User Submitted Blog Post: Who Needs Libraries?

When Google announced a few years back that it was going to undertake digitizing the contents of a number of libraries, a few complaints sprung up---the biggest one being what this meant for copyright holders. But the real issue, Robert Darnton suggests, is more cerebral than legal. In a tremendous must-read essay in the New York Review of Books, "The Library in the New Age," he argues that Google's efforts have supported the false notion that a digitized library will lead to the elimination of brick-and-mortar libraries, and even the physical book.

Darnton, the director of the University Library at Harvard, indulges himself for a moment or two to sing the praises of old-fashioned book: "When I read an old book, I hold its pages up to the light and often find among the fibers of the paper little circles made by drops from the hand of the vatman as he made the sheet-or bits of shirts and petticoats that failed to be ground up adequately during the preparation of the pulp," he writes. The thrust of his piece, however, argues that the physical book is an impermanent thing when it comes to presenting information---newspapers often get the story wrong (or present a deeply imperfect version of events), there are large differences between various Shakespeare texts, and some authors endlessly tweak their books. Voltaire, Darnton points out, was a chief offender on that front, though you don't have to look back to 18th-century France for examples; Galleycat recently reported on the case of Yael Goldstein's 2007 novel Overture, which is now out under a new title (The Passion of Tasha Darksy), a new author name (Yael Goldstein Love---she got married between editions), and a revised opening (she wanted to do some tweaking).

What this means, in sum, is that you need libraries---repositories for all the stray information included in multiple editions, for the books that Google won't deem scan-worthy, for all the books that Google won't get to, which are legion. The dream of an Internet repository of all the world's information is just that, a dream, and though there's a lot to be said for creating a place where lots of information resides online---it's certainly nice to have access to Animal Farm or Don Quixote whenever I need it---spaces for even more information are as necessary as ever. No serious scholar trusts just one source, and that's what Google, for all the multitudes it contains, is becoming---one source.

Photo by umjanedoan