Where Will All the Books and Journals Go?

As a librarian, I am confronted almost daily with the challenge of what to purchase and what to discard. Since the explosion of the world wide web and related internet developments, the first things to be discarded, recycled, or donated somewhere else have been newspapers, magazines, and journals. Why? Because, with the exception of high quality journals, they physically decay, while their texts are now widely available via the internet. Furthermore, it is far easier to retrieve exactly what a patron is looking for via digital resources. What is lost, of course, is the tactile joy of holding and reading something material.

What else goes? Film strips are long gone; next, video tapes, which are allowed to expire on the shelves, dying on the vine. CDs and DVDs are easier to store, but in the not too distant future, we'll be able to download most of what we want, view, and delete until next time, and they will die on the vine, too.

Is this a tragedy? Not really. It actually helps ensure that anyone who can get to an internet-linked computer will have a better shot at reading (or seeing or hearing) what they actually want to read (or see or hear) than they could in any one physical location. Also, in light of disasters like Katrina or Beirut, anything digitized and saved online will survive physical disaster.

Also, online cataologs are a zillion times more effective than the old labor-intensive card catalogs. I can attest to that, having experienced the change.

Is there still a place for physical artifacts like books and journals? Of course! Hard to beat the real thing. Then again, I still like listening to old records, too. But seriously, I hope there will always be large physical library nodes such as the great ones at colleges and universities and lovely places like the Poet's House.

Is there a danger that we could become hostages to the power grid? What if electricity breaks down, or governments and corporations conspire to take away the freedoms of the net? Then we're in trouble, and would have to resort to old style publishing and word of mouth. Think Fahrenheit 451, of subversive artists and underground patrons keeping the dream alive despite authoritarian rule.

As is, what happens to most books and journals, eventually? They are discarded or recycled. How about storing books and journals at home? I once knew a librarian (at Duke) who kept everything he ever received or bought, and I mean everything -- until he died. The survivors had to deal with it. Where do you suppose all of it ended up going? I have moved enough times to have come to this conclusion: better to cap my personal book collection at about 500 books. Move the rest out into the world again. It's good feng shui. With a trusty laptop, I can retrieve bits of books and journals via the internet and find virtually anything I need at any time. If the power goes out, I can always read one of the 500 books by candlelight.

Project Gutenberg is a noble database of free books, ones with expired US copyrights. It's nifty fifty, indeed.

Today's rune: Fertility.