We forget sometimes, as we fret about the future of the book, that the future is about more than books. It's about more than authors, or bookshops. It's about more than Amazon, or Google, or the new Nook versus the slightly older Kindle. The future is also about the past. About memories and how they can shape what is still to come.
A book, of course, can be a memory made real. A point of transference for something of the past, say, the battle of Salamis, down through thousands of years into our present. But think bigger than that. Because there are bigger things than books. There are vast galaxies of meaning stored in the collections of books we have gathered together in libraries. When we obsess about the future of the book, we sometimes forget about the fate of the library as the older, physical artefact of the book appears to fade away before us.
I've had to spend some time thinking about this the last couple of years, having been a Board member of the State Library of Queensland. We are lucky in Australia to have in our National Library, and its state counterparts, some of the finest institutions of this type in the world. They inherited from the British Library a sense of mission to store and catalog the memories of national life, allowing future generations to ponder the meaning of that life. They are also redefining what it means to be a library in the digital age.
Advertisement: Story continues below Increasingly libraries will not be about shelf space. They will still hold the past in physical form, bound between leather and cardboard. But libraries will also become places, both physical and virtual, where the public accesses information and creates meaning, in the purely digital realm.
What might this look like?
Vast auditoriums full of widescreen monitors?
A bit. But it will also look like the amazing app that the British Library has just put out, for free, formatted for iPad. 1000 books, fully and perfectly scanned from its 19th century collection. A treasure house of published knowledge, and occasionally of profound but enlightening ignorance, so valuable that until now it would have been beyond the means of an average person, or even a reasonably wealthy one, to have put together such a collection for themselves.
This is what libraries do. They give to us all, what only a few could otherwise have. Opening the app and grabbing a random sampler this morning, I chanced upon, Lights and Shades of Hill Life in the Afghan and Hindu Highlands of the Punjab by Frederick St. John Gore. A dry and dusty tome, by the sound of it. And in fact, somewhere within the stacks of the British Library it exists in just that form. But it is now sitting at my right hand, on the Blessed Tablet of My Master, beaming up at me, reminding me in no uncertain way just how different was the world and the mindset of our forebears. Take this, from Gore’s preface:
“The increasing interest that is continually being taken in that great dependency of hours which we call India, leads me to hope that the following pages may bring a little fresh light to those who are, unfortunately, unable to visit it for themselves; for even in these days of so-called enlightenment one still at times hears in England the cry of “India for the Indians”–that there is so plausible to the Western, but so meaningless to the Eastern mind. … What we call India has absolutely no meaning to any of the native dwellers within the area. It is a vast conglomeration of distinct peoples and nationalities, conquered by British blood freely shed, and welded together solely by the physical and moral strength of a superior race…”
In just those few opening paragraphs we get a glimpse of what a different country the past really was. And some understanding of the psychology of modern India when dealing with its post-colonial trauma. Having been bruted about by the likes of Frederick St. John Gore for a couple of centuries, you can imagine why they don’t take kindly to being treated as second raters by, say Victorian state politicians, during episodes such as last year's student murders.
Libraries have always been there to help us understand the world in these ways. It’s a pity that as the technology to do that improves in quantum leaps, some people will use it as an excuse to do away with libraries altogether, arguing that Google and Wikipedia have effectively replaced them.
But they haven’t. And being driven by profit seeking, the likes of Google and Apple and Microsoft never will.
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