The importance of books, free access, and libraries as places - And the dangerous inadequacy of the information science paradigm

Journal of Academic Librarianship

Volumn 27, Issue 4, 2001, Pages 268-281

  Mann, Thomas ^a  

^a LIBRARY OF CONGRESS   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0012012740     PISSN: 00991333     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1016/S0099-1333(01)00214-2     Document Type: Article

References (34)

1. Theodore Levitt, "Marketing Myopia," Harvard Business Review 38 (July-August 1960): 45-56. Reprinted in Harvard Business Review 53 (September-October 1975): 26-28, 33-34, 38-39, 44, 173-81. The statement on railroads appears on page 45 of the original printing.
2. Levitt, "Marketing Myopia," p. 45. A page later, Levitt does quote a remark by Jacques Barzun about railroads, that "[What is lacking is] the will of the companies to survive and to satisfy the public by inventiveness and skill" (Holiday, February 1960, p. 21). This reference, however, does not address the specific point about railroads confusing the railroad business with the transportation business. Levitt again refers, on page 56, to this Barzun article for its portrait of railroads, but the Barzun article itself is woefully ignorant of the real problems of competition, subsidization, and government regulation that Levitt himself so cavalierly dismisses. Here, for example, is Barzun on the railroads' competition: "Why then the gloom about the railroads? They have done their part in educating and mobilizing mankind. Is it not inevitable that they should be displaced by faster and better means of transportation? Faster, yes, but better is still to be proved. For in the displacement, it is clear, the railroad's special virtue is being lost and not merely transferred. Nowhere in other forms of transportation does the observant citizen find in front of him the vivid and awe-inspiring lesson or order and rationality embodied. Certainly not in the blithe anarchy of air and bus travel. The private car, which goes from door to door, compels work at the increasingly mindless task of driving while preventing any more agreeable use of time. Who has ever read a good book on the New Jersey Turnpike or enjoyed gin rummy while driving across the alkali desert? As for brute efficiency, the railroad is still supreme: five men running a fast freight will haul at less cost a tonnage which it takes two hundred trucks and drivers to transport" [Holiday (February 1960): 21]. This puff piece is hardly documentation that the railroad business did not know what it was doing. It is interesting that Levitt himself acknowledges that Barzun is an "amateur" on the subject of railroads (p. 46). Rather than find a real expert, however, Levitt attempts to justify his use of Barzun by saying "Even an amateur like Barzun can see what is lacking." What is really lacking, however, is any substantive research by either Barzun or Levitt on the genuine complexity of the problems of railroads.
3. Albro Martin, Railroads Triumphant (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 360.
4. Wallace Patrick Mullan, Causes and Consequences of Regulatory Breakdown, PhD Thesis. (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1992. Dissertation Abstracts International, 53-06A: 2028.
5. Mark Reutter, "The Lost Promise of the American Railroad. WQ, The Wilson Quarterly 18 (Winter 1994): 26.
6. Don Phillips, "Life on the Mississippi: A Voyage of Commerce, Conflict," The Washington Post, Business section (December 19, 1999): H1, H8.
7. Peter D. McClelland, "Transportation" in Encyclopedia of American Economic History, Vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1980).
8. Clarence B. Carson, "Throttling the Railroads," Freeman 20 (7-10) (1970): 686-687. See also John Stover, American Railroads, 2nd ed. (University of Chicago Press, 1997), chapters 8-9.
9. For example, "Let us not repeat the mistake of the American railroads, who forgot they were not in the railroad business. Neither are we in the book business." [Herbert S. White, "Libraries and Railroads," Information and Library Manager 2 (June 1982): 23]; and "[management experts] point to the plight of the American railroad companies, which almost became extinct because they thought they were in the business of trains, not realizing that they were actually in the transportation business. Most libraries and information centers now realize that they are in the information business" [Robert D. Stueart & Barbara B. Moran, Library and Information Center Management, 5th ed. (Englewood, CO: Libraries Unlimited, 1998), p. 100]; and "Railroads had been so successful in the 19th century, that they thought they could just keep on with the same business model in the 20th... . Another thing we could say about libraries is that we have tended to think of ourselves as being in the book business, not the information business" [Marcia J. Bates, "Information Curriculum for the 21st Century," presentation before the ALA Congress on Professional Education (May 1, 1999). [Online]. Available: http://www.ala.org/congress/bates.html. (accessed May 22, 2001).].
10. I would include copyrighted articles in serials as equally important; and more articles than books will be appearing in online formats. Even in the case of online serials, however, most readers will have to continue coming inside the physical walls of libraries that subscribe to them; most online articles will not be available from anywhere, at anytime, to anyone who is searching the general, "free" portions of the Internet. (By "free" I mean "without direct charges at the point of use.") The current literature does not really have terms to distinguish the "free" portions of the Internet from the "fee" portions. My experience, however, is that most researchers (especially students) use the terms "Internet" and "Information Superhighway" interchangeably - most, of course, just say Internet - and that both are understood to refer to the "free" portions of the Net. For example, when I show students a site-licensed database such as Chadwyck-Healey's Periodical Contents Index, they usually ask "Can I get into this on the Internet?" meaning can they tap into it for free from outside the library's own onsite terminals.
11. In specifying "reasons or causes" I do not mean to limit valid understanding only to philosophical or scientific matters. The grasp of unifying narrative structures of beginnings, middles, and ends, and the judgment of their adequacy by their ranges of inclusiveness and complexity of integration, is also an important aspect of understanding.
12. See "The Principle of Least Effort" and the annotated "Bibliography" sections of Thomas Mann, Library Research Models (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 91-101, 221-42.
13. Walt Crawford, "Paper Persists: Why Physical Library Collections Still Matter," Online 22 (1998): 42-48.
14. In The Washington Post (April 26, 2000, Section C), reporter Linton Weeks noted the following: "In the August 1999 issue of Conservation Biology, David W. Orr, a professor at Oberlin College, wrote that the human vocabulary is shrinking. By one reckoning, he observed, the working vocabulary of 14-year-olds in America has plummeted from 25,000 words in 1950 to 10,000 words today. `There has been a precipitous decline in language facility,' says Orr. `This is nothing less than a cultural disaster.' " Weeks also quoted Keith Devlin, dean of science at St. Mary's College in California and a senior researcher at Stanford. According to Devlin, "We may be moving toward a generation that is cognitively unable to acquire information efficiently by reading a paragraph. The can read words or sentences - such as bits of text you find on a graphical display on a Web page - but they are not equipped to assimilate structured information that requires a paragraph to get across... . Half a century after the dawn of the television age, and a decade into the Internet, it's perhaps not surprising that the medium for acquiring information [that a large number of the 10,000 college students surveyed] find most natural is visual nonverbal: pictures, video, illustrations and diagrams." See also Walt Crawford, "Paper Persists: Why Physical Collections Still Matter, Online 22 (January/February 1998): 47: "Many futurists... now admit that people will print out anything longer than 500 words or so. It's just too hard to read from a computer, and it doesn't seem likely to get a lot easier." The dumbing down of learning, the loss of larger knowledge frameworks in our culture, is also commented on by Vladimir N. Garkov, "Cultural Or Scientific Literacy?" Academic Questions 13 (3) (Summer 2000): 63-64: "A report on the first national assessment of our 17-year-old students' knowledge of history and literature found that this `nationally represented sample of eleventh-grade students earns failing marks in both subjects.' A more recent study on cultural literacy, reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education (14 June 1996) found that only 7 percent of our graduating college students answered fifteen or more of the twenty questions correctly. The results from the National Assessment of Educational progress history exam show that only four out of ten high-school seniors demonstrated even a rudimentary knowledge of their own American history." Garkov cites Diane Ravitch and Chester E. Finn, Jr., "What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know?, A Report on the First National Assessment of History and Literature" (New York: Harper & Row, 1987); Study on cultural literacy, Chronicle of Higher Education (14 June 1996); and L. Hancock and P. Wingert, "A Mixed Report Card," Newsweek (13 November 1995): 69. Again, the dumbing down of verbal, analytical culture cannot be attributed solely to the Internet; but I think our profession would be more prudent to view the Net as, on balance, contributing more to the problem than to the solution.
15. This from marketing consultant Geoffrey Meredith's article in the October 1999 issue of The Futurist [as quoted in American Libraries (January 2000): 51].
16. Yet another response to the difference between book and screen formats is to assert that physical libraries are "evolving" into digital forms, as though the process were as inevitable as biological evolution. The naivete, and falsehood, of the concealed propositions in this belief are discussed at length in Thomas Mann, "The Height Shelving Threat to the Nation's Libraries" [Online]. Available: http://slis.cua.edu/slislab/shelving.htm (accessed May 22, 2001). Reprinted in Counterpoise 3 (July/October 1999): 19-38.
17. The date 2047 is offered as the time by which, "All information about physical objects, including humans, buildings, processes, and organizations, will be online," according to Gordon Bell and James N. Gray, "The Revolution Yet to Happen," in Beyond Calculation: The Next Fifty Years of Computing, edited by Peter J. Denning and Robert M. Metcalfe (New York: Copernicus, 1997). Interestingly, this book itself is unlikely to be digitized by 2047; the verso of its title page says, "No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher." Under the 1998 modification of the copyright law, works published after January 1, 1978, are now protected for the life of the author plus 70 years.
18. One reason that the Judeo-Christian-Islamic world view has lasted so long is its realistic understanding of human nature. The biblical injunctions of "Thou shalt not steal" and "Thou shalt not covet" would be meaningless in any society that did not recognize private property ownership. One reason that Marxism was so short lived (less than one full century) lies in its rejection of just this understanding. Some values, in other words, are not multiculturally relative; some views of human nature are just unworkable as the basis for enduring social systems.
19. A further discussion may be found in "Reference Service, Human Nature, Copyright, and Offsite Service - In a `Digital Age'?" Reference & User Services Quarterly 38 (1999): 55-61.
20. Bates, "Information Curriculum."
21. See also Walt Crawford, "Bits Is Bits: Pitfalls in Digital Reformatting," American Libraries 30 (May 1999): 47-49.
22. An extreme example is Maureen Brunsdale, "From Mild to Wild: Strategies for Promoting Academic Libraries to Undergraduates," Reference & User Services Quarterly 39 (Summer 2000): 331-35. Nowhere in the entire article does the author mention the word "books."
23. Quoted in Sylvia Moreno, "President Aims to Leap the `Digital Divide,' " The Washington Post (February 3, 2000): B04.
24. Advertising revenues may defray the costs of mounting some popular sources for current information, but they cannot be relied on to pay for ongoing access to the materials that college and research libraries must deal with, nor can advertising revenues be relied on to pay for long-term preservation of records no longer current.
25. In the real world of unavoidable trade-offs among what, who, and where considerations, to gain free access to materials you must always restrict one of these three elements to loosen (or eliminate) the restrictions on the other two. Save for truly exceptional cases that cannot be generalized into an over-all model, it is not possible to eliminate restrictions on all three simultaneously.
26. Tied to the continuing need for classified bookshelving is the continuing need for pre-coordination (rather than post-coordination) in the construction of Library of Congress Subject Heading Strings. Recommendations for a post-coordinate system, as in Lois Chan's article, simply, even incredibly, overlook the important linkage of post-coordinate terms to class numbers, a linkage that makes the pre-coordinate terms in the library catalog the best functional index to the classification scheme. See Lois Chan, "Entering the New Millennium: A New Century for LCSH, " Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 29 (2000): 232-233; see Thomas Mann, Library Research Models, chapter 4; Thomas Mann, The Oxford Guide to Library Research (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998): 37-38, 83-84, 175-77; and Thomas Mann, "Is Precoordination Unnecessary in LCSH? Are Web Sites More Important to Catalog than Books? A Reference Librarian's Thoughts on the Future of Bibliographic Control" From the Bicentennial Conference on the Future of Bibliographic Control, held at the Library of Congress November 15-17, 2000. [Online]. Available http://lcweb.loc.gov/catdir/bibcontrol/mann_paper.html. (accessed May 22, 2001).
27. Many studies have shown that people who try to guess the same uncontrolled keywords to use in indexing a document agree only about 20% of the time. See
28. "Fewer added entries are required and no more than one or two subject headings need be added to the core record" [Willy Cromwell, "The Core Record: A New Bibliographic Standard," Library Resources & Technical Services 38 (October 1994): 422].
29. There is of course a distinction between "sources" and specifically "books." In providing what I have called "reference service," there is a further distinction between "research" and "reference" questions; the former seek an overview of what is available rather than just a specific fact (the province of the latter). In trying to provide an overview for researchers of "what is available" on their topics for research inquiries, nowadays, reference librarians need to try to indicate the range of relevant Web sites as well as the range of printed sources. But my experience is that the process, in actual practice, must necessarily be accomplished in progressive stages rather than all at once and that most researchers still want first to know which books are available on their subjects. At the very least, they do not want an overview of Web sites that omits a view of relevant books. (Researchers, at least those who come into libraries, usually seem to realize the quality control differences between books and Web sites.) Service for research questions, in other words, must still start with an overview of books, followed by other formats. To the extent that such service should also strive to present an overview of Web sites, reference librarians must necessarily rely on avenues into the Web that are, for the most part, outside the reach of formal cataloging by librarians. One implication of this is that proper cataloging of books ought to be a higher priority for librarians than cataloging of Web sites. Just as we do not do subject cataloging of individual journal articles ourselves, but rely on other groups within the information field to index such sources, so too, must we rely mainly on channels other than cataloging by librarians for entry into the contents of the Web. The analogy to journal articles is not perfect, of course; it is indeed desirable that librarians catalog valuable Web sites. But I think these sites should be identified mainly through published reviews, not through catalogers spending their own time surfing the Web for interesting sites. The main concern of catalogers ought to be with books. Most of our access to the Web will necessarily have to be through search engines created by others in the information field. (See Mann, "Is Precoordination Unnecessary.").
30. This, again, is a major problem that is now solved by browse displays of pre-coordinated LCSH strings. That this problem exists to begin with, and still requires a solution, is a fact entirely overlooked in calls for reengineering LCSH into a post-coordinate system, as with Chan, "Entering the New Millennium: A New Century for LCSH." Post-coordination of LCSH would sever the tie between the first assigned heading and the classification number, as well as destroy the possibility of intelligible browse displays of subdivisions that are so necessary in alerting researchers to relevant options that they could not specify in advance in post-coordination.
31. The use of published bibliographies and specialized encyclopedias are other important ways of searching that are, in general, neither duplicated nor superseded by online searching.
32. Many of the blind spots of information science spring from a basic disregard, perhaps even ignorance, of the "traditional library science" and the "type of literature" conceptual models of research options and of how well they continue to work in providing access to large portions of the contents of research libraries. See Mann, Library Research Models, especially chapters 3-6 and 10.
33. On the matter of "inevitability," see note 16 above.
34. Let us especially heed the chilling warning derived from a recent survey of practicing librarians: "Library educators would do well to remember that many respondents chose librarianship because they love books or libraries, while few - even among younger, recent graduates - expressed a similar view of technology. Although most would agree that libraries must integrate current technologies, especially the Internet, into their mission, an overemphasis on technology in library schools at the expense of more traditional courses may discourage qualified individuals from librarianship" [emphasis added]; Rachel Singer Gordon & Sarah Nesbitt, "Who We Are, Where We're Going: A Report from the Front," Library Journal (May 15, 1999): 39.]. A concrete example of the discouragement foisted on students by inappropriate library school education may be found in Karen Elliott, "What I Really Learned in Library School," MSRRT Newsletter 12 (Spring 1997): 1-2: "All intelligent and talented librarians invariably wind up working in the private sector, as well they should... . `Librarian' might be a dirty word. Use `information professional' to be on the safe side... . All good reference librarians want to become information brokers or information consultants... . All good catalogers want to catalog Internet sources and nothing else. They should also be experts in SGML and metadata, otherwise they are not to be taken seriously... . Don't expect any of your professors to have worked in an actual library any time in the past 20 years. Don't expect any of your professors to have worked in an actual library any time ever."