call in and request information from the librarians. With shared catalogs like WorldCat, online repositories of journals and books, and Google, it seems that his vision of libraries in 2000 wasn’t far off the mark, if perhaps in a different form than he could have known.
My initial reaction to his statement about the obsolescence of libraries was a very petty, “neener-neener, you’re wrong!” But, upon further reading I realized it’s not that he thinks libraries would become obsolete, it’s that he thinks that libraries as they were in the 1960s would become obsolete. In many ways, they have, and so will the libraries of 2005 if we aren’t willing to change to make the responsible use of technology to meet the needs of our users.
It’s always interesting to look back in the past to see their ideas of the future. He made a very good point about libraries becoming obsolete and many still make the arguement today. I think people vastly underestimate our drive to stand the test of time. If we can manage to change and adapt over the past 40 years then I feel hopeful that there will always be a library and a need for librarians.
ironically…the mathematics library on our campus (i.e., MY library) is still very text-based. mathematicians often use old materials that have not been digitized, and we routinely reshelve 100+ year-old journals in our library. and mathematicians, at least the current group of baby-boomer and older types, WANT to pick up a book or journal in print and page through it for the sake of serendipity, not just beam in to the exact passage they’re looking for in an online text.
however, i think even older mathematicians appreciate the ability to easily & quickly search through online databases like mathscinet & zentralblatt MATH instead of pecking through the monthly installments of math reviews & print zentralblatt!