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To use Google Books, a person must type "Google" into a browser of some sort. Each page of the book scanned by Google bears their mark, seen to the left. It is fairly clear that it is a document scanned and provided by Google, presented by Google through their interface (and their copyright settlement).Yet, there is a tricky problem: The same text is marked very clearly with the institution where a physical copy (at one point?) was housed. In the case of Essays of an Ex-Librarian by Richard Garnett, 1901, it bears a large bookplate identifying the University of Michigan.
Patron: Page 193 is blurry, can you scan it for me and e-mail it?
Me: There is a button in Google's interface to report the page unreadable.
Patron: Come on...It's just a page. Can't you go get it? At least read it to me?
Me: No.
Patron: Pretty please?
Me: No, but you can request the book through Inter-Library Loan.
Patron: But, it's just a page, and I'm in Poland. That would take a month and I'd have to pay.
Me: No.
Okay, okay, some of that is a lie already. In fact, I have, on my own time, requested books to be brought over from the Buhr storage library on my own account, and I have photographed the requested page with my own digital camera and e-mailed the photo to the patron. There is no policy for handling such requests since they are not frequent enough as of yet to be a problem. In general, our affiliated patrons come first, but with any time left I can choose to help.
What should the response be to these types of questions? Whose text is it when the digital scan belongs to a company providing access, but yet it never loses its association with its referent, physically housed in another place, but containing the same content? The combination creates a lot of assumptions. The person typing usually assumes that I am in the library, that the book still exists in the library, that it is a few feet away from me, and that it will "just take a minute." They also assume that it is our (my) responsibility to help them, and not Google. Maybe that is a good thing? The library is seen as more available, and helpful than Google. The physical item in this case is more accessible since a bad scan cannot be re-scanned.
But, what do I do though when there are three other chat windows open simultaneously and it's the second Google verification request of my shift? As the face of a "public" research university, who is my patron? Should I have levels? Shouldn't the students come first? How does a local or state institution fund reference services for a public that through those bookplates and our availability on the web becomes a global audience? Does the whole library become a reference for the digital in that we should make plans duplication charges like for a closed-stack special library? Are physical books now a "Special Collection" in relation to the digital?
These questions cannot just remain fuzzy since the digitized texts constitute the memory of our culture. In some sense we all own them since the memories in the texts lie in the spaces between people, sustained by references to the texts each time we read one, think about it, and add it to our store of knowledge that we share with others as we live and chat over coffee. For now (most of) the physical books that Google references remain in the libraries, but many people unable to see the blurry details behind "the cloud" call for the practical destruction or selling-off of the books and their pricy buildings and air-conditioning as a practical necessity, not seeing the physical servers, fiber optic cable, and software with quick obsolescence upon which a digitized collection such as Google Books collection relies. We must define our relationship, and take ownership and responsibility for it, or just like the stack of corroded 51/4 inch floppy disks that hold the games my father programmed for me that sit next to a failed Commodore PET disk drive in my closet, the entirety of our cultural memory could become inaccessible while we pay attention to shinier things.
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ReplyDeleteApropos of the 'liquidation' of the physical library and the destruction of the book under conditions of late capitalism, there came to my mind a fascinating passage from Hannah Arendt which, when read in the context of the information economy, becomes supremely contemporary. She is discussing how one of the early-modern prerequisites for the rise of capitalism was "a development in which all property was destroyed in the process of its appropriation, all things devoured in the process of their production, and the stability of the world undermined in a constant process of change." The point of view she suggests here is one of considerable value for understanding how the expansion of capital into an 'information economy' is effecting an expropriation of the proprietary physical book and its transformation into circulable image-information with digital technology. Every major expansion of capitalism, Arendt argues, every major stage of growth undergone by its productivity, requires a concurrent and equally dramatic period of destruction and liquidation as its seedbed. Her primary touchstone for this argument is economic conditions in postwar Germany:
ReplyDelete"In order not to underestimate the momentum this process has reached after centuries of almost unhindered development, it may be well to reflect on the so-called 'economic miracle' of postwar Germany[. ...] The German example shows very clearly that under modern conditions the expropriation of people, the destruction of objects, and the devastation of cities will turn out to be a radical stimulant for a process, not of mere recovery, but of quicker and more efficient accumulation of wealth[. ...] In Germany, outright destruction took the place of the relentless process of depreciation of all worldly things, which is the hallmark of the waste economy in which we now live. The result is almost the same: a booming prosperity which, as postwar Germany illustrates, feeds not on the abundance of material goods or anything stable and given but on the process of production and consumption itself. Under modern conditions, not destruction but conservation spells ruin because the very durability of conserved objects is the greatest impediment to the turnover process, whose constant gain in speed is the only constancy left wherever it has taken hold."
To put it in poetic terms: a hypothetical madman who hallucinates the sound of a firebomb raid while walking among the quiet Hatcher stacks is actually less mad than we are.
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1998), 252f.
That "conservation as the barrier to turnover" bit is the tricky part. Certainly that plays out in the arguments over use of space that come out in talks on the future of libraries. To revise the use of space, to include group work space and computer space, the books have to be moved out. That was true back even when the first computers entered the library. In the Hatcher library the rooms devoted to Faculty Exploratory and the KNC, the two main technical rooms, long ago were used for periodical guides. Shapiro made huge changes two years ago, moving out books to make their first floor computer spaces and group study spaces. Some see places like Boston's Cushing Academy that has moved out all of the books and replaced them with research terminals, as the logical next step. The books are seen as being in the way, sucking up the air conditioning, and consuming the space that could be used to consume digital text and cappuccino. Yet expunging ownership of the documents and changing to rental of content leaves the conservation and access to memory to corportations, law settlements, and invisible infrastructure, and it is giving up control. The destruction seedbed seems imminent, so how do we choose and decide how to keep enough to maintain memory, and evidence? Do we still value memory?
ReplyDeleteI am trying to answer this, but I do not have an answer yet.
The ultimate, and really unsettling, logical outcome of this process is the dissolution of the library per se both as physical infrastructure and as meaningful cultural space. What's the point of shoveling the books out the window to make room for research terminals if texts are accessible over the web, access to which theoretically does not depend on locale? That's the question about infrastructure, but in terms of cultural space: What will the world look like, how will it function differently, when the cultural value of a space set aside and administered as a library has been absorbed, expanded, and radically altered by digital networks? If we're on the topic of space and climate control, why not sell out museums? I mean, Jesus, 50 CPUs in a room generate a billion times more heat than a stack of books - who's paying for that air conditioning? I will stop now because I am reaching a point of fury.
ReplyDelete