Time to Consider Reinventing the Library

Pop Quiz/Short Essay (50 points): Which individual has had the greatest positive impact on the quality of American education in this century?

John Dewey? The sentimental choice but not a contender. Columbia University’s Nicholas Murray Butler, Harvard University’s James Bryant Conant or the University of Chicago’s Robert Hutchins? Giants of their time, for sure, but their influence today is but a nostalgic echo. Joan Ganz Cooney of “Sesame Street”? Maybe Captain Kangaroo? Just kidding.

No, the person who unquestionably did the most for hungry young minds was Andrew Carnegie--a man who intuitively understood that even the most powerful ideas needed affordable housing. By the time the Roaring ‘20s kicked in, the steel baron had shelled out more than $56 million (real money now, unbelievable largess then) to build more than 2,500 free libraries. As canny as philanthropists come, Carnegie didn’t just invest in ideas and imagery--he built an enduring infrastructure. His libraries did at least as much for stimulating literacy as the schools. Carnegie literally birthed a new public medium for knowledge.

When this immigrant Scot was asked in 1900 why on earth he gave his wealth to launch libraries, of all things, when there were so many other problems in America, he replied: “I choose free libraries as the best agencies for improving the masses of the people because they give nothing for nothing. They only help those who help themselves. They never pauperize. They reach the aspiring and open to these chief treasures of the world--those stored up in books. A taste for reading drives out lower tastes.”

Good stuff. Ask around and you’ll be astonished by the number and variety of people whose lives were touched by a Carnegie library. When Americans talk about books that changed their lives, the chances are those books were part of Carnegie’s legacy.

Today, we’re surrounded by new media and beset by declining literacy. People talk about shoring up the schools and “getting back to basics.” That’s all wonderful, but it’s far from enough. We need new infrastructures to house ideas and capture imaginations. We need to do at the end of this century what Carnegie did at its beginning--build a powerfully accessible knowledge medium. We need an Andrew Carnegie for the 21st Century.

“The problems never change,” says Michael Hawley, a friend who is snagging his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab. “You always need some new form of technology to pump the information into the communities.”

Hawley champions the concept of “digital libraries”--the notion of putting the world’s greatest words on compact disc platters. “You figure a book is a megabyte (of data),” Hawley calculates, “and a CD can hold 550 megabytes--200 CDs could hold a nice-sized library.”

In other words, take the printed word, digitize it and slap it on to a new medium--a medium that can allow instantaneous access via computer; a medium that would let people play with text in the same way that videocassette recorders and camcorders let people play with imagery. Create a resource--a digital mine--with information that can be excavated, refined, processed, linked and fused in intriguing ways.

This isn’t intellectual skywriting. As one of Steve Jobs’ hotshots at Next Inc., Hawley designed and wrote the software for the Next machine’s “digital books”--which include the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations and the complete works of Shakespeare. Searching through and reading digitized text isn’t like searching through and reading the paper-based word--it’s a radically different experience, almost fragmentary and collage-like. But it makes you think differently and it lets you explore, graze and wander through vast landscapes of text with the tap of a key.

Picture a digitized Library of Congress. One staffer there estimates that it could take 40 years to digitize its collection of 19 million books (figuring 2,000 characters per page per book) yielding more than 14.6 trillion bytes of data. What’s more, the library’s collection grows by more than 270 billion bytes of data each year. Copyright questions aside, just imagine what kind of information infrastructure that would be. It’s the sort of infrastructure that is truly Carnegie-esque in magnitude.

Other information architects have a different perspective on Carnegie’s legacy. “The idea of digital books is just the wrong idea,” asserts John Seely Brown, who runs Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center. “It misses the point--just being able to quickly get at a lot of books doesn’t necessarily change the way you think; you could end up with the digital equivalents of sound bites.”

The real issue, says Brown, is “how do you jog people’s imagination about reading between the lines?”

Instead of digitized libraries, Brown envisions the community library of 2010 as “a center of design--the design of music, the design of books, the design of film, the design of information,” and he sees these libraries all linked together on high-speed, high-bandwidth computer networks that enable people to share their ideas. Brown calls these technological webs “collaboratories.”

Actually, Brown and Hawley aren’t all that far apart--Hawley stresses the raw materials of ideas while Brown wants to focus on the tools to refine and add value to them. What’s important is that people who know technology and care about both people and ideas feel that the time is ripe to go Carnegie one better.

“I’m interested in every device we can use in diffusing the word,” says former Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin, who has written extensively on the role of new media in spreading ideas. “But I believe in the conventional book as well as the new technology. We should not abandon the traditional format; we should complement books and not displace them.”

The issue, of course, isn’t making the book obsolete. On the contrary, it’s doing what Carnegie did: giving the word a new medium, a new home and a different degree of accessibility to the public. When you sit down and run the numbers, says MIT’s Hawley, Carnegie spent about $1 billion in 1990 currency to create more than 2,500 new communities of knowledge. Shouldn’t the aspiring philanthropists of today take that as a challenge? Isn’t this the kind of investment in the future that a Walter Annenberg, an H. Ross Perot, a Donald J. Trump and a John Kluge should consider?

Unfortunately, our government doesn’t have the wit or the money to build for this future. Indeed, too many of our traditional libraries have begun to decay. The sad truth is that we’re sinking deeper and deeper into swamps of information that become even more and more difficult to access. What’s even sadder is that this society and its philanthropists lack the vision and the will to take advantage of the resources and opportunities it has to change that.