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Aside from sentiment and atmosphere, why bother with a physical library
at all? Anyone with a computer and a modem link can already consult the
catalogues of 75 British university libraries, and hundreds of American
and European institutions, without leaving their office. Over half of Britain’s
university libraries accept orders for books electronically. There is at
least one fully refereed scientific journal, Current Clinical Trials, published
by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which exists
only in electronic form. Papers are published on the Internet academic computer
network 48 hours after acceptance. Similar projects are planned in Britain.

Tom Stonier, emeritus professor in science and society at the University
of Bradford, imagines a totally electronic future for information. ‘The
function of libraries as places which you physically visit to access information
is going to be superseded. A future Karl Marx would write Das Kapital at
home, with the British Library reading room on his desk . . . In my view
everybody will have access to a personal computer with communications within
20 years.’ Librarians will become ‘theoreticians on ways of managing the
wealth of information’, rather than custodians of shelves of books.

Stonier thinks that local libraries will function primarily as social
centres. With a world library available down a telephone line, libraries
dedicated to technical information are likely to become a habitat for historians
rather than researchers. Brian Perry, director of research at the British
Library, talks of this phenomenon as ‘libraries without walls’.

CULTURAL SWITCH

This major change in the way people handle information will be marked
by a discontinuity in the collective cultural memory. For example, to look
up information published since 1980 in almost any major American newspaper
you need only get your computer to dial a local electronic network, and
then type in commands to search for the subjects you are interested in.
But if you want to search for a story from 1979, you have to take a plane
to America: most of the information published by those papers before that
date is unlikely ever to be typed into a database. Roughly the same cutoff
date applies to university library catalogues. As Stonier says, ‘undoubtedly
a good deal of information will get lost, as a lot of information must have
been lost in the Middle Ages when the transition to print occurred.’

He sees similarities in the move to electronic media. ‘Before the Renaissance
you could read all the books that had ever been printed: later, you needed
not only a repository but people who could guide you to the book you needed.
Librarians now have to deal with global databases.’

There is another similarity: just as early printing could not match
the graphic quality of illuminated manuscripts, current computer technology
displays graphic images coarsely and stores them in many mutally incompatible
formats. Remote access to higher-quality graphics will have to wait for
high-speed communications networks such as SuperJANET (This Week, 21 November)
and, in the distant future, fibre-optic networks that reach every home.
Even then, as Stonier says, ‘the feel of a book and the smell of a book
are very important – to our generations they give a kind of companionship’.
Lynne Brindley, who is in charge of the British Library of Political and
Economic Science, in London, expects that even in those subjects which may
become paperless, there will be a 10-year transition.

That has begun in earnest in France, where the national library, the
Bibliotheque Nationale, accepts book reservations entered through any of
the country’s 6 million Minitel telephone communications terminals. When
the new Library of France opens in 1995, in Paris, 300 000 documents will
be available in digital form, both as page images and as text. Researchers
will be able to call them up from workstations within the library. But
these electronic documents will not initially be accessible outside the
building. One reason is publishers’ concern over copyright. Another is interlibrary
politics: as the Library of France’s policy paper says, making documents
available remotely to all potential users would ‘short-circuit the network
of university and public libraries’.

In the new British Library in London, due to be stocked by 1994, readers
will be able to order books from terminals that will access a new electronic
catalogue called the On-line Public Access Catalogue, or OPAC. The library’s
directors are still discussing whether to make OPAC more widely available.
It is likely to be accessible to academics, through the JANET interuniversity
computer network. But funding is a serious problem: while 150 OPAC terminals
will be available in reading rooms, a planned 100 terminals behind the scenes
have been cut. The library’s existing BLAISE system (the British Library
Automated Information Service) will be kept in operation, providing access
from terminals outside the library to 20 databases, including current catalogues.
The back catalogue, covering acquisitions from when the library opened in
1759, up to 1975, will be added this month. In keeping with the distributed
nature of the library of the future, BLAISE is operated from Boston Spa
in Yorkshire and held on a computer belonging to the food company Rank Hovis
McDougall. No decision has yet been made on whether access to OPAC will
be free; it costs £70 a year to subscribe to BLAISE and £10
an hour to use it. Digitisation of documents is, says Perry, ‘purely in
the experimental stage’. But in January 1993 the library will publish an
ambitious strategic plan for the rest of the century, which will place great
emphasis on electronic documents: it says that ‘increasingly, end-users
will access library services from their terminals, unfettered by national
or geographic boundaries’.

Financing the plan is a different question. The government has offered
a meagre 3 per cent increase in the library’s funding, to £72.1 million
for the coming year, a cut in real terms and 10 per cent below previous
funding projections. Its strategy will therefore provide for an increasingly
selective collection that will no longer aspire to being comprehensive in
its coverage of the world’s literature. New technology ‘will have to be
paid for from savings in other areas’, says Perry.

The library will aim to be a ‘single gateway’ to information around
the world. Perry says this will provide ‘the ability to search with a common
command language’. Others disagree with this centralised approach. The plan
is described as ‘absolute rubbish’ by one senior academic librarian. ‘The
notion of a single gateway is misguided: we’re talking about a world of
distributed information.’

Brindley points to another argument about how a library without walls
should develop. At present, finding an obscure title may involve a search
through dozens of individual university library catalogues. Will there be
an online ‘union catalogue’ covering all the universities’ holdings? ‘The
world is moving too fast for that,’ she says. ‘What we need is interfacing
tools to help us use all these resources.’ Such tools are still lacking.
Philip Bryant, director of the UK Office for Library and Information Networking,
comments that using Internet at present is like ‘tipping the contents of
the British Library and the American Library of Congress into Twickenham
rugby ground, then saying ‘go find’. Technically, the problem can be solved
either by standardising databases, or with intelligent search tools that
can cope with the lack of standards. The result stands to transform a researcher’s
literature search from a week in the library to something the computer does
while you have lunch.

All this will be available on a personal computer – if you have one.
For Perry, ‘the nightmare is where most material is available in machine-readable
form, and a lot is available only in that form. People who don’t have remote
access will lose out.’ Brindley, too, sees a danger of a particular cultural
dominance. ‘The notion of the Third World getting involved in this when
they haven’t even decent telephones is a really big global problem.’ It
seems unlikely, though, that people in industrial countries will relinquish
the advantages of new technology just because their counterparts in Bangladesh
don’t share them.

DEVELOPING ADVANTAGES

And, as Perry observes, ‘theoretically, the new technology is an advantage
for developing countries, because they will get information more quickly.
A scientific journal may take three months to reach Thailand through the
post.’ This speedy delivery will work, however, only when developing countries
have reliable phone systems – or if universities can establish satellite
links that bypass national telephone services.

¿ìè¶ÌÊÓƵs in Britain will face more esoteric problems as publishing
and libraries move onto the electronic networks. Brindley thinks it is too
early to say whether purely electronic publications will count towards tenure,
for example. And what is the legal status of an electronic ‘book’? Brian
Lang, head of the British Library, announced in October that he would press
for legislation to require electronic publications to be deposited with
a national archive, in the same way that the copyright libraries must receive
a copy of every paper publication. Moira Simpson, a researcher into computers
and the law at the University of Strathclyde, believes that existing legislation
‘may stretch to cover this’, but this interpretation is not being acted
on. In her view the law ought to apply even to computer games programs,
which claim the protection of the copyright law as ‘publications’.

Traditional libraries are a powerful symbol of our culture’s regard
for knowledge; it is no exaggeration to call them shrines to learning. They
will, at the very least, remain essential to historians of the pre-computer
age.

Mike Holderness is a freelance journalist.