Issue 1.01 | Mar/Apr 1993
While the monks practiced two of the key concepts of the modern library - collecting books and guarding them for communal use - they lacked a third: a system for organizing books so that they could be found later. Most libraries simply had too few books to bother with a catalog. With the spread of the printing press, however, the distinction between library and publisher split - and the proliferation of books and libraries required better technology for telling books apart: namely, card catalogs and indexing systems. Card catalogs, in turn, helped reinforce a new distinction that sprang up with the advent of printing: that of authorship.
An author is someone whose views are considered so important and interesting to a publisher that the publisher is willing to risk money to bring those views to the public. Authors and (especially) would-be authors have complained about the arbitrariness of this distinction since before the printers of London balked at publishing Newton's treatise on calculus. (Their grounds: mathematics books never sell.) Changes in the technology of libraries and publishing may create alternatives to the power of publisher - and soon.
Much of the necessary preliminary work of automating card catalogs is already done without anyone but librarians really noticing. The automated card catalog, in turn, helps to raise the possibility of a new electronic world in which all authors can be, in effect, their own publishers. The publishers' power stems from the cost and difficulty of printing. In an electronic world, "printing'' is trivial; anyone can copy an electronic text with a few keystrokes. The really hard problem in the electronic world is finding which text you might want to read or to copy. Electronic card catalogs are an important first step towards solving that problem.
Books by the Numbers
>From your local neighborhood Internet network terminal, you can now search the catalogs of thousands of libraries across the world. The Library of Congress catalog is there: containing more than 20 million entries. John Mahoney, head of computing at the British Library, says that 12-15 million items in the British Library's electronic catalog will become available over the British research network, JANET, by this summer. By far the greatest contributions to online access to information, however, come from Ohio, of all places.
In 1967, academic librarian Frederick Kilgour had two insights: first, that all libraries soon would put their card catalogs on computer, and second, that it was senseless for them all to duplicate the work of typing text from cards into the machines. So he put together a consortium of academic libraries from Ohio, got a bit of seed money from the state legislature and began creating a cooperative card catalog based on a shared database.
Today the OCLC, descendant of Kilgour's Ohio College Libraries Center, enables more than 14,000 libraries, spread over 46 countries, to share a database of about 26 million entries. Some 5,000 of these libraries are general members that agree to share all of their catalog entries with other OCLC members - so that once one member has made a catalog entry for a new work, others can simply copy that entry rather than duplicate the same effort. Not surprisingly, OCLC also runs an inter-library loan service to help librarians get their hands on books that appear in the shared database, but not on their own shelves.
Automated catalogs are a boon to researcher and librarian alike. The OCLC has built a new service called EPIC that searches its online catalog and enables a researcher to track down information by any, some, or all sorts of indices - including author, title, publisher and subject.
But the sheer ease with which researchers can now find their way through vast collections often merely adds to their frustration. Though it takes only a few seconds to locate a book or article in an automated catalog, it then requires hours to bring it up from the stacks - or weeks to get it on inter-library loan. Nor is the impatience of researchers the only factor pressuring libraries to extend the scope of automation from the card catalog to the body of texts themselves.
On the contrary, more powerful forces are at work. One is the rapid decay of most paper made since the mid-19th century, a time when papermakers switched to acidic wood pulp as their raw material. Joseph Price, head of technology at the Library of Congress, estimates that each year 80,000 of the items on its shelves become so brittle that their pages can no longer be turned. The only way to save the text is to copy it onto another media. Today, the medium is typically microfiche, but Price reckons it will soon be some form of optical disk.
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