”We`re drowning in information and starving for knowledge,” said Rutherford D. Rogers, who knows more about the strange new world of research libraries than most people know about the papers on their desks.
”The old sausage grinder is going to turn out more sausage than you can eat,” he said, resorting to another homely metaphor for the 800,000 books, 400,000 periodicals and untold hundreds of thousands of other documents published each year around the globe, each in multiple copies.
”There are too many books,” he said simply.
Rogers, one of the world`s most respected librarians, is among a growing number of his colleagues in the United States who are concerned that the whole ”library system,” as they call it, is suffering from overload.
In self-defense against torrents of information, the most comprehensive libraries, mainly at universities, are being forced to pool their resources in a national and even an international network, a superlibrary whose collections, catalogues, computers and lending practices are becoming more integrated.
Yet the system still is reeling under the multiple pressures of too many books, too little money or space and technological changes that have left many library users mystified. Several prominent librarians suspect that the quality of academic research in some disciplines has declined as a result.
Few experts have pondered such problems as a whole, or with a sense that research libraries face unprecedented pressures and changes, senior librarians say.
”Universities aren`t paying enough attention to what I`d call strategic planning,” said Warren J. Haas, president of the Council on Library Resources in Washington.
About the system as a whole, he said, ”There are not enough philosophers looking at it.”
Nor are there enough qualified top managers, said William J. Welsh, deputy librarian of Congress.
Patricia Battin, head of Columbia University`s library system, said that the education of librarians has fallen behind the facts of the profession and that a professional ”identity crisis” has followed.
New academic subspecialties are demanding that libraries buy books in fields that few people know anything about, while the common ideal of developing ”a good core collection,” Battin said, is causing ”incredible problems.”
”It`s very difficult now to know what constitutes a well-informed person,” Battin said of the explosion of books, papers, journals, films and other materials that have been competing for library space.
The search for an intellectual core within an ever-expanding world of specialties dates back many decades, she conceded. But the difficulty of defining this core has grown painfully obvious to librarians only in the last decade or two.
In some subject areas at Columbia, for example, librarians have acquired thousands more books since 1967 than they acquired over the previous century and a half.
”That`s how bad it is,” Battin said. ”No one realizes it.”
Rogers, who has watched this process for decades from a series of command posts at the New York Public Library, Stanford University and other big research institutions, told similar stories about Yale, from which he retired two months ago as university librarian.
Yale`s libraries, which last year passed the 8 million volume mark, acquire only 7 or 8 percent of the world`s new literature each year, or roughly 175,000 volumes.
”You add 4 to 5 miles of books a year,” Rogers said of the shelf space required to store this annual acquisition. ”You need 12,000 square feet of floor space just to house this stuff.”
Welsh, whose position at the Library of Congress makes him, in effect, the library`s chief administrator, has even larger problems, as Rogers did when he was deputy librarian of Congress in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
The overload has become so distressing that librarians joke about it. Consider the great Library of Alexandria in ancient Egypt. This vast repository caught fire during the Roman occupation in 47 B.C. and reportedly burned centuries later during the Arab invasion. Its loss is often viewed as the worst tragedy in bibliographic history. But Welsh at the Library of Congress has been saying the fire was a blessing; if the library had kept growing it would have covered all Egypt by now.
”People say, `Why don`t you put everything on microfilm?` ” Rogers said. ”They don`t know how much it costs, $40 to $45 a volume on top of an average book`s cost of $20 to $25. This rapidly runs into such a huge amount that it`s not a very facile solution to the space problem.”
American scholars of foreign countries require books, journals, newspapers and government documents in foreign languages that have raised further problems. The Research Libraries Group, a consortium founded in 1974 that now links three dozen major research libraries through a computer at Stanford University, has developed computerized catalogues in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic and other non-Roman characters. Yet finding library personnel who can deal with such catalogues can be very difficult.
The Research Libraries Group also has taken steps to coordinate its members` acquisitions, to get each library to collect books in its fields of special strength, to back away from other fields if necessary and to share more books.
In acquisitions, for instance, a member library may agree to assume
”primary responsibility” in fields that either produce too much literature for most libraries to handle or are highly specialized.
Cornell University, for example, collects materials on Southeast Asia, a major responsibility, and also on Iceland. Other universities, with few exceptions, no longer try to match Cornell`s holdings in these areas.
There also have been drawbacks to the new system, which aims at the creation of a gigantic ”bibliographic utility” comparable to a national telephone system.
One potential problem, Rogers said, is that the unfinished utility already is being so heavily used that libraries have to compete for their central computer`s attention.
The system also depends increasingly on interlibrary loans, which depend on the physical shipment of books and photocopies. Each such loan costs about $15.
Rogers was asked if the new library system`s tendency toward specialization might confine individual university libraries to fewer areas of full bibliographic competence.
He replied that well-run libraries would try to skim the cream, at least, in most fields, and he suggested that the best short-term hope for researchers deluged with too much information lay in wider access to better computerized catalogues and in better indexes and abstracts.
Battin, of Columbia, said it was true that individual research libraries were becoming more specialized, but the alternative was to become ”mediocre across the board” of knowledge. Other senior librarians agreed.
Few librarians, Rogers said, have excelled at planning the heavy new flow of information, or at dealing with the organizational problems that have hit them. Mathematicians and financial experts are needed, he said, as well as linguists, computer experts and strategists.
Researchers, too, are showing the strain, Rogers and some of his colleagues believe. There are full professors who have yet to master the old- fashioned card catalogue. But such catalogues are vanishing from every major research library in the United States. Some senior researchers, Rogers asserted, have been unwilling or unable to cope with the profusion of new sources, and their work shows it.
”There`s great concern about this,” Battin said.
Part of the problem, Rogers explained, lies with the libraries, whose indexes to many new materials have been compiled hastily and inadequately.
Yet the economics of compiling better library guides has raised serious intellectual and social questions, Haas said. Lawyers, doctors, chemists and various other researchers depend on books and journals that have been funded lavishly. Computerized data banks in their fields already are being widely used. Scientists and engineers, moreover, often concern themselves only with the latest literature on a subject, and their searches can be focused sharply. By contrast, Haas said, the humanities and social sciences have been less well-funded. Information in these fields tends to be wide-ranging and historically complicated, and it has remained less accessible.
Haas said that he was worried that the country`s great research libraries might be participating in the creation of an inequitable and unwise new system of handling knowledge. Specialists in the humanities, not to mention poor colleges and students, could be in danger, he said, of becoming an
”informational third world.”
”There are so many more demands on us than we can meet,” Battin said.
”I`m worried that we may not make the right decisions.”
New York Times News Service
