PHILIP HARVEY
1.
Then there was
the Application. It was a library held in your hand. It contained everything, even your most private thoughts and
desires. It was a library of appearances. Actually it did not contain
everything. It was a small reference collection of personal data. Material that
was up-to-date had the feel of being out-of-date. It perpetrated syndromes. In
fact, it was not a library. The Application was weak on quality control. It
could not remember every thing. Sorry, it was only a machine. There was no one
to talk to about its contents. The Application was someone’s personal library
of this and that.
2.
Then there was
the 3D Print. It turned flatness into an object. Museums of layered models were
realised out of horizontal cross-sections. The paperless museum became the
paperful museum. Animated from a flat plane, the 3D Print came clean out of
‘computer-personed’ design. Not that the results stayed clean. Dust settled.
Feather dusters were required by librarians to keep things spruce-goose. Exact
replicas of fragile objects turned into fossils, sometimes in perfect duplicate
forms. A literature sprang up. The fossils themselves were a kind of living
paper literature. New cataloguing rules had to be devised to describe this
realia.
3.
The there was
the Automatic Check-In. This was good practice for borrowers who used airports
a lot. Humans no longer needed to be librarians. They could make coffee or join
protest marches or write science fiction at home. Fines were handled by a
colleague of the Automatic Check-In known as the Automatic Adds-Up. Not that
they lacked the personal touch. Borrowers had to personally touch the Automatic
Check-In with their index finger in order to follow the directions. If they
didn’t do this, or the returned items did not register for some obscure
technical reason, the Automatic Adds-Up could get very angry. Not that either
of them had any feelings.
4.
Then there was
the Touchscreen. Idle turning of pages or flipping through catalogue card
drawers was for nostalgia buffs. The catalogue was in the aisle with the
searcher. It could be read in the passenger seat during those long trips along
freeways. The point of need could more or less be met anywhere using handheld
devices and the Touchscreen. Instead of the cumbersome paperback or antiquated
magazine, the library became an endless finger dance for background
information, enhanced experiences, softening interactions, virtual copies,
zooming intuitions, spectral formats, keyboardless sonatas.
5.
Then there was
the E-Book. This was a reminder of how impermanent and fragile our libraries
really were, as there were no books more impermanent and fragile than the
E-Book. Once there was a literature so ethereal it rarely moved from the shelf
from one generation to the next, but now there was a whole literature
technology sourced entirely from the ether itself. When they said that the
E-Book was skyrocketing, they weren’t being metaphorical. The atmosphere we
breathed was filled with words. Download made much of the online world one vast
regional library network. Borrowing rights were a nightmare, when they weren’t
free.
6.
Then there was
the Downtime. This was the strange period of a day or night when the
information wasn’t available on a screen. It was sometimes called the Realtime
by those who could remember a time in their lives when computers did not exist.
This was an antique world in which people embraced face-to-face, depending on
whose face. In that long gone world now only seen in movies, people sat in
large armchairs and slowly turned pages in an effort to find out something.
Sometimes they would do this both day and night. The Downtime reminded
borrowers that it was enjoyable to talk to one another, often in large groups
called discussion groups. This happened in libraries in forms like the Book Group,
but in numerous other ways, humans being by nature, talkers. The Downtime had
the effect of reminding people of information rich and information poor, as it
became apparent some people did not suffer from the Downtime because they
didn’t have access to the internet anyway. Librarians were in the unenviable
position of reminding everyone that the books were there for everyone. Those
rare humans who were still known as librarians.
7.
Then there was the
Interaction. Cataloguers became regulators of a flood, rather than a workflow.
How to describe Blogger, Wordpress and other content management systems. Leave
it to Google? What is the information we lost in the information? Were we
describing a river, a lagoon, a lake, a bight? A bay of books looked quaint. During
the flood all shape was lost under the prevailing push of wash. And the
Interaction extended to more unmanageable daily correspondence. Could we have
libraries of Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr? At least a print monograph stood
resolutely on its feet through all vicissitudes. How were cataloguers to judge
what was priority for their library on Youtube, Flickr, Photobucket? Did the
cataloguer drop all hits on a subject in a box labelled with the subject? And
what happened when their main subject went viral? There were not enough minutes
in the day. The waters, it seemed, may never recede. Libraries became
Pinterests of self-definition. Librarians became evangelists for the Keyword.
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