In 1938, Alfred Kazin began work on his first book, “On Native Grounds.”
The child of poor Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn, he had studied at City
College. Somehow, with little money or backing, he managed to write an
extraordinary book, setting the great American intellectual and
literary movements from the late nineteenth century to his own time in
a richly evoked historical context.
One institution made his work possible: the New
York Public Library on Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street. Kazin
later recalled, “Anything I had heard of and wanted to see, the blessed
place owned: first editions of American novels out of those germinal
decades after the Civil War that led to my theme of the ‘modern’; old
catalogues from long-departed Chicago publishers who had been young men
in the eighteen-nineties trying to support a little realism.” Without
leaving Manhattan, Kazin read his way into “lonely small towns, prairie
villages, isolated colleges, dusty law offices, national magazines, and
provincial ‘academies’ where no one suspected that the obedient-looking
young reporters, law clerks, librarians, teachers would turn out to be
Willa Cather, Robert Frost, Sinclair Lewis, Wallace Stevens, Marianne
Moore.”
It’s an old and reassuring story: bookish boy or girl
enters the cool, dark library and discovers loneliness and freedom. For
the past ten years or so, however, the cities of the book have been
anything but quiet. The computer and the Internet have transformed
reading more dramatically than any technology since the printing press,
and for the past five years Google has been at work on an ambitious
project, Google Book Search. Google’s self-described aim is to “build a
comprehensive index of all the books in the world,” one that would
enable readers to search the list of books it contains and to see full
texts of those not covered by copyright. Google collaborates with
publishers, called Google Publishing Partners—there are more than ten
thousand of them around the world—to provide information about books
that are still copyright protected, including text samples, to all
users of the Web. A second enterprise, the Google Library Project, is
digitizing as many books as possible, in collaboration with great
libraries in the U.S. and abroad. Among them is Kazin’s beloved New
York Public Library, where more than a million books are being scanned.
Google’s projects, together with rival initiatives by Microsoft and
Amazon, have elicited millenarian prophecies about the possibilities of
digitized knowledge and the end of the book as we know it. Last year,
Kevin Kelly, the self-styled “senior maverick” of Wired, predicted, in a piece in the Times,
that “all the books in the world” would “become a single liquid fabric
of interconnected words and ideas.” The user of the electronic library
would be able to bring together “all texts—past and present,
multilingual—on a particular subject,” and, by doing so, gain “a
clearer sense of what we as a civilization, a species, do know and
don’t know.” Others have evoked even more utopian prospects, such as a
universal archive that will contain not only all books and articles but
all documents anywhere—the basis for a total history of the human race.
In fact, the Internet will not bring us a universal library, much
less an encyclopedic record of human experience. None of the firms now
engaged in digitization projects claim that it will create anything of
the kind. The hype and rhetoric make it hard to grasp what Google and
Microsoft and their partner libraries are actually doing. We have
clearly reached a new point in the history of text production. On many
fronts, traditional periodicals and books are making way for blogs and
other electronic formats. But magazines and books still sell a lot of
copies. The rush to digitize the written record is one of a number of
critical moments in the long saga of our drive to accumulate, store,
and retrieve information efficiently. It will result not in the
infotopia that the prophets conjure up but in one in a long series of
new information ecologies, all of them challenging, in which readers,
writers, and producers of text have learned to survive.
As early as the third millennium B.C.,
Mesopotamian scribes began to catalogue the clay tablets in their
collections. For ease of reference, they appended content descriptions
to the edges of tablets, and they adopted systematic shelving for quick
identification of related texts. The greatest and most famous of the
ancient collections, the Library of Alexandria, had, in its ambitions
and its methods, a good deal in common with Google’s book projects. It
was founded around 300 B.C. by Ptolemy I, who had inherited Alexandria,
a brand-new city, from Alexander the Great. A historian with a taste
for poetry, Ptolemy decided to amass a comprehensive collection of
Greek works. Like Google, the library developed an efficient procedure
for capturing and reproducing texts. When ships docked in Alexandria,
any scrolls found on them were confiscated and taken to the library.
The staff made copies for the owners and stored the originals in heaps,
until they could be catalogued. At the collection’s height, it
contained more than half a million scrolls, a welter of information
that forced librarians to develop new organizational methods. For the
first time, works were shelved alphabetically.
Six hundred years
later, Eusebius, a historian and bishop of the coastal city of
Caesarea, in Palestine, assembled Christian writings in the local
library. He also devised a system of cross-references, known as “canon
tables,” that enabled readers to find parallel passages in the four
Gospels—a system that the scholar James O’Donnell recently described as
the world’s first set of hot links. A deft impresario, Eusebius
mobilized a team of secretaries and scribes to produce Bibles featuring
his new study aid; in the three-thirties, the emperor Constantine
placed an order with Eusebius for fifty parchment codex Bibles for the
churches of his new city, Constantinople. Throughout the Middle Ages,
the great monastic libraries engaged in the twin projects of
accumulating large holdings and, in their scriptoria, making and
disseminating copies of key texts.
The rise of printing in fifteenth-century Europe transformed the
work of librarians and readers. Into a world already literate and
curious, the printers brought, within half a century, some twenty-eight
thousand titles, and millions of individual books—many times more than
the libraries of the West had previously held. Reports of new worlds,
new theologies, and new ideas about the universe travelled faster and
more cheaply than ever before. The entrepreneurial world of printing
made much use of the traditional skills of learned librarians. Giovanni
Andrea Bussi, a librarian of the papal collection of Sixtus IV, also
served as adviser to two German printers in Rome, Conrad Sweynheym and
Arnold Pannartz, who began printing handsome editions of classical
texts, edited, corrected, and sometimes prefaced by Bussi. Like many
first movers, Bussi and his partners soon found that they had
overestimated the market, with disastrous financial results. They were
not the last impresarios of new book technologies to experience this
kind of difficulty.
Still, the model of scholars advising printers became normal in the
sixteenth century, even if, in later centuries, the profit-driven
industry of publishing and the industrious scholarship of the libraries
gradually became separate spheres. Remarkably, this ancient model has
been resurgent in recent years, as sales of university-press books have
dwindled and the price of journal subscriptions has risen. With
electronic publishing programs, libraries have begun to take on many of
the tasks that traditionally fell to university presses, such as the
distribution of doctoral dissertations and the reproduction of local
book and document collections—a spread of activities that Eusebius
would have found natural.
Fast, reliable methods of search and retrieval are
sometimes identified as the hallmark of our information age; “Search is
everything” has become a proverb. But scholars have had to deal with
too much information for millennia, and in periods when information
resources were multiplying especially fast they devised ingenious ways
to control the floods. The Renaissance, during which the number of new
texts threatened to become overwhelming, was the great age of
systematic note-taking. Manuals such as Jeremias Drexel’s
“Goldmine”—the frontispiece of which showed a scholar taking notes
opposite miners digging for literal gold—taught students how to
condense and arrange the contents of literature by headings. Scholars
well grounded in this regime, like Isaac Casaubon, spun tough,
efficient webs of notes around the texts of their books and in their
notebooks—hundreds of Casaubon’s books survive—and used them to
retrieve information about everything from the religion of Greek
tragedy to Jewish burial practices. Jacques Cujas, a sixteenth-century
legal scholar, astonished visitors to his study when he showed them the
rotating barber’s chair and movable bookstand that enabled him to keep
many open books in view at the same time. Thomas Harrison, a
seventeenth-century English inventor, devised a cabinet that he called
the Ark of Studies: readers could synopsize and excerpt books and then
arrange their notes by subject on a series of labelled metal hooks,
somewhat in the manner of a card index. The German philosopher Leibniz
obtained one of Harrison’s cabinets and used it in his research.
For
less erudite souls, simpler techniques abridged the process of looking
for information much as Wikipedia does now. Erasmus said that every
serious student must read the entire corpus of the classics and make
his own notes on them. But he also composed a magnificent reference
work, the “Adages,” in which he laid out and explicated thousands of
pithy ancient sayings—and provided subject indexes to help readers find
what they needed. For centuries, schoolboys first encountered the
wisdom of the ancients in this predigested form. When Erasmus told the
story of Pandora, he said that she opened not a jar, as in the original
version of the story, by the Greek poet Hesiod, but a box. In every
European language except Italian, Pandora’s box became proverbial—a
canard made ubiquitous by the power of a new information technology.
Even the best search procedures depend on the databases they explore.
From the eighteenth century, countries, universities, and academies
maintained research libraries, whose staff pioneered information
retrieval with a variety of indexing and cataloguing systems. The
development of the Dewey decimal system, in the eighteen-seventies,
coincided with a democratization of reading. Cheap but durable editions
like those of Bohn’s Library brought books other than the Bible into
working-class households, and newspapers, which in the late nineteenth
century sometimes appeared every hour, made breaking news and social
commentary available across all social ranks.
In the nineteen-forties, Fremont Rider, a librarian at Wesleyan
University, prophesied that material was multiplying so quickly that it
would soon overflow even the biggest sets of stacks. He argued that
microphotography could eliminate this problem, and that, by multiplying
the resources of any given library, it also offered the promise of
truly universal libraries. As old universities expanded and new ones
sprouted in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, generous funding enabled
them to buy what was available on film or microfiche and in reprint
form. Suddenly, you could do serious research on the Vatican Library’s
collections not only in Rome but also in St. Louis, where the Knights
of Columbus assembled a vast holding of microfilm.
But the film- and reprint-based libraries never became really
comprehensive. The commercial companies that did most of the filming
naturally concentrated on more marketable texts, while nonprofit
sponsors concentrated on the texts that mattered to them. No over-all
logic determined which texts were reprinted on paper, which were
filmed, and which remained in obscurity. Some efforts, like Eugene
Power’s STC project, which distributed on microfilm twenty-six thousand
early English books, transformed research conditions in certain fields.
Others simply died. As the production of books and serials exploded in
the sixties, library budgets failed to keep pace. A number of reprint
publishers ended up, like Bussi and his associates, drowning in unsold
books. The venders of microfilm kept going—so efficiently, and
enthusiastically, that they persuaded librarians and archivists to
destroy large quantities of books and newspapers that could have been
preserved.
The current era of digitization outstrips that of
microfilm, in ambition and in achievement. Few individuals ever owned
microfilm readers, after all, whereas many people have access to P.C.s
with Internet connections. Now even the most traditional-minded scholar
generally begins by consulting a search engine. As a cheerful editor at
Cambridge University Press recently told me, “Conservatively,
ninety-five per cent of all scholarly inquiries start at Google.”
Google’s famous search algorithm emulates the principle of scholarly
citation—counting up and evaluating earlier links in order to steer
users toward the sources that others have already found helpful. In a
sense, the system resembles nothing more than trillions of
old-fashioned footnotes.
The Google Library Project has so far
received mixed reviews. Google shows the reader a scanned version of
the page; it is generally accurate and readable. But Google also uses
optical character recognition to produce a second version, for its
search engine to use, and this double process has some quirks. In a
scriptorium lit by the sun, a scribe could mistakenly transcribe a “u”
as an “n,” or vice versa. Curiously, the computer makes the same
mistake. If you enter qualitas—an important term in medieval
philosophy—into Google Book Search, you’ll find almost two thousand
appearances. But if you enter “qnalitas” you’ll be rewarded with more
than five hundred references that you wouldn’t necessarily have found.
Sometimes the scanner operators miss pages, or scan them out of order.
Sometimes the copy is not in good condition. The cataloguing data that
identify an item are often incomplete or confusing. And the key terms
that Google provides in order to characterize individual books are
sometimes unintentionally comic. It’s not all that helpful, when you’re
thinking about how to use an 1878 Baedeker guide to Paris, to be told
that one of its keywords is “fauteuils.”
But there are even more fundamental limitations to the Google
project, and to its competitors from Microsoft and Amazon. One of the
most frequently discussed difficulties is that of copyright. A
conservative reckoning of the number of books ever published is
thirty-two million; Google believes that there could be as many as a
hundred million. It is estimated that between five and ten per cent of
known books are currently in print, and twenty per cent—those produced
between the beginning of print, in the fifteenth century, and 1923—are
out of copyright. The rest, perhaps seventy-five per cent of all books
ever printed, are “orphans,” possibly still covered by copyright
protections but out of print and pretty much out of mind. Google,
controversially, is scanning these books although it is not yet making
them fully available; Microsoft, more cautiously, is scanning only what
it knows it can legitimately disseminate.
Google and Microsoft pursue their own interests, in ways that they
think will generate income, and this has prompted a number of major
libraries to work with the Open Content Alliance, a nonprofit
book-digitizing venture. Many important books will remain untouched:
Google, for example, has no immediate plans to scan books from the
first couple of centuries of printing. Rare books require expensive
special conditions for copying, and most of those likely to generate a
lot of use have already been made available by companies like
Chadwyck-Healey and Gale, which sell their collections to libraries and
universities for substantial fees. Early English Books Online offers a
hundred thousand titles printed between 1475 and 1700. Massive tomes in
Latin and the little pamphlets that poured off the presses during the
Puritan revolution—schoolbooks, Jacobean tragedies with prompters’
notes, and political pamphlets by Puritan regicides—are all available
to anyone in a major library.
Other sectors of the world’s book production are not even catalogued
and accessible on site, much less available for digitization. The
materials from the poorest societies may not attract companies that
rely on subscriptions or on advertising for cash flow. This is
unfortunate, because these very societies have the least access to
printed books and thus to their own literature and history. If you
visit the Web site of the Online Computer Library Center and look at
its WorldMap, you can see the numbers of books in public and academic
systems around the world. Sixty million Britons have a hundred and
sixteen million public-library books at their disposal, while more than
1.1 billion Indians have only thirty-six million. Poverty, in other
words, is embodied in lack of print as well as in lack of food. The
Internet will do much to redress this imbalance, by providing Western
books for non-Western readers. What it will do for non-Western books is
less clear.
A record of all history appears even more distant. If you were going
to make such a record available, as the most utopian champions of
digitization imagine, you would have to include both literary works and
archival documents never meant for publication. It’s true that millions
of these documents are starting to appear on screens. The online
records of the Patent and Trademark Office are a boon for anyone
interested in its spectacular panorama of the brilliance and lunacy of
American tinkerers. Thanks to the nonprofit Aluka archive, scholars and
writers in Africa can study on the Web a growing number of African
records whose originals are stored, inaccessibly, elsewhere in the
world. Historians of the papacy can read original documents of the
early Popes without going to Rome, in a digitized collection of
documents mounted by the Vatican Secret Archives. But even the biggest
of these projects is nothing more than a flare of light in the still
unexplored night sky of humanity’s recorded past. ArchivesUSA, a
Web-based guide to American archives, lists five and a half thousand
repositories and more than a hundred and sixty thousand collections of
primary source material. The U.S. National Archives alone contain some
nine billion items. It’s not likely that we’ll see the whole archives
of the United States or any other developed nation online in the
immediate future—much less those of poorer nations.
The supposed universal library, then, will be not a seamless mass of
books, easily linked and studied together, but a patchwork of
interfaces and databases, some open to anyone with a computer and WiFi,
others closed to those without access or money. The real challenge now
is how to chart the tectonic plates of information that are crashing
into one another and then to learn to navigate the new landscapes they
are creating. Over time, as more of this material emerges from
copyright protection, we’ll be able to learn things about our culture
that we could never have known previously. Soon, the present will
become overwhelmingly accessible, but a great deal of older material
may never coalesce into a single database. Neither Google nor anyone
else will fuse the proprietary databases of early books and the local
systems created by individual archives into one accessible store of
information. Though the distant past will be more available, in a
technical sense, than ever before, once it is captured and preserved as
a vast, disjointed mosaic it may recede ever more rapidly from our
collective attention.
Still, it is hard to exaggerate what is already
becoming possible month by month and what will become possible in the
next few years. Google and Microsoft are flanked by other big efforts.
Some are largely philanthropic, like the old standby Project Gutenberg,
which provides hand-keyboarded texts of English and American classics,
and the distinctive Million Book Project, founded by Raj Reddy, at
Carnegie Mellon University. Reddy works with partners around the world
to provide, among other things, online texts in many languages for
which character-recognition software is not yet available. There are
hundreds of smaller efforts in specialized fields—like Perseus, a site,
based at Tufts, specializing in Greek and Latin—and new commercial
enterprises like Alexander Street Press, which offers libraries
beautifully produced collections of everything from Harper’s Weekly
to the letters and diaries of American immigrants. It has become
impossible for ordinary scholars to keep abreast of what’s available in
this age of electronic abundance—though D-Lib Magazine, an
online publication, helps by highlighting new digital sources and
collections, rather as material libraries used to advertise their
acquisition of a writer’s papers or a collection of books with fine
bindings.
The Internet’s technologies, moreover, are
continually improving. Search engines like Google, Altavista, and
HotBot originally informed the user about only the top layers of Web
pages. To find materials buried in such deep bodies of fact and
document as the Library of Congress’s Web site or JSTOR,
a repository of scholarly journal articles, you had to go to the site
and ask a specific question. But in recent years—as anyone who
regularly uses Google knows—they have become more adept at asking
questions, and the search companies have apparently induced the largest
proprietary sites to become more responsive. Specialist engines like
Google Scholar can discriminate with astonishing precision between
relevant and irrelevant, firsthand and derivative information.
Alfred Kazin loved the New York Public Library because it admitted
everyone. The readers included not only presentable young scholars like
his friend Richard Hofstadter but also many wild figures who haunted
the reading rooms: “the little man with one slice of hair across his
bald head, like General MacArthur’s . . . poring with a faint smile
over a large six-column Bible in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, English, French,
German,” and “the bony, ugly, screeching madwoman who reminded me of
Maxim Gorky’s ‘Boless.’ ” Even Kazin’s democratic imagination could not
have envisaged the hordes of the Web’s actual and potential users, many
of whom will read material that would have been all but inaccessible to
them a generation ago.
And yet we will still need our libraries and archives. John Seely
Brown and Paul Duguid have written of the so-called “social life of
information”—the form in which you encounter a text can have a huge
impact on how you use it. Original documents reward us for taking the
trouble to find them by telling us things that no image can. Duguid
describes watching a fellow-historian systematically sniff
two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old letters in an archive. By detecting the
smell of vinegar—which had been sprinkled, in the eighteenth century,
on letters from towns struck by cholera, in the hope of disinfecting
them—he could trace the history of disease outbreaks. Historians of the
book—a new and growing tribe—read books as scouts read trails.
Bindings, usually custom-made in the early centuries of printing, can
tell you who owned them and what level of society they belonged to.
Marginal annotations, which abounded in the centuries when readers
usually went through books with pen in hand, identify the often
surprising messages that individuals have found as they read. Many
original writers and thinkers—Martin Luther, John Adams, Samuel Taylor
Coleridge—have filled their books with notes that are indispensable to
understanding their thought. Thousands of forgotten men and women have
covered Bibles and prayer books, recipe collections, and political
pamphlets with pointing hands, underlining, and notes that give
insights into which books mattered, and why. If you want to capture how
a book was packaged and what it has meant to the readers who have
unwrapped it, you have to look at all the copies you can find, from
original manuscripts to cheap reprints. The databases include multiple
copies of some titles. But they will never provide all the copies of,
say, “The Wealth of Nations” and the early responses it provoked.
For now and for the foreseeable future, any serious reader will have
to know how to travel down two very different roads simultaneously. No
one should avoid the broad, smooth, and open road that leads through
the screen. But if you want to know what one of Coleridge’s annotated
books or an early “Spider-Man” comic really looks and feels like, or if
you just want to read one of those millions of books which are being
digitized, you still have to do it the old way, and you will have to
for decades to come. At the New York Public Library, the staff loves
electronic media. The library has made hundreds of thousands of images
from its collections accessible on the Web, but it has done so in the
knowledge that its collection comprises fifty-three million items.
Sit in your local coffee shop, and your laptop can tell you a lot. If
you want deeper, more local knowledge, you will have to take the
narrower path that leads between the lions and up the stairs. There—as
in great libraries around the world—you’ll use all the new sources, the
library’s and those it buys from others, all the time. You’ll check
musicians’ names and dates at Grove Music Online, read Marlowe’s
“Doctor Faustus” on Early English Books Online, or decipher Civil War
documents on Valley of the Shadow. But these streams of data, rich as
they are, will illuminate, rather than eliminate, books and prints and
manuscripts that only the library can put in front of you. The narrow
path still leads, as it must, to crowded public rooms where the
sunlight gleams on varnished tables, and knowledge is embodied in
millions of dusty, crumbling, smelly, irreplaceable documents and books.
Via The New Yorker