Again, lest we become confused and forgetful, the function of a great library is to sort and store obscure books. This is above all the task we want libraries to perform: to hold on to books that we don’t want enough to own, books of very limited appeal, unshielded by racks of Cliffs Notes or ubiquitous citations or simple notoriety. A book whose presence you crave at your bedside or whose referential or snob value you think you will need throughout life, you buy. Libraries are repositories for the out of print and the less desired, and we value them inestimably for that. The fact that most library books seldom circulate is part of the mystery and power of libraries. The books are there, waiting from age to age until their moment comes. And in the case of any given book, its moment may never come — but we have no way of predicting that, since we are unable to know now what a future time will find of interest.
So the incremental value of any one library book, even a rare and costly book, is tiny. The value of a huge collection isn’t immeasurably increased by the acquisition of some out-of-date 1943 monograph on, say, granary design. And, conversely, the loss of any one book does no obvious harm to the whole. If an operator reverses two numbers in transferring the call number for a book from a card, causing you to look for the book on a shelf where it isn’t, how terrible is that? The numerical typos and coding errors in online catalogs that (particularly in our era of closed, unbrowsable stacks) result in the complete disappearance of a title for the seeker — in its effective, though not physical, loss, its total unfindability, its sinking from view — can’t compel outrage, or make headlines in academia, because most titles are in the minds of no more than five or ten people at a time. Sometimes the only person who has devoted fifteen minutes of mental receptivity and appreciation to a book, aside from its author and (with luck) its publisher, is the cataloger at the library who described it for the OCLC database. If a hundred thousand volumes disappeared at random from the shelves of a major university library in a single night, it might take weeks or months before graduate students compared their puzzling shelf experiences and slowly realized that something big, something on the order of Fahrenheit 451, had taken place. And yet, despite the insignificance of any individual wheat stalk of a book in relation to the total Nebraska of print, we demand that libraries exercise extraordinary care to preserve the ephemera they have on their shelves; we want them to get right to work microfilming or digitizing whatever starts crumbling; we want to trust that when we pass through a university library’s entrance turnstile we aren’t going to be missing too much of the inspiringly miscellaneous assembly of all that has been done and thought.
We certainly don’t think that because a book may wait a decade or three between checkouts the library should necessarily cull it. And even if we do consent to the culling, and forgive the library for laying it out on the twenty-five-cent table, we are unlikely to agree that all copies of that book, in all libraries, private and public, ought to be rooted out and destroyed. We want the book to continue to exist somewhere, not to go extinct, because in some later ecosystem of knowledge it may be put to some surprising use — a cautionary use, a comic use, a cultural-historical use. And unforeseen secondary uses await the book that every library is certain to have self-published, as well. By studying Haverford’s card catalog, Michael Stuart Freeman, librarian of Haverford College, was able to determine when his predecessors deployed their first typewriter (it was during the summer of 1916) — a tiny fact, perhaps, but one of sufficient interest to Freeman that he published a brief, thoughtful paper that discussed the history of typewriters in libraries. Freeman kept several handwritten cards as samples (“I save a few, because I’m a sentimentalist,” he confided to me); but once his own passing curiosity was satisfied, he dumped the rest of his catalog.
Put in mind of mass extinctions and systems analysis, I got in touch with Jim Bradley, a programmer-analyst at the Computer Services department of Berkeley’s College of Natural Resources and the author of an unfinished entomological dissertation entitled “Computer Tools for Pest Management: A Case Study of the Codling Moth.” I asked him about retrospective conversion. “At universities, people get financial support if they’re doing something sexy, and an awful lot of people that are running the over-all library operation today are not so much reference librarians as promoters of sexy modern technique,” he promptly said. “The people who pay the bills want to get out of the stuff business. They don’t want libraries to have anything in them.” I fulminated ineffectually about the new typo layer in online catalogs, and he replied by making a point that seems to me undeniable: “I guess what we’re really doing is we’re having a short Dark Ages of scribalism as we transcribe from the original records into the electronic form. There’s going to be that same blot on the historical record in our age as there was in the Middle Ages.”
We should know better than to do this to ourselves. Or, if we do do this to ourselves — make a gigantic software upgrade of sorts from a paper database to an electronic one, because it’s inevitable — we should, good systems managers that we are, have the sense to keep the old “software” around as a backup, in case Rev. 2.0 has strange bugs and doesn’t perform as claimed. Charles Hildreth, a big name in library automation, said in a 1985 interview that “comparing the … card catalog to the online catalog is like comparing a bicycle to a space vehicle; they’re both modes of transportation but that’s where the similarities end.” And the question is: Don’t both modes have characteristic and complementary virtues? Which mode do you really want to ride to school? Which is going to have the brittle O-rings? Which is costlier? Which is likelier to drift aimlessly off into outer darkness? Which would you prefer to have your fourth grader ride? In a study of some fourth, sixth, and eighth graders carried out at the Downers Grove Public Library, in Illinois, Leslie Edmonds found that 65 percent of the kids’ card-catalog searches were successful, versus only 18 percent of their online searches. No fourth graders used the online catalog successfully. (They were asked to look up things like “Fire Stations,” “Insects — Poetry,” “Octopus Pie,” and “The Curse of the Blue Figurine.”)
And grown-ups have problems, too. There are many more ways to go astray if you must type your way to the call number for a book than if you can flip mutely through cards to one. In 1984, Jean Dickson, in An Analysis of User Errors in Searching on Online Catalog, found that users of Northwestern’s LUIS failed 39.5 percent of the time to type in a title at a terminal in a way that would bring up the record for something that actually existed in the database. She mentions, as one class of keyboard entries, “expressions of frustration” such as “Bleahh!” and “I hate this computer!” and various obscenities.
Under the “Bleahh!” subject heading may be adduced the Problem of Accelerating Typos. First, you type in a name and get no record. You think, Is it me, or is it that the library doesn’t have anything by this person? You look at what you’ve typed. No obvious mistakes. You try again, several ways. Could this library possibly not have anything by this person? You have to decide whether it’s a question of your having given a bad command, or a matter of a harder-to-spot typo, or a variant form of the writer’s name. Some online catalogs require “A” as the author-search command, some “A=,” some “FI PA” (for “Personal Author”), some “FI PN” (for “Personal Name”), some “FI AU,” some “AUT” or a number from a menu. Some screens respond as soon as you’ve typed the magical letter, some want you to press Return to deliver the command. It’s as if you walked up to a card catalog you hadn’t used in a while and weren’t sure whether, in order to open a drawer, you were supposed to pull on the drawer handle, push on the drawer handle, twirl the brass end of the holding rod, or fart twice and sing “God Bless America” in a hoarse falsetto. Anger builds. You’ve forgotten whether you’ve already tried some variant, because your previous tries have disappeared off the screen. With anger comes poor typing. You can’t know it, but you have finally found the proper command and the right form of the name — it’s just that now you’re so steamed that you’re making basic typos every time. Finally everything gels, and you get 123 RECORDS RETRIEVED BY YOUR SEARCH, and then you learn, to your further dismay, how extremely long it takes to page through that seemingly small number of records (“at the simple touch of a button”), hitting Enter, Enter, Enter, or M, M, M, or F, F, F.