This commentary is by Marc Estrin, a novelist who lives in Burlington.
Let’s walk through this digital vs. hard copy library debate. You go into the library with a quest or a question. First step, the “card catalogue,” no longer cards, but electronic. We elders will remember the lovely cabinets of sliding drawers, filled with thick index cards to thumb through, but they’re gone, and this is comparison No. 1.
I think any researcher would agree that for cataloguing, the electronic system is more agile, and may yield more second- and third-order results.
But what that catalogue actually does is send you to the stacks, to the Library of Congress or Dewey Decimal section that seems to contain the core of the collection to be investigated, and it is here that, in the old days, the most productive activity occurred: shelf browsing.
There they all are, or most of them, available to be taken from the shelf, examined to any degree, in any manner, and a choice half-dozen taken over to a desk or carrel for a more detailed look, or even for primary note-taking. Neither this most productive kind of browsing search, nor any consequential use, is possible with a digital entry.
Then what? Given only a digital entry, you have to actually see the book you would have earlier been able to, so there follows a lot of inter-library loan energy and transport, and if it’s not what you thought it was, all that (including the carbon footprint) is wasted.
What could have been ascertained in a minute or so lasts a week — which hardly helps with deadlines.
And of course, not every book in, say, UVM’s huge collection has been or will be digitized. Research — especially original, groundbreaking research — can snake through some pretty unpredictable paths, and if only the most-used materials are prioritized, who knows what great stuff may get away?
I have at home a small, unwilled experiment going on. I’ve long owned a prime collection of literature, philosophy and social science texts. But almost all these were bought between 1955 and 1975 in the cheapest used paperback editions a poor student could find, and, though carefully tended and moved from dwelling to dwelling, they now smell like old, moldy books, and I can’t open any of them without my chest tightening and eyes tearing.
People less sensitive than I have been taking them from me for several years, and I now have gotten rid of perhaps a tenth of my collection — especially philosophy and religion. I figured these days, I can find whatever I need online.
Well, not true! First of all, and obviously, texts found online do not have my annotations, and bookmarks at key places. Second, they’re mostly not available in full text versions, and mostly what I’m looking for is not in the freebie “Look Inside” pages Amazon allots. And third, shelf-, in this case, room-browsing aspects are gone. I knew where it was, but it is no longer there.
“You must have given it to somebody,” says my wife. Or I forget WHAT it was, but it was OVER THERE.
Lastly, by the end of a reading and writing day at the computer, even without opening any of the old moldy books, my eyes are burning with all those screen photons coming at me. Reading from a printed page in incandescent light is so much less demanding on the eyes. And each book handled has its own unique size, shape, cover, Dasein, personhood, and is not just part of an anonymous mass of pixels on a screen. More of a friend.
The conclusion from my unwanted experiment is that online resources cannot replace, or even approximate, what can be trolled from a library of real books surrounding you. Good thing I’m a fiction writer: Now that my tools at Howe and at home are disappearing, I can always make things up, and claim “This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance…”
