What we have already begun seeing, in fact, especially at state universities with dwindling budgets, is a kind of self-inflicted online hell, in which the libraries are forced to continue to pay paraprofessionals to convert their huge card catalogs, since they’ve already pillaged the paper database to the point where its integrity is unrestorable, and yet they aren’t able to afford the continuous hardware and software upgrades necessary to make the growing mass of online records function together adequately. They can’t go back, and they don’t have the money to go forward.
I’m thinking, for instance, of U.C. Berkeley. Berkeley has one of the best research collections in the world, and the quality of its cataloging over the past hundred and twenty-five years has been unusually high. Thus its card catalog and its shelf list were filled with richly detailed, accurate, intelligent cards, many of which were sent to Maureen Finn’s RETROCON staff for conversion, sent back, and scrapped. But higher education is in serious trouble in California, and, as a result, Berkeley has chosen not to pay Maureen Finn for a premium RETROCON job. For about two dollars a card, Berkeley is getting a middling RETROCON — better than Harvard’s but still very plain. Typically, an OCLC operator takes a Berkeley card, finds a match in the database as fast as he or she can, and accepts what the database offers, without being able to spend additional time entering the supplemental (or superior) information — the notes, the subject tracings, the holdings records — that the original card may contain. “The standards of conversion were, of necessity, because of lack of funds and lack of staff, not exquisitely high,” one Berkeley employee told me. Because it can’t afford better, Berkeley (like Harvard, like hundreds of other libraries) is paying OCLC not to improve but to denature and often to mediocritize its records of old and out-of-print material. “No matter how good it is,” the employee said, “you throw away that card and, in some cases, accept something that’s inferior.”
Berkeley’s subject catalog is already gone. Though it was more or less frozen in the 1980s, it was nonetheless very efficient for some kinds of searches: if the primary sources in your field were published in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, you don’t want your retrievals spread among the thousands of irrelevant records that a mechanical database subject haul brings up. Any drawer of an out-of-date paper catalog represents the equivalent of a filtered computer search, a Boolean date-limited search, of a very sophisticated sort — in fact, one drawer represents the outcome of a kind of search that most online catalogs can’t and won’t ever be able to perform, since it offers clues to what books were in the library during different eras. If in seventy years a historian of science (say) wants to know whether some Nobel-laureate physics professor could possibly have seen and been influenced by a certain out-of-the-way Dutch mathematical monograph from the thirties that bears important similarities to the professor’s work — whether, that is, it was part of the library’s collection during the period when the professor was developing his ideas, or was acquired only after the professor’s papers were published (perhaps acquired by the library as a gift from the professor’s estate, because the professor was sent the monograph by the Dutchman himself, anxious to establish primacy) — the historian of science will have little chance of finding an answer to his question now, because the computer record will bear the (to him) meaningless date of the retrospective conversion of the card, i.e., sometime in the late eighties or early nineties, which has no relation to the time that the card was originally produced (and the book placed on the shelf), whereas the original card, even if it bore no direct date of creation, would have exhibited distinct features (typewriter style, format, cataloging conventions) that might have enabled a catalog-card paleographer to place it within a five-year period.
Why, then, did library administrators order the Berkeley subject catalog destroyed? Was it really just to have the space for eight study tables? Admittedly, eight study tables, incised with the inevitable obscene drawings, declarations of love, and reciprocal ethnic slurs, and populated with thirty or forty pre-midterm Psych 101 students making soft sighing noises with their pungent highlighters and burping like moss-gorged moose from time to time for comic effect, is a noble sight to have in a library. But is it a reasonable trade-off? Library administrators always use the magical phrase “out of space” when they want to get rid of something, but this in no way constitutes an argument. Libraries have been running out of space since the Sumerians first impassioned clay, because tablets and scrolls and manuscripts and books and microforms and computer disks tend to take up space, and their numbers inevitably grow. There are countless duplicates of old textbooks from the sixties and seventies on the shelves of most university libraries; scholarly and scientific journals probably pump more non-unique paper into Berkeley’s library system every few months than was contained in its unique subject catalog. A library continues to buy books, and it selects what it throws out, on the basis of what it judges is of value to present and future users of the library: the need for space is merely a constant, SNEED, in every decision to acquire or discard.
Administrators are singling out card catalogs, I think, not as a last resort but as a first resort, because they hate them. They feel cleaner, lighter, healthier, more polyunsaturated, when all that thick, butter-colored paper is gone. (One Berkeley administrator was heard saying, “Oh, we’re just going to get rid of those junky old cards. Nobody uses the subject catalog anyway.”) “Resist the impulse to burn those old cards,” gaily cautions one article on retrospective conversion, since “the staff will experience withdrawal symptoms.” The impulse to burn is there, it seems to me, because library administrators (more often male than female) want so keenly to distance themselves from the quasi-clerical associations that surround traditional librarianship — the filing, the typing, the shelving, the pasting, the labeling. Librarianship, they think (rightly), hasn’t received the respect it deserves. The card catalog is to them a monument, not to intergenerational intellect, but to the idea of the lowly, meek-and-mild public librarian as she exists in the popular mind. The archetype, though they know it to be cheap and false, shames them; they believe that if they are disburdened of all that soiled cardboard, they will be able to define themselves as Brokers of Information and Off-Site Digital Retrievalists instead of as shy, bookish people with due-date stamps and wooden drawers to hold the nickel-and-dime overdue fines, with “Read to Your Child” posters over their heads and “February Is Black History Month” bookmarks at their fingertips. The proponents of computerization are such upbeat boosters of the library’s potential role in the paperless society (Fred Kilgour once wrote that “not having to go to a library is a very important improvement in providing library service,” and when asked in an end-of-career interview whether he felt there was any possible downside to library automation, he thought for a moment and replied, “I can’t think of any negative effect”) that library managers are encouraged to forget — are eventually frightened even to admit — that their principal job is to keep millions of used books dry and lend them out to people. When we redefine libraries as means rather than as places — as conduits of knowledge rather than as physical buildings filled with physical books — we may think that the new, more “visionary,” more megatrendy definition embraces the old, but in fact it doesn’t: the removal of the concrete word “books” from the library’s statement of purpose is exactly the act that allows misguided administrators to work out their hostility toward printed history while the rest of us sleep.