The Enduring Library: Technology, Tradition, and the Quest for Balance

173 Pages·2003·1.35 MB·English

by  Michael Gorman

THE
Enduring
Library
TECHNOLOGY, TRADITION, AND
THE QUEST FOR BALANCE
Michael Gorman
AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION
Chicago 2003
Portions of this book appeared in a different form inLibrary Journal, Information Technology
and Libraries, Library Trends, and the IFLA Journal.
While extensive effort has gone into ensuring the reliability of information appearing in this
book, the publisher makes no warranty, express or implied, on the accuracy or reliability of
the information, and does not assume and hereby disclaims any liability to any person for
any loss or damage caused by errors or omissions in this publication.
Design and composition by ALA Editions in Berkeley Book, Alexa, and Futura Condensed
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Printed on 50-pound white offset and bound in 10-point coated cover stock by
McNaughton & Gunn
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National
Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,
ANSI Z39.48-1992. (cid:1)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gorman, Michael, 1941–
The enduring library : technology, tradition, and the quest for balance / by Michael
Gorman.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-8389-0846-2
1. Libraries and society. 2. Libraries—Aims and objectives. 3. Libraries—Automation.
4. Library science—Technological innovations. 5. Library science—Forecasting.
6. Librarians—Professional ethics. I. Title.
Z716.4.G665 2003
021.2—dc21 2002151679
Copyright © 2003 by Michael Gorman. All rights reserved except those which may be
granted by Sections 107 and 108 of the Copyright Revision Act of 1976.
Printed in the United States of America
07 06 05 04 03 5 4 3 2 1
This book is dedicated to
LOUIS DEXTER GORMAN
and
BESS ROSA GORMAN

CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii
INTRODUCTION ix
Libraries and Communications Technology
1
The Way We Live Now: Libraries Today 1
2
Communications Technology, 1875 to Now 14
3
Communications Technology and Libraries Today 27
Reading and the Web
4
Reading in a Digital World 40
5
The Nature of the Web 52
Library Work and the Future of Libraries
6
Reference Work in Technologically Advanced Libraries 66
7
Cataloguing in the Twenty-First Century 82
8
Challenges of the Future 95
9
The Future of Libraries: A Research Agenda 110
v
vi Contents
Overcoming Stress and Achieving Harmony
10
Information Overload and Stress: The Ailments
of Modern Living 122
11
Seeking Harmony and Balance 134
INDEX 149
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I
wish to acknowledge the help of a number of my colleagues in the Madden
Library at Fresno State for their witting or unwitting contributions to this
book. In particular, I would like to thank Dave Tyckoson, Ross LaBaugh,
Patrick Newell, Karen Kinney, Angelica Carpenter, and Pat Lavigna. My provost,
Michael Ortiz, could not possibly be more supportive or encouraging. I am also
grateful to my colleagues and friends in other places: Anne Heanue, Wilma
Minty, Anne Reuland, Sherrie Schmidt, John Byrum, Michael Buckland, and
Kerrie Talmacs. I discussed one chapter of this book with the late and much
missed Brett Butler and profited from his insights. I thank my assistants Susan
Mangini and Bernie Griffith for their infinite patience and ever-present resource-
fulness. The editors at ALA Editions, especially Marlene Chamberlain, Mary
Huchting, and Paul Mendelson, have been patient, persevering, and immensely
helpful.
As ever, I am more grateful than I can say for the love of my daughters
Emma Celeste Gorman and Alice Clara Gorman. They are the light of my life.
vii

INTRODUCTION
In times of change and danger, when there is a quicksand of fear
under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations
gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present.
—John Dos Passos1
G
eorge Eliot’s Middlemarch, deemed by many the finest English-language
novel of the nineteenth century, is rooted in a particular time and place.
The time is the late 1820s and early 1830s and the place England—a
country going through a profound change. Superstition was giving way to
science, quackery to scientific medicine, stagecoaches to railroads, cottage
industries and hand implements to factories and machinery, and the nation was
still consumed with the controversies attendant on the First Reform Bill, finally
enacted in 1832. The changes and societal shifts seemed epochal and transfor-
mational to the people of the time about which Eliot was writing (forty years
later)—as indeed they were. The novel would lack much of its resonance if it
were set in quieter, more settled times. The rub is, of course, to find any such
times. The American and French Revolutions had taken place a scant fifty years
before the events of Middlemarch—and they were epochal, the best of times and
the worst of times. The European revolutions of 1848 lay between the times in
which Middlemarch is set and the writing of the book, and they were seen as
transforming the Continent. The First World War broke out thirty-four years
after George Eliot died. It was called “the war to end all wars” and is seen by
many as the defining line between the Victorian age and modern times. I could
go on with a familiar litany of political, military, and social defining moments—
the “quiet bland” Eisenhower 1950s were, after all, the time of the “red scare,”
ix