Dan DaranciangIn a chapter of his autobiography, titled “A Law of Acceleration,” Henry Adams described an early 20th century world where science would go on “doubling or quadrupling its complexities every 10 years.” Technology would not only progress, he argued, it would progress exponentially.
Nearly 100 years after “The Education of Henry Adams” was first published, writers are still stressing the boundlessness of change. Last year inventor Ray Kurzweil published “The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology,” in which he argued that it was only a matter of time before human advances in genetics, nanotechnology and robotics would transform what it means to be human. In the future, Kurzweil argued, we will be able to create food from nothing, live to preposterous ages and combine our brains with computers that will enlarge our intelligence. But what about the university? And what about next year, not next century?
One change will be that within the next year, students at universities will likely begin to interact with electronic paper and electronic ink. This spring, Sony will release a digital reader the size of a paperback in which owners can download electronic texts – books, PDFs, personal text files, blogs and newsfeeds – and read them on a screen in an experience that nearly mirrors paper and ink, with little to no eye strain.
The idea of the electronic book is nothing new. The online e-text archive Project Gutenberg, which now boasts over 18,000 texts, was begun by Michael Hart in the pre-Internet days of the early 1970s. Since then, projects such as the Library of Congress’ “American Memory,” The Internet Archive’s “Million Book Project”, the Carnegie Melon-hosted “Universal Library” and the Yahoo!-initiated “Open Content Alliance” have added millions of books to the Internet, all freely downloadable due to copyright expiration.
For many in the Washington University community, the question is not the scope of these changes, but their meaning. How will the further digitization of books affect the student body and the institution as a whole? In the age of the electronic book, of course, libraries need to be the vanguard of change. For Shirley Baker, the vice chancellor for information technology and dean of University libraries, the issues surrounding technological advances in the field of books and research have consumed much of her career. In terms of current changes, the trajectory of library spending is one way to see how the Washington University libraries have been adapting to a world of increasing digital information. This past year, the University’s libraries spent $2.4 million (40 percent of their library collections budget) on electronic materials, including reference sources, journals, indices, abstracts and subscriptions to electronic book services, such as Safari, which specializes in technical books. As Dean Baker described, having access to electronic books allows the library to take several courses of action. First, as administrators are able to compare their own library catalogues with a much larger electronic reference source – such as Google’s “Book Search” – they will get a better sense of what books their libraries lack. When Google has completed its goal of scanning the collections of the University of Michigan, Stanford University and the University of Oxford, the University will have access to “around 600,000 titles that we do not own,” said Baker. “Additionally,” she continued, “we now know that we have 170,000 titles that they are digitizing, which we can now move out of prime library space.”
The general trend of the future, Baker suggested, would be moving bound books out of the library (to West Campus, for example) and bringing in electronic ones. While library administrators will be responsible for the physical, material transition, it will be the task of the University community to consider the larger consequences of such changes.
“You can imagine that we need to think through what this [change] means for intellectual life,” said Baker.
On the one hand, she acknowledged, as libraries remove books from shelves and migrate forward data from the predigital age, “the preservation issues are a real concern.” Ultimately, however, the possibilities are endless. Baker described her own early educational experience, where the idea of having access to almost limitless amounts of information was nonexistent. The availability of online electronic books will open up sources to a number of people previously thought unreachable.
“The democratization of intellectual life is how I talk about [these changes],” said Baker. “You get weird situations where you have a field that maybe has 3,000 or so practitioners, such as philology, but when you put those journals online, you find that 400,000 people have looked at them.”
She went on to describe an article she is reading by Tufts professor Gregory Kane, in which he argues, she explained, that this “industrial-scale digitization project is as big a change as not just the invention of printing, but the invention of writing.” While Baker was unwilling to make such sweeping statements herself, she held a similar degree of optimism.
“This is an exciting time,” she said. “This is a thing I think about, in addition to my daily job, all the time.”
Krister Knapp, a lecturer in the history department, is a bit more skeptical about the degree of change to come. As a scholar, he is worried about what moving information to digital sources will mean for doing research. In the 1980s and 1990s, when libraries moved from card catalogues to electronic ones, a lot of useful information that had been written by librarians and other scholars over the years on the cards themselves was discarded.
“I was horrified when they threw those [cards] out,” he said.
Removing books could present similar problems for people doing research.
“People write in books,” he said. “It’s important that if there is valuable information, it does not get thrown away.”
Knapp, who also teaches a class on U.S. popular culture, noted that historically, innovation rarely means replacing one technology with another.
“There’s an argument that the latest form of technology will replace the old ones, but time and time again, it has not,” he said. “New technologies rarely displace old technologies. They just integrate them, mimicking the old ones, and adding new features.”
He cited the transitions from vinyl to compact disc, radio to television and television to computer as examples of innovations that have not fully done away with the old. With old records, people believe they get a “different listening experience, different from a CD,” and so keep listening to them, he said. “Clearly, old records, just like [bound] books in the future, will still serve some useful function.”
As for how a world of digital reading devices and electronic books will effect students, it might be too early to say. If digital reading can approximate the experience of digital listening, then it may take only a few years before students have an iPod in their left hand and a Sony Reader in their right one.
Senior Austin Thompson has already placed his name on an e-mail list that will alert him when the Sony Reader becomes available for purchase. He thinks such devices should catch on quickly with students.
“Everyone who uses ERes [Electronic Reserve] or JSTOR, or a blog, is already using information in a digital form, and things like the Sony Reader will only make it easier to read. You download an article to it, take it to a coffee shop and just read it like you would anything else,” he said.
It may not only allow for easier reading but also a better quality of reading, continued Thompson. An age of electronic books, easier and cheaper to produce and distribute, will “continue the breaking down of barriers to market entry for people with good ideas and good writing,” he said. “I think it will change a lot of what we read, and definitely the way that we read.”