PUBLIC LIBRARIES AND THE INFORMATION AGE (1995)
[An edited version for the Internet of my speech given at Kitchener Public Library, Monday, Oct. 16, 1995]
INTRODUCTION
It
is a pleasure to be here today to help celebrate Ontario's Library
Week. Although I have been an academic librarian for many years, I
fondly remember working in and using public libraries. Just recently, I
returned to King City library this past June to observe the twenty-fifth
anniversary of its opening. King City was one of the first smaller public
libraries to open in York Region after the 1966 Public Libraries Act
consolidated the older association libraries. We must remember it is
important to have celebrations, to mark anniversaries, to promote and to
market public library services. In this area, for example, we have three
of the oldest public libraries in Canada--Guelph formed in 1883,
Kitchener in 1884, and Waterloo in 1888. Certainly, the Kitchener
library has been prominent in Ontario circles for a long time. We
recognize the outstanding contributions of Mabel Dunham to Canadian
librarianship. We can look back sixty years to the Great Depression when
the first national library study, Libraries in Canada, noted that
Kitchener possessed one of the best collections of lantern slides and
German books in Canada. So a tradition of fine service to the community
measured by provincial and national trends has long been a standard in
this community.
As for Library Week in Ontario, we should
remember that 1995 is the one-hundredth anniversary of our first
provincial Public Libraries Act. Previous to 1895, free libraries
coexisted beside mechanics' institute libraries and literary society
libraries. These organizations received grants from agriculture and
education departments up until 1895 and have a complex history in their
own right. But it was exactly a hundred years ago when our provincial
legislature consolidated and combined a number of acts into one under
the Dept. of Education with the result that the public library concept
and terminology that we are familiar with today was first established in
Ontario. Much has changed on the municipal and provincial scene over
time, but the public library which is managed locally and normally does
not directly charge for services has continued to grow throughout this
century as we can see from the following logarithmic graph on population
served, circulation, and books held.
So
much for progress and advancement. What is the public library doing
today? Right now there are many challenges, perhaps too many for
comfort. Management challenges, e.g. budgets--they are always a problem.
Technological challenges, e.g. computers--they are always being
upgraded. Educational challenges, e.g. learner-centred environments
created by the proliferation of information. There are, of course, other
challenges, but I want to speak about the incredible growth of
information that seems at times to engulf us and to submerge libraries.
We are familiar with the general trends surrounding the universe of
information. After all, it is the subject of many popular books and
magazine articles such as the recent October issue of National
Geographic on the information revolution. Currently, we are undergoing a
synthesis of scholarly/popular interpretations of the time and society
we are living in. I am sure many of us are familiar with Alvin Toffler's
Third Wave and its predictions for future change, but he is only one of
many seers. For a moment, I would like to link some of these societal
conceptualizations with books we may remember from the past half-century
in the following table.
MODERN SOCIETAL AND CULTURAL CHANGES IDENTIFIED SINCE 1940
Year Societal/Cultural Change Source
1941 Managerial Revolution Burnham, Managerial Revolution
1950 Cybernetics Wiener, Human Use of Human Beings
1950 Lonely Crowd Riesman, Lonely Crowd
1956 Organization Man Whyte, Organizational Man
1958 Consumer Society Galbraith, Affluent Society
1959 Two Cultures Snow, Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution
1960 Environmentalism Carson, Silent Spring
1960 End of Ideology Bell, End of Ideology
1962 Paradigm Shift Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolution
1963 Atomic Age Atomic Scientists, The Atomic Age
1964 Global Village McLuhan, Understanding Media
1964 Technological Society Ellul, Technological Society
1968 Postmodern Society Etzioni, The Active Society
1970 Leisure Society Parker, Future of Work and Leisure
1972 Sustainable Development Club of Rome, Limits to Growth
1973 Post-Industrial Society Bell, Coming of Post-Industrial Society
1977 Information Economy Porat, Information Economy
1979 Computer Age Dertousoz & Moses, The Computer Age
1980 Third Wave Toffler Third Wave
1983 Third World Worsley, Three Worlds
1986 Information Age Beniger, Control Revolution
1990 Information Age Toffler, Powershift
Many
of these contemporary accounts seem to suggest that we have entered
into a new era in which information about societal political/economic
structures is the key ingredient in our lives. To some extent, we are
overwhelmed with the enormous quantity of material that touches on this
subject.
THE INFORMATION AGE: WHAT IS IT?
The
Information Society or Information Age is a new phenomenon since 1950
which brings with it new challenges as we seek to integrate an expanding
universe of print and multimedia sources into our daily lives. The two
terms often are used to describe a cybernetic society in which there is a
great dependence on the use of computers and data transmission linkages
to generate and transmit information. By contrast, our familiar
reference frame of an industrial society relied on machines to augment
human physical labour to produce goods and services. Now, through a
process of continual change, geographic barriers are being dissolved,
businesses are more interconnected, and relationships between workers
and workplace are changing more rapidly.
However,
information (or data, or ideas, or knowledge) has long played, in one
way or another, a significant role in human culture and society, and has
shaped, over a long period of time, the way in which we behave and
think. I think what is now proclaimed to be the Information Age is
terminology that can be applied to all stages of human development.
We must recognize that improvements in communications during the
industrial period since 1800, and I am speaking of the telegraph,
telephone, postal delivery, radio, television, and modern printing
presses, have been in part a response to the need to process more
information. For example, just think of one historical period taught in
school, the Renaissance. It is regarded as a rebirth of knowledge, the
rediscovery of and transmission of ideas and texts about classical
authors which transformed European culture and thinking in the fourteen
and fifteenth centuries. In a historical context, Information has been
with us a long time. One can illustrate themes in information by looking
at literacy, censorship, the organization of knowledge, the economics
of information, and roles which institutions such as the public library
and schools have played.
The definition of
"information" varies incredibly. It is often used interchangeably with
terms such as data, knowledge, understanding, messages, wisdom, and
ideas. I am not going to discuss the lexical nuances at length. Instead,
I prefer to use the term broadly in the way it is used across many
disciplines and in many countries today. We talk and read about consumer
information, management information systems, information technology,
information overload, the information highway, and so on, all the time.
In the past fifty years information has assumed an important new
meaning. In a new sense, borrowed from the sciences, Information has
come to express whatever can be transmitted through a channel connecting
a source with a receiver. What is being communicated, a message, is
information. Considerations about the character or quality of what is
being transmitted--a legal live broadcast of the judgement in the O.J.
Simpson trial or the latest evening hockey score in the
newspaper--become less relevant in this sense. The older distinction
between information as mostly specific data with potential usefulness
and knowledge as aggregated thought that is applied usefully has eroded.
In this process, information has almost come to subsume knowledge.
In
the twentieth century, there has been a radical transformation in the
role of information in society as well as in the technology used in its
production and dissemination. At the turn of the last century, printed
information reigned supreme in Europe and North American communities.
This, of course, is no longer the case. New electronic forms of
communication have multiplied, reducing the primacy of the print medium,
but not yet displacing it. Instead, each new form of communication has
supplemented printing and publishing (we must remember that more than
two billion copies of books are produced in North America alone each
year). Whole new industries, such as television and cable networks, each
with its own set of directions and organization, have grown up around
each of these new forms of communication. The proliferation of
communication technology has also brought with it a situation in which
the content of these various forms of communication are merging as forms
of digitized information that combine print, voice, video, and
graphics for educational and recreational purposes.
Just
as the printing press served as an agent of change in the nineteenth
century, so have telecommunications given us the capacity to transfer
information instantaneously across vast distances in the twentieth
century. The advent of the telegraph in the 1830s, the telephone in the
1870s, radio, which came into being in 1901, and television shortly
afterwards had by mid-century led to the slogan "Global Village." Thirty
years after Marshall McLuhan, the computer has effectively established
itself as the dominant means of handing textual material as well as
numeric data. Combined with telecommunications systems, the computer
appears to have created a major turning point in the history of
information. It is this amalgamation of new systems, and the emphasis,
perhaps even devotion, that is placed on information, that has brought
into being the phrase "Information Age.
Today there is a
significant new approach to the production, storage, distribution, and
use of various types of information. Previous information "systems,"
such as the book, were based on the process that the message that
entered a system was the message that was received. This is no longer
the case: the newer communication technologies on the Internet are
interactive, that is the capability of modifying messages and creating
new messages exists within the system. As well, in the new systems, such
as electronic bulletin boards, information is controlled to a greater
extent by managers who store and transmit information. In older systems,
the original creator or supplier of the information was in control.
Thus, a new set of relationships and responsibilities is emerging but
has not yet been clearly established, witness problems with copyright
and censorship on the Internet under proposed new American legal
regulations scheduled for 1996.
The evolving electronic
information systems also pose new directions for issues that have been
around for some time. Take literacy as an example. It is no longer
sufficient to be print literate, i.e. to read and write, and the idea of
audio or visual literacy has in turn been supplanted by stress on
computer literacy. Literacy has come to be seen as the ability to use
information in various forms that it is presented in and to master the
skills and techniques necessary to use the systems involved in managing
information, a.k.a. computers. Most commentators seem to see this new
literacy not only as an expansion of traditional literacy but also an
expansion that requires the development of new skills and new ways to
deal with information.
Another issue for re-examination
is the economics of information. Information in many forms has a high
economic value and indeed it is said the information industry is
becoming the engine driving our economy. We have become an "information
economy" with "information workers" taking their place beside
manufacturers, industrialists, steel workers, and cab drivers. In fact,
as Alvin Toffler writes in his Third Wave, we have entered a new
post-smoke stack economy. Whenever someone watches television, rents a
video, or reads a magazine, they are substituting information in place a
manufactured product such as a tennis racket or automobile created by
the traditional production modes we have known. Information normally is
language (radio, TV, books, tapes, magazines) or image (TV, movies,
videos) and the information derived from it is relatively inexpensive to
replicate. One can verify this by looking in stores at prices for
tapes, videos, record albums, cd-roms, and so on. This fact makes for
economies of scale since most of the business investment is devoted to
developing the first copy.
But from the individual
citizen's perspective on information resources, there seems to arise a
major issue from this economic transformation. Within a print and
broadcast culture the typical user is not expected to invest significant
amounts of money into information systems hardware (e.g. books, radios,
portable television sets, videos, music recordings). Purchases were
made for an item, such as a record, or for a right, such as admission to
a movie theatre. However, with the growth of personal and business
computing enterprizes and new home games after the mid-1980s, a
fundamental alteration is occurring. With computers and
telecommunications systems, the user, not the manufacturer, publisher,
or broadcaster, becomes responsible for significant financial outlays in
the investment in information systems equipment and peripherals, such
as Nintendo and modems which require frequent upgrades. Obviously, there
is a danger that economically disadvantaged families--indeed whole
countries--will not be able to take complete advantage of our
information-rich universe which is dominated by the English language.
This perspective was most recently voiced in the August issue of
Scientific American which dealt with foreign language coverage in North
American reference sources.
A third area of concern
deals with control and freedom of information. Increasingly on a local,
regional, national and international scale the regulation of the free
flow of information becomes more difficult. A host of issues might be
dealt with here, such as censorship in networks, copyright infringements
in electronic formats, freedom of information, and the need for
personal privacy. Some national governments consider the control of
information as a vital element of state policy. Nevertheless, the
advanced computerized telecommunication networks make information more
readily accessible and make it more difficult to restrict information
flow. What we need to balance, to some degree, is the right of the
individual to obtain free access to information with the right of
individuals to control and limit access to their personal information.
Finally,
the role of institutions such as schools and libraries in the
dissemination of information has come under scrutiny at a time when
public spending is being reduced in stages at the federal and provincial
levels in Canada. In the past century, public libraries have developed
their own unique sets of procedures for organizing print and
audio-visual knowledge. Classification systems such as the Dewey Decimal
System have been adopted, reference service desks created, children's
departments set up, audio-visual departments organized, interlibrary
lending procedures arranged, and so on. Now a glut of information
threatens to make libraries irrelevant: in the fictional library of
Jorge Luis Borges--the Library of Babel--the librarian is unable to find
anything in a collection boasting an infinite number of books.
At
a general level, society recognizes that people need to gain access to
information. To make the best use of it there needs to be an effective
system for organizing information on a community basis so it can be
retrieved effectively. The public library has responded to this need in
varying ways for many decades through years of economic restraint, as
witnessed by the Great Depression of the 1930s, and years of growth
characterized by the 1960s and 1970s. The question posed in the 1990s
returns to the basic functions of the library and what it should offer
the public.
To conclude my brief introduction to the
so-called Information Age, I would like to stress that divergent views
exist about the possible effects of the development of a full-fledged
Information Society. On one side, advocates insist that it will empower
people, providing direct access to opportunities previously unavailable
to them. On the other side, there are pessimists who believe that the
global economic structure that information provides the foundation for
what will ultimately displace individuals and communities with
totalitarian capitalist structures. There is little doubt that the
development of information can produce dramatic changes, but it remains
to be seen if the nature of those impacts will be determined mostly by
the structural requirements of new computerized technologies or if their
impact will be influenced to a greater degree by social/political
forces, such as state regulation.
What can be said,
however, is that the role of information and related communication
technology continues to expand by leaps and bounds in the 1990s. I
think, paradoxically at first, that the capacity to strengthen both
centralization and decentralization is taking place. Today's management
business texts, such as Fifth Discipline and Megatrends 2000, stress
flexible ways of organizing business in a deregulated, privatized
environment. Opportunities seem to exist for local or small
entrepreneurs who are willing to switch organizational and production
facilities freely from one place to another in order to capture a share
of a global marketplace. Evidently, the new information networks are no
longer tied to places and it is possible to attain a centralization of
managerial control and decentralization of production. On the other
hand, it is not difficult to see why massive corporate concentrations
are taking place in communications, why Disney and ABC are merging to
dominate and make money from an industry composed of independent
communication enterprises and local broadcast channels.
Finally,
new groups and audiences are in the process of interconnection, e.g.
electronic mail groups and dial-up bulletin boards, direct
telemarketing, and subscription cable television. The principal
media--television or video or the computer, and the telephone, are
connected in many new networks that are integrating sound, speech, text,
data, and images and permitting the connection of persons in lieu of
the connection of places. It seems the most important communication
patterns of the future will be interaction and conversation, not the
hierarchical transmission from a mass communication centre to a mass
audience tracked by Neilson ratings or recounted by George Orwell in
Nineteen Eighty-Four. Traditional community ties are being replaced by
much more selective groupings in diffuse social networks. Further, an
increasing number of social activities will rely on integrated online
media in place of traditional face-to-face modes, e.g. telemarketing,
and so on. As we can see, the Information Age or Society promises to be
an exciting time, although it is too early to predict the demise of
door-to-door sales!
THE PUBLIC LIBRARY'S ROLE: WHAT IS IT?
Let
us turn now to the public library. Where does it fit into an information
revolution which is taking place? As far back as 1950, a prominent
scientist, Norbert Wiener, wrote a book, The Human Use of Human Beings,
which applied insights gained in the computer technology of his era to
the study of human communication systems using information in the new
sense. Even at this early stage of the computer era, he emphasized that
the proliferation of information reinforced existing relationships by
placing a greater burden on society to disseminate and store
information. The needs and the complexity of modern life make
greater demands on this process of information than ever before, and our
press, our museums, our scientific laboratories, our universities, our
libraries and textbooks, are obliged to meet the needs of this process
or fail in their purpose. The fact that he specifically mentioned
libraries in the same sentence with kindred educational and research-oriented institutions indicates to me that he recognized their crucial
importance in the next stage of the information revolution.
I
feel the basic question to be resolved right now is: will libraries be
able to adapt new technologies to information demands during a period of
retrenchment in government funding? Well, let us start with some good
news. Although the public library generally is viewed today as a
print-based institution, I have already referred to the ability of
libraries to integrate formats such as films, videos, slides, records,
and audio cassettes into their services. This activity began in earnest
after the Second World War and continues today. Those of you who have
used libraries over the past two decades realize that public libraries
have successfully automated their acquisitions, cataloguing and
circulation functions and introduced online and cd-rom products to
their reference and interlibrary loan services. There have been
successes and some failures along the way, nevertheless, by the
mid-1990s it safe to say that most urban public libraries in Ontario
serving more than 30,000 people have either made or are in the midst of
the transition to automated systems. There is no doubt that libraries
can incorporate new electronic formats into collections, in fact, these
formats reduce rather than create barriers to public access. The
managerial and professional expertise therefore exists to deal
successfully with new electronic information resources on a
community-wide basis.
If we review technical changes in
libraries, we can see that online public catalogues have replaced card
catalogues which first appeared in Ontario at the turn of the century
during the Carnegie building program. Bar codes and wands have replaced
the photocharging systems that had become common library procedures by
the late 1960s. Online searching of remote databases is another recent
innovation: users can ask to have many different searches performed.
Full-text retrievable searches are possible, for example from Toronto
where the Globe and Mail was the first major newspaper in North America
to introduce computerized editions in the late 1970s. Subject specific
inquiries can be made outside this country, for example, to California
where large corporations (like Lockheed Dialog) have established huge
database libraries that provide access to many subject areas,
especially business, on a fee per use basis. And we must remember that
library automation was accomplished during a period of recessions and
cutbacks in the 1980s and 1990s, so libraries have not only been able to
introduce automation they have been able to achieve economy in
operation at the same time.
It seems to me, therefore,
that public libraries can build on their knowledge and experience to
extend their range of services. It is certain that the electronic
information superhighway, the Internet, is offering people the ability
to communicate via computers and to make available vast quantities of
information that dwarf local library resources as we know them now. Let
us be clear that people are not going to stop reading--in fact,
digitized print is a basic staple of the Internet where information is
created, shared, modified, "flamed", praised, and so on, every day. What
will continue, is the erosion we have witnessed in this century of the
book's dominance and centrality. With every passing month, it is
becoming more important to identify and evaluate electronic forms of
information in order to provide meaningful, balanced collections for
public consumption. This process is essentially one that libraries and
librarians have been engaged in for decades.
To be
successful I think public libraries have to try to develop new services,
to provide new resources, and to alter the public perception that
libraries are mostly old-fashioned print warehouses that predate the
modern era. To position the library more firmly in the mainstream, I
think its crucial for public libraries to do five things during the next
five years.
First, libraries have to employ the power
of information technology by emphasizing new roles in their public
services. The communications revolution is an important feature of
society. Libraries must continue to offer the latest features of
telecommunications that integrate sound, text, data, and images. This
effort will entail budgetary decisions, and, in a climate of restraint
and cutback, lead to the reallocation of declining budgetary resources.
Success in the area of technical services that people do not clearly
observe will no longer suffice. As a start, computer workstations should
be introduced as public resources where word processing, e-mail
functions, electronic newsgroups, cd-roms, and worldwide Internet access
are standard services. After all, the public library is a learning
centre where many different resources should be utilized. One can easily
envisage right now that older newspaper reading areas characterized by
tables and racks will be replaced with state-of-the-art computer
terminals that can access hundreds of daily newspapers across North
America. The same is true, to a lesser extent, for magazine reading
areas: a number of traditional general or specialized periodicals, like
Macleans, are now available on a subscription basis in electronic forms.
Using software programs, either newspaper stories or magazine articles
can be downloaded to disk or printed on paper at workstations on demand,
thereby shifting the library's focus to immediate service demands away
from the time-honoured collection of on-site materials.
Second,
partnerships with other organizations have to be developed in the
rapidly expanding information universe. The development of
regional/metropolitan freenets which permit toll-free access to the
Internet across the province is a good case in point. Libraries must at
the very least get their catalogues on local electronic freenets and
they should try to play a leadership role in developing local community
networks. Librarians have many opportunities to draw on their experience
and proficiency in this process. They can select information resources,
design user interfaces, or help promote the organization of community
information on these networks. Libraries and librarians need to
participate in network initiatives by allowing access to library
catalogues around the world and by developing WWW servers with
navigational aids that allow people to find or discover information
resources. Across the province, local networks are in a state of
development, e.g. London's homepage efforts and Ottawa's national
capital freenet. To date, a number of Ontario libraries (small and
large) are responding by developing Internet access and establishing
their presence as an information provider.
Third,
libraries must strive to promote the concept of end-user empowerment,
that is to link people with information without an intermediary.
Ideally, the idea is to provide an alternative to visiting the library
by permitting users to locate and control their own information at their
own convenience from home or office on a time basis outside the
traditional 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. The creation of virtual reference libraries
with encyclopedias, dictionaries, atlases, indexes and abstracts that
people can access from outside the library is the next step in the
evolution (revolution?) of reference services. But to achieve this goal,
librarians need to impart their skills developed over the past decade
or so. Finding information on an information highway is not a s easy as
it seems: people need direction, training, and skillsets. Frequently,
the assistance of an intermediary--such as a librarian--will be
required. Electronic information retrieval requires what many retrieval
experts have termed recall and precision. Recall is the amount of
relevant material a searcher finds, usually 50-75% of what is actually
available. Precision is the number of relevant items from a particular
search that a user decides to use, usually 50-80% of what was originally
located. Obviously, it is easy to see that many searches will produce
less than half of what is actually pertinent to a subject search and
that searching can become a frustrating activity. Librarians certainly
can help information seekers overcome these obstacles.
Fourth,
libraries have to dramatically broaden the range of electronic
services. It is just not a matter of collecting electronic files. The
day is over when library staff can feel comfortable offering an array of
print or electronic resources housed in a central library or community
branches. The traditional meaning of circulation as it pertains to
libraries is changing and this concept has to be rethought. The
twentieth-first century electronic library we have heard about should
provide access to a vast range of resources and service providers
anywhere in the world. It is not necessary to have news from newspapers that are incorporating more analytical and journalistic pieces to
retain readership. If you want news from Australia, you can go on the
World Wide Web and connect with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
A few people can do this from home now: in fact, according to
Statistics Canada, Ontario has a growing number of people owning home
computers with modems in Canada. Granted that this percentage is just
under fifteen percent and there is a fundamental restriction--they have
the know the information resource exists.
Another
future service possibility is to have people login to a local library by
computer from their homes or offices and "chat" with staff as they do
on Internet Relay Chat channels around the world or fill in an
electronic form, post it in an electronic mailbox and receive a response
from the library about some specific query, say the status of a
previous request or the whereabouts of a circulating item. This
organizational response is not as easy as it seems but it is a key area
where libraries can play a vital role in providing an environment where
research, study, and learning can flourish.
Finally, an
image problem needs to be addressed. Libraries need to reimage
themselves as important learning organizations where services
continually change and improve. Too often, people consider the local
public library as a recreational resource and the educational or
informational role is secondary or overlooked altogether. If libraries
are to continue to receive tax funding from municipal and provincial
governments, they will have to rethink their traditional mainstay, the
circulating collection. The concept of reading is changing: the cultural
weight is more on visual/factual information in a variety of formats
and less on reflective/entertaining book-oriented activity. Although
books account for less than five percent of what is printed on an annual
basis--newspapers, magazines, brochures, etc. account for the vast
majority of "printed" sources--most space in libraries is allocated to
books. Is it any wonder that the library is perceived to be a "book
place" even though audio-visual departments have impressive collections
and network structures to deliver off-site resources? This public
perception needs to change, something I feel we are trying to do here
today.
Already, some steps are being taken in this
province to develop libraries as learning centres in a broad sense.
Industry Canada's Schoolnet Community Access Project announced in
February 1995 that it intends to offer rural communities affordable
public access to information resources on the Internet by creating a
national network of community access sites. The plan includes libraries.
As well, the government of Ontario information is now available on-line in
over two hundred public libraries with details about different ministry
services, the location of government offices, MPP's addresses, and
Ontario's parliamentary system. The idea of an electronic learning
centre--the electronic library--needs to be integrated with the
library's long-standing commitment to literacy and educational and
recreational resources. The library is an important institution for
improving literacy skills and helping understand and use information in
different formats such as printed texts and computer files.
Taken
together, none of these points is a remarkable new starting point.
People have been saying libraries need to stress educational services
for years, this is why book reading clubs and readers' advisory services
were popular in libraries as long ago as the 1920s. Information
technology is not new, what is new is the pace of change. Access to
resources at a distance is a challenge that interlibrary loan
departments have been grappling with for decades. End-user empowerment
is essentially newfangled terminology for explaining why free public
library services have existed for a hundred years. To say that libraries
should help people help themselves is to revisit the age of Victoria
when Samuel Smiles wrote a best seller, Self-Help, in 1859. Partnerships
are not of recent origin, libraries have been cooperating with
community groups for decades. It is the groups that are new.
To
conclude, we need to acknowledge that there is work to be done if
Library Week is to continue as a relevant occasion in Ontario.
Fortunately, technology offers the library a chance to preserve and
enlarge its role in providing access to resources in different types of
formats. While it is always difficult to predict the future, it appears
that public libraries are well-positioned to exploit information
technology and interact with their communities and users in meaningful
ways. I for one, anyway, think that the foundation public libraries
have laid is such that continued growth is highly likely. Free access to
information and educational/recreational services has been their
business for more than a century and it seems that another hundred years
is not out of the question.
NOTES
Jorge Luis Borges,
Ficciones (New York, 1962)
W. Wayt Gibbs, "Lost Science in the Third World,"
Scientific American 273, 2 (Aug. 1995): 92-99
John Ridington, Mary J.L. Black, and George H. Locke,
Libraries in Canada; a Study of Library Conditions and Needs (Toronto, 1933)
Statistics Canada,
Household Facilities and Equipment, 1995 (annual), Table 5.6
Joel Swerdlow, "Information Revolution,"
National Geographic Magazine 188, 4 (Oct. 1995): 5-27
Alvin Toffler,
Third Wave (New York, 1980)
Norbert Wiener,
The Human Use of Human Beings (New York, 1950)
