Software engineers are clever and adaptable people. They have, more than most of us, profited speedily from their mistakes. We have leaped ahead from, say, the late-seventies computer catalog at the University of Toronto Library, which reportedly included a program to rotate any “Sir” beginning a name entry to the end of the name: the program not only moved all the stand-alone “Sir”s but bestowed involuntary knighthood on writers like Ernest Sirluck (who was a professor at the University of Toronto at the time and an editor of, among other things, Milton’s Areopagitica), turning him into “Luck, Ernest Sir.” Any day now, information retrieval will be a new and amazing experience: “For the first time the catalog user will be freed from the tyranny of the linear sequences of A-Z and 0–9,” Michael Gorman headily writes, in an anthology called Closing the Catalog. We will cast off our letter fetters, he seems to promise, and soar. Envisioning what Gorman calls the “New Jerusalem” of the online catalog, I can fantasize about one that would include an aging-and-fading component, so that the older a given database record is, the yellower (or pinker, or ocean-bluer) the screen would be at its corners, thereby offering us some of the instantaneous secondary information that cardboard offers us now. (Word-processing packages would also benefit from what might be called AGE or OLD utilities — for Advanced Geriatric Engine and Optional Latent Dogearing, respectively.) And the more times a bibliographic record is called up by the users of the database, the darker will be the accumulation of random “grime pixels” in the top margin — though never so dark that they would interfere with legibility, of course, and every tenth retrieval might remove one grime dot rather than add one, since handling wears away previous deposits, too. We will be able to tour mind rooms full of three-dimensional representations of catalog cabinets by gesticulating with our data gloves like armchair Shivas, so that we will have some intuitive sense of the size of the collection we are interrogating, just as we do now when we walk into the lobby of a library we haven’t visited before and size up its rows of card cabinets; we will have ways to maintain a sense of where we are in the database, as we do now through drawer and cabinet labels, through guide cards, and through our subconscious feel for where the rest rooms and the circulation desk are; we will have screens whose resolution will be the equal of Library of Congress printed cards, or even of handwritten cards; we will be able to look at five or six records at a time, and to move forward and backward through 826-unit clusters of retrieved records with the rifflingly variable speeds we now attain over semi-pliant paper. All this and more will be ours in the years to come, assuming there is money to pay for it. But it isn’t ours yet, and Michael Gorman and his colleagues in Closing the Catalog were foretelling the ways that online techniques would free information retrieval from various alphanumeric tyrannies almost fifteen years ago. Today, if I take a stool in front of a University of California MELVYL screen and type, for instance, BROWSE SU CENSORSHIP (meaning “Please show me the subject headings relating to Censorship”), this is what I get back:
LONG SEARCH
: Your search consists of one or more very common words, which will retrieve over 800 headings and take a long time to complete. Long searches slow the system down for everyone on the catalog and often do not produce useful results. Please type
HELP
or see a reference librarian for suggestions.
If I type in BRO SU ROME — HISTORY, I get the same thing. So, too, if I’m curious about AIR POLLUTION or BIRTH CONTROL or PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY or HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY, or BIBLE — HISTORY, or even INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL. If I need some books on LINGUISTICS or FOLKLORE and ask MELVYL what it has, and I do so during normal working hours, I get a slightly different message:
PEAK LOAD RESTRICTION
: Your search consists of a common word which would retrieve over 6,400 headings and would slow down the system. During peak load periods, your search cannot be completed. You may reissue your search to make it more specific, or try again during the evening or early morning.
And if I try to narrow the search by typing, say, FI XS ROME — HISTORY (meaning “Please show me only those subject headings that begin with the words ‘Rome — history’ ”), I will be sure to miss many excellent books, including Robert Brentano’s Rome Before Avignon, which is cataloged under “Rome (Italy) — History—476–1420.” Nor will title-keyword searching solve my Roman history problems with MELVYL: to get one possible sample of things I will miss if I place too much confidence in keywords and exact subject headings, I can type FI SU (ROME HISTORY) AND NOT XS (ROME HISTORY) AND NOT XS (ROME ITALY HISTORY) AND NOT TW (ROME) AND NOT TW (ROMAN) AND LANG ENGLISH, which translated means, “Please show me all the books with subject headings that contain ‘Rome’ and ‘history,’ but whose subject headings do not begin either with ‘Rome — history’ or ‘Rome (Italy) — history’ and that do not contain either the word ‘Rome’ or ‘Roman’ anywhere in the title, and that are in English.” Even after this narrowing-down (which takes 97 search cycles and should only be performed after midnight, when few are roaming the system), I will see over 130 books, among them Peter Brown’s Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity and Gillian Clark’s Women in the Ancient World—books I would have missed had I been too uncritical a keyword devotee. And MELVYL is, in fairness, a much more flexible and powerful system than many, especially in its ability to marshal long chains of Boolean exclusivity: if you do an analogous FI KSH search (KSH refers to Keywords of the Subject Heading) on Harvard’s catalog (which cheats by defaulting to a limited, initial-word subject search very similar to MELVYL’S XS, and which disallows commands longer than one line), HOLLIS too will choke on topics like ROME — HISTORY, or ETHICS — HISTORY, or AGRICULTURE — HISTORY, or COSMOLOGY, or BOOKS AND READING, or COINS, or TEXTILE (but not TEXTILES), or TOBACCO, or LIBRARIES, or our friend INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL. Each time, HOLLIS comes back with its HELP OVERFLOW screen, saying in boldface: “Your search retrieved more than the maximum number of items the system can display.”
None of those general headings deserve a system rebuff. All of them are eminently reasonable ways to begin a search — a search that we who have research papers, or dissertations, or mere essayistic tirades due might like to begin in the next few days, not two or five years from now, when the online catalog has been improved to the point where it can comfortably accommodate this sort of inquiry. If there is already a big wooden machine in the library that is able to point us quickly in a few directions without calling us users of “common” words and thereby hurting our feelings, maybe we should keep it. The fact that the card catalog is no longer the necessary first stop in a visit to the library shouldn’t doom it. If nobody uses it for months at a time, stuff it away in the rare-books wing, or sequester it on a seldom visited subbasement floor, crowded humbly among the Z shelves (Z is the call letter for bibliography and library science), like Mike Mulligan’s obsolete steam shovel. Or it could be pushed off to the far end of the reference room (one row of cabinets bolted on top of another to halve its footprint, the entire structure festooned with warnings that its information is not current), where it will gather exactly the same amount of dust as other big and usefully out-of-date library catalogs: Cutter’s, or the British Museum’s General Catalog of Printed Books, or the magnificent pea-green-and-gold wall of the 756-volume National Union Catalog, Pre-1956 Imprints.