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Welcome to my whirlwind tour of the history of libraries. You could probably already guess
this from the title, but I’m going to leave a lot out of this history. It’s also not
important to me that you come away with any specific facts or dates memorized. I just
want to get you interested in the library – as a place, as an institution, as an ever-changing
organism that shapes, and is shaped by, the information that’s all around us.
Libraries have many purposes and there are plenty of valid definitions of what a library
is and does, especially on a busy campus like PSU. For the purposes of this course, we’re
going to look at the library as a searchable collection of information that you can use
to do your academic research. Without communication, there is no information
, there’s just raw data – letters and numbers, ones and zeros. For the data to become
useful, to become information, it has to be transformed in some way so that it can be
communicated – there has to be a sender, a receiver, a medium, and a message. Just
like this very simple diagram shows! In the beginning, people used oral communication.
Oral cultures are the oldest kind there are and many still exist today. In an oral tradition,
long and complex histories, myths, literature, even entire legal and religious systems are
transmitted verbally through the generations. This means committing a great deal of energy
to memory and memorization. One of the upsides of a written culture, like our own, is mental
space for the mind to think, analyze, and evaluate.
People started speaking long before they started writing. But eventually they developed ways
of keeping track of their records – genealogy, taxes, buying and selling, that kind of thing.
In some cultures this was with clay markers or systems of knotting string. These methods
of record-keeping eventually became more complex and abstract and developed into writing systems.
These are two examples of ancient writing. On the left we’re looking at Egyptian hieroglyphics,
which are pictographs. It’s commonsense to see that these systems developed from people
drawing a picture of the thing they want to write about. The example on the right is one
of the oldest forms of Chinese writing. These are ideographs – each symbol represents
one concept, and the symbols are a little more abstract than pictographs. This form
of writing is still in use today, for example in some Asian forms of writing. Modern English
uses a much more abstract system where alphabetical symbols represent sounds, but our culture
still makes plenty of use of pictograms… …For street signs, walk signals, the ubiquitous
“no smoking” sign, restrooms, emoticons, and many, many more. Look around your computer
desktop, your street, your car or bus, or any PSU building – you are bound to see
more examples all around you. People wrote on stone, on clay, on wood, bones,
wax, silk, bamboo, shells, bark – any surface that would hold a mark to preserve and transmit
information. The first books that we know about were written on papyrus. Long scrolls
of papyrus that unrolled horizontally were stored alphabetically in libraries with a
title tag on the end. The Library of Alexandria was the most famous of these scroll libraries.
It existed for hundreds of years. Scrolls were bought, copied, and stolen until the
library was said to house more than 600,000 of them. The Library of Alexandria is also
one the first libraries to publish a comprehensive catalog written by a professional librarian.
It was a center for scholarship in the ancient world. Until it burned down.
Eventually papyrus was replaced with parchment, which is made from animal skins, and parchment
made way for paper – a chinese invention from the first century that took hold in the
west about a thousand years later. And eventually people stopped writing books on scrolls and
started binding them into a more convenient form called the codex. You can lay it flat,
you can turn to a precise place in the text, especially with the help of a table of contents
or index, and you can label the spine with information that tells you about what’s
inside. Now we don’t bother calling books codices anymore – every book we encounter
is a codex. This is a codex from over a thousand years ago – a beautifully illustrated Koran
manuscript. Check out all the codices in this image. This
is a Christian monk copying out and illustrating a manuscript. Up to the 1400s, all books had
to be made completely by hand. Doesn’t that sound like a ton of work?
Several Asian cultures already used movable type to create woodblock prints, but in the
15th century Johannes Gutenberg invented the first printing press. The reason that the
printing press had such a huge impact on religious, intellectual, and scientific thought in Europe
was that it provided a comparatively cheap and easy way to communicate on a new, massive
scale. That trend has continued right up to instantaneous free publishing on the internet
today. This is an example of a page from the Gutenberg
Bible, which was printed in 1455. By the way, the illustrated portions of this page are
actually done by hand, the part that's done by the printing press is the text portion.
You might be interested to know that in 1897 a copy of the Gutenberg bible was sold at
auction in London for about 12,000 dollars. One hundred years later, in 1997, a copy was
sold at Christie's in New York for 5.3 million. But, of course, most books today are not rare,
valuable, unique artifacts – because of the printing press, we have mass production
as well as mass literacy. Books are one more commodity that makes up our ever-expanding
economy. In the U.S., the spread of literacy and public
education was encouraged by the spread of public libraries, such as this Carnegie library.
These were partially funded by money from the well-known philanthropist-slash-robber
baron Andrew Carnegie, who made his fortune with his company Pittsburgh Steel. While private
libraries belonging to religious organizations, universities, and wealthy individuals had
existed since the first scrolls were created and collected – as we saw - this library
is fundamentally different because it's a public library. It's designed for use by everyday
citizens like you and me for entertainment and education.
So what goes in a library? Everything that is ever published? Well, we do have an institution
that tries to do something like that for US publications, the Library of Congress. But
not every single library has a mission of being a complete repository for our entire
culture. There’s just way too much STUFF out there for that to be practical. So how
do librarians choose what to buy? How do we choose what to throw away from time to time?
What should be in and what should be out? There’s a blog called Awful Library Books
where librarians post about the ridiculous, out-of-date, terrible, old-fashioned things
we find on the shelves when we’re weeding old books from the shelves. This book is from
1998 – not that long ago, really – but today it seems completely useless!
My point here is that libraries are constantly changing and evolving. When Carnegie libraries
were built, librarians were considered gatekeepers to knowledge. They chose books that they thought
would improve and uplift their readers. Today librarians at public libraries let the preferences
of the readers guide their selections rather than the other way around. At an academic
library, like PSU, librarians try to make purchases that support the research and learning
that goes on here. And we also have to do our best to change with the times. In fact,
your main experience of the library here might look something like this…
So here is a question. There is so much information out there on the internet. Do we really need
libraries anymore? Should I start looking for a new job?
To give you my answer to this question, I’m going to take one more minute of your time
and tell you about the history of the internet. We’ve done our whirlwind history of books
and libraries, but do you know how the internet started? Or when?
The internet started as a Defense Department project in the 1960s. The purpose of the project
was for computers to communicate and exchange data so that the US could stay one step ahead
of the Soviet Union in the cold war.
Fast-forward to the 1980s, when the idea of hypertext took off – connecting a word to
another word, one piece of information to another, so that a user could explore a lateral
series of links. Fast-forward again to the mid-90s when people started widely using graphical
web browsers. Ever heard of Mosaic? It was the first browser, but it’s been superseded
by Firefox, Crome, and others.
So, in conclusion to this one-minute history, about 15 years ago people started to use the
internet as we know it with today’s elements of communication, hyperlinks, and a graphical
interface. It’s so ubiquitous now that it’s hard to imagine life without it, isn’t it?
For example:
Where’s the first place you look when you need information?
Right, you google it. Guess what – Google has only been around since 1998. It is really
amazing how far they have come. While some of their decisions have been controversial,
their vision of how we can and should manage information is totally changing the playing
field.
But when you search the internet, are you searching all the information there is? Is
everything on the internet? Think of all the zillions of records of our thoughts, our creative
expressions, and our transactions that have been recorded over 30 centuries in print,
on scrolls, in modern and ancient languages, for every possible reason you could think
of. How much of all that do you think is actually on the web?
Not much. A generous guess would be just five percent. Although they’re trying as hard
and fast as they can, Google can’t get to all this information. What that means is there’s
all this important research material that you have to access some other way besides
using an internet search engine. And this is where the library comes in. My
two cents on the role of libraries today is to connect information users – and that’s
you – to the most appropriate information for their purpose, wherever it may be. Some
of what you need will be on the web, but the library can connect you with a world of resources
much bigger than what you can get to on Google.
I’ll be honest. Sometimes the library is not as easy and fast to use as Google. That’s
where librarians can help. So I’m not quitting my day job just yet. Thanks for listening.