No one needs another review of Anthony Doerr's novel. I enjoyed it. I did not hold unreasonably high expectations for it, and I was rewarded with an enjoyable time with a book. (That is not damning with faint praise, because an enjoyable time cannot always or even usually be found.)
In Cloud Cuckoo Land, the reader has to expend considerable energy and attention shifting from one focus to another. The action of the book happens in three general time periods, each with characters that arise from distinct circumstances. How they will intersect with each other, much less with consequences of characters' actions in one or both of the other time periods, lends the book a puzzle-like quality. Much less the fragments of an ancient text.
The everlasting problem of the mystery genre --whether historical fiction, mysteries of crime and redemption, spying and espionage, or fantasy fiction--is that the reader's attention must be divided between trying to figure who is doing, has done, or will do what, and who those characters really are. The truly best puzzle-books (I'm thinking of P. D. James' Adam Dalgleish novels, for example, or Robertson Davies' Cornish series) build the puzzles through the characters. Their actions reveal their hidden truths --and those of others, usually. Often the character who "did it" (and what is "it"?) appears in the five five or ten pages, but the layers of that character do not become apparent until much later. The reader has to attend carefully to character, because only through characterization will the key be found.
Anthony Doerr's characters were enjoyable but never more than two-dimensional. With one exception: Zeno Nenis, who provides a linkage between ancient text, contemporary libraries and children, and a future dystopia. His sexuality, confusions, and quixotic labors of translation provide insight for the reader into the deeper dimensions of literacy.
"Sometimes the things we think are lost are only hidden, waiting to be rediscovered." True of ancient texts, of human desires, of all our fears for the environmental climate cataclysm facing us. More attention to that sentence, in the lives of the characters, and this book would have moved from enjoyable and very good to truly great.
After sixteen years we are breaking camp in Connecticut and moving to the Roxborough section of Philadelphia. This will be an important change, although my life beyond moving so far is remaining opaque to me. I'm not sure what it will bring.
Moving after so long a time—by far the longest we have ever lived in one house anywhere—has meant that stuff built up. Much of it had to go. We're downsizing so some decisions were difficult, some timely, some frankly welcome: far less yard care, snow shoveling (but parking in the street, alas). Difficult: giving away the piano. Timely: drastically thinning the books while maintaining my own sense of identity, history, and intentions for the future.
While weeding the collections, I turned up Alberto Manguel's Packing My Library: An Elegy and Ten Digressions, a book remarkably timely to my condition. Although Manguel is a very different person, with a very different library (now in Lisbon), I recognize the dilemma. Books are friends, and friends form some level of a person's self-definition, my identity. Book on Anglican theology and spirituality (once a greater interest of mine than now): gone. I am unlikely to read those. Books about American history and history of religion went to SHU: who knows whether they will use or retain any of them. (They did apparently retain my copy of America's God by Mark Noll.) Various other miscellany: gone (to Better World Books)
Packing one's books is a peculiar exercise: suddenly what matters most is a book's dimensions and relative physical weight. The contents of the boxes can be most heterogenous and I imagine the books speaking to each other, and hardly at all about me --they have so many more interesting insights to exchange.
Collecting books--even modestly--is to try to assert some control over the unbearable: forgetting, disregarding, mocking, patronizing—all the sniggers of American culture so anti-intellectual that it welcomes conspiracy theories and all manner of paranoid hatreds. Collecting books is somehow a stay against loss, a bricolage of hope in a world of shrinking and ever-darkening horizons. Manguel identifies "shall these stones live?" as a (sic) "Samarian" question (Samaritan question? Sumerian question?). I relate it rather to Ezekiel: shall these bones live? Collecting books is an invitation to the spirit, the wind that will join book to book, joint to joint, bone to bone.
Packing a Library is a hedge against loss, but also a pledge to rediscover when unpacking: in a new setting, new shelving, with new neighbors (both human, and neighboring books on the shelves). It is to assert some kind of strength in an opaque future, a virtue of persistence and commitment to wisdom.
In one of my favorite illustrations: books fall open, you fall in. Packing a library is a promise to fall into the future. With those voices, those presences, those memories shored against my ruin, in Eliot's phrase. To remember to walk with Tiresias, or to borrow the voice of Charles Ryder (Evelyn Waugh):
The builders did not know the uses to which their work would descend; they made a new house with the stones of the old castle; year by year, generation after generation, they enriched and extended it; year by year the great harvest of timber in the park grew to ripeness; until, in sudden frost, came the age of Hooper; the place was desolate and the work all brought to nothing; Quomodo sedet sola civitas. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. . . .
Something quite remote from anything the builders intended has come out of their work, and out of the fierce little human tragedy in which I played; something none of us thought about at the time: a small red flame--a beaten-copper lamp of deplorable design, relit before the beaten-copper doors of a tabernacle; the flame which the old knights saw from their tombs, which they saw put out; that flame burns again for other soldiers, far from home, farther, in heart, than Acre or Jerusalem. It could not have been lit but for the builders and the tragedians, and there I found it this morning, burning anew among the old stones.
I haven't posted since May --during which time a member of my family received his graduate degree from Yale, and my spouse and I travelled to Scotland for three weeks, including ten days on a small boat in the Outer Hebrides. I retired from my position as a librarian. I have been preparing our house for sale and moving to Philadelphia.
This blog began in 2010 with my views about books, e-books, and readers. Then it was on the Typepad platform. Since then I have posted sometimes regularly and other times hardly at all, migrated to WordPress, and expanded my comments beyond my concerns as a librarian. I've had hardly any readers, nor sought them. I wrote this for my own thinking, my pleasure as a writer, and modest contribution for whomever might read it. I am from the generation which does not post deeply personal remarks on a public platform of any kind, so this is neither a diary nor an intellectual autobiographical sketch. It's merely a set of remarks.
So where do I go with this now? Retirement has freed me from having to be more diplomatic about the retrograde views of the administrative leadership of my previous academic employer. I certainly don't miss the commute and the daily experience of feeling insulted and devalued by a University leadership that could find no serious money to put into a library, nor will nor imagination to do so. I don't want to settle scores, though; that's old news.
Extensible might come to mean librarianship extended and transformed in my life into something not originally intended—observations on becoming more of a writer and less of a leader. The disciplines of a librarian: thoughtfulness, order, consistency, intelligibility, might serve me well with a new focus.
Recently I read Steven Petrow's hilarious and provocative Stupid Things I Won't Do When I Get Old. As the subtitle promises, it is highly judgmental, unapologetically honest, and sometimes very funny By the end Petrow turns much more empathetic than one might have predicted. It's a take-down, but not just a take-down. It's a mind-the-gap notice, but an entertaining one.
In my forties I once heard a wise older person say, "Be careful who you are when you're middle aged, because you only become more so when you're old." Anyone can find examples of people whose characters, as they age, tilt towards their negative traits and away from their previous more positive. That's a well-taken warning.
I do worry a bit about living away from younger people, since I spent my career on university campuses. I have already heard older people dismiss the very real mental health images of young, post-pandemic adults as mere whinging "snowflakes." I don't want to lose emotional sensitivity, flexibility, and empathy. I watched those qualities ebb in my mother as she lived with chronic pain in her later years —and pain can eat away at you. Still, plenty of people experience chronic daily pain and resist becoming judgmental. Working with young people took me out of myself, and I want to find a way to continue that appropriately.
Now that our house is on the market, and prepared for the market, I have a moment to pause and to feel retired, perhaps for the first time since August, when I officially left my post. Freedom, uprooting, moving, the space to write can be threatening, and I need to give myself some time for this transition. (And I've hardly had that time.)
Quo ibis? Quo vadis? I'm only now finding out, and I look forward to the journey through the later years of my life.
Shout-out to Mary Beard, whose blog has paralleled my own transition to retirement. (It is, unfortunately, pay-walled by TLS.) In her case it was pretty much forced by English law and academic custom. I had the relative freedom to chose my time after my spouse qualified for Medicare. I worked several years later than Mary has done, and I'm glad for it, and was ready to go all the same. Thanks, Mary!
"A funny thing happened on our way to digital utopia: we find ourselves increasingly missing reality." David Sax's 2016 book The Revenge of the Analog acknowledged that humans need to work, sell, and live in the real world—not on a screen.
One of the best aspects of living in Hamden, Connecticut, USA is Best Video --more precisely, Best Video Film & Cultural Center. Hank Paper founded Best Video as a video rental store in 1985, and organized it around his extraordinary archive of films and programs on DVD and VHS. After 30 years and the demise of the video rental business elsewhere, Paper sold Best Video to a newly-formed nonprofit local cultural center. With over 30,000 titles, and a special wealth of classic, foreign, and independent titles, Best Video had become a cultural asset that the community could not let go. It now boasts curated screenings, a local performance space welcoming local musicians including high school students, readings and literary events, and a coffee bar that has become a local favorite (in addition to providing high-quality sipping while browsing).
Hank Hoffman (l) and Hank Paper (r) in Best Video
Walking into Best Video is an experience akin to entering a good public library --friendly, unhurried atmosphere, excellent help and advice, and a wealth of interesting finds that you probably did not realize you were looking for, or missing. Although the archive supports life on a screen —once the silver screen, now the flat digital kind— that screen time is firmly anchored to the sensory life of reality.
With Best Video, your selection is not guided by what a streaming service wants to show you (often disguised as "recommendation"), or what it pays that streaming service to curate. A streaming service could never support the number and variety of independent films archived on DVD. How Best Video's films are organized is both a little confusing and delightfully idiosyncratic --categories such as "Oscar losers," films organized by directors living and dead, film noir, musical events, and of course the staff picks. If you can't find it, the staff can locate it in minutes.
Best Video enables and enhances that a rare contemporary experience --true serendipity. Films you did not know existed, or forgot about, or never heard of, or supply an interest that you're just beginning to develop. The joys of collocation are very similar to the shelves of a good public library—items both famous and obscure, sometimes right next to each other. I have become aware of how the offerings of the streaming services are channeled, guided, and limited, as well as how dreadful their search interfaces are. How arbitrary their assignments of genre or interest are.
The streaming services are an excellent example of the problem highlighted in Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. The shallow offerings on Netflix, Hulu, or any of the others serve the corporate interests that finance them —so that amazing material is simply omitted and by omission a viewer cannot even think to look for it. Where Carr was concerned with our withering abilities to think and read deeply, visiting Best Video shows how by analogy we are also losing the ability to view and imagine deeply. Ukrainian film such as Bitter Harvest (2017—about the profound famine of 1932 called in Ukrainian the Holodomor, in which millions died) form a sense of national reality so often lacking in superficial popular recommendations.
The film collections of larger public libraries can partially fill the void left by the death of independent video rental stores (as well as the bland chains). The best part of Best Video is sheer unpredictability —not a quality that streams to your home easily. A funny thing happened on the way to ubiquity —it turns out that place is important. Best Video is a vital third place for viewing, talking, and finding —some of the qualities that make us human.
Best Video Coffee Bar, photo courtesy of Best Video, 2020
In The New York Times recently (December 24, 2021), Julie Lasky (real estate beat) wrote about Reid Byers of Princeton. Reid wrote The Private Library . . . : The History of the Architecture and Furnishing of the Domestic Bookroom, because he found no other books specifically about private libraries about experiences of creating and using private, domestic libraries and why some people continue to build, curate, and preserve them. (See also The Times' slideshow.)
Byers' term "book-wrapt" extends the meanings and connotations both of the homophone rapt (as in enraptured) and wrapped as in surrounded-by or encased-in. A well-curated library "should feel like easing into a hot tub, strolling into a magic store, emerging into the orchestra pit . . . it is a setting forth, and it is a coming back to center." In contrast to a living room without people (a room without the living), a library without people casts a spell. "I like to be in a room where I've read half the books, and I'd like there to be enough books that I cannot possibly read them in my remaining years," Byers says in The Times. (Think of the Japanese term tsundoku--books that remain unread.)
David Atlas (The Atlas of New Librarianship) writes, "I have long contended that a room full of books is simply a closet but that an empty room with a librarian in it is a library." (p. 16) While I have long appreciated Lankes' reminder that librarians are the key to libraries' purpose, I have also long felt that Lankes is gliding over something important in a bid to re-assert librarianship in the face of digital complacency. (The sense that "everything is going digital" and "software is eating the world," so why bother with anything else? —a sense especially promoted by anyone selling anything digital.) What is Lankes' missing? The center of libraries' fundamental identity: libri -- books. From scrolls to codices to streaming text, books have been the distinguished feature of libraries for millennia. (I cannot restrict "book" to mean "binding.")
Book-wrapt captures the setting out and re-centering or entering-in that a good library provides for its humans. Librarians are, above all, library people. Were books suddenly magically and mysteriously removed from human habitations, librarians would lack their primary referent—one wonders even whether the term or function would any longer be intelligible.
Academic librarians have become aware of a paradox: students do not particularly like library spaces where there are no books. The bookless library of Applied Engineering and Technology at the University of Texas (2010) remains an outlier (though most engineering and technology libraries have drastically weeded print collections). In 2009 the Cushing Academy in Ashburnham, MA intended to remove all its printed materials to become an all-digital library for the 21st century, but after a change in leadership (!) a librarian was engaged in 2014 to re-balance the library's collections and restore print resources. Surveys and studies of user experience have shown that students do want books, at least in the background.
On the other hand, print circulation everywhere is far less than 2002 or 2012. Students seem to want books in libraries, but don't particularly read them. Younger Americans do seem to use libraries and know about them, as much as do older Americans, but follow typologies similar to those of other ages, from distant admirers to library lovers. (Those Pew studies were published before the rise of marked anti-intellectual distrust in some sectors of the American population.) I have not yet seen anyone solve the apparent contradiction: if younger Americans use libraries at rates exceeding or similar to their elders, why is academic library circulation of printed books down? I believe it may be because of different kinds of uses of different genres of books: academic books are rarely meant to be read cover-to-cover, unlike popular or literary fiction (whether textual or graphic).
I suspect that the term "book-wrapt" might give a hint about why students want books in libraries, but don't actually use them (whether internally or circulating).
When students enter a space with many books, they are seeking a space to get and keep themselves on task: they manage technology carefully, especially at crunch time. In a built environment wrapped in books, these students can become enrapt in their work. I suspect students like the backdrop of books because it reminds them of possible personal journeys. As Reid Byers says, masses of books represent "delights that we hold in possibility." Books represent explored worlds, roads not yet taken. (—or never to be taken?) Students want the company of books because in their spell they become re-centered: they are both setting out on tasks and and coming back to a sense of themselves as students and not just consumers or customers.
My insight might strike some as simple-minded romanticism. On the contrary, I have seen students remain remarkably on task in libraries. For at least some students, the books physically represent the learning they would like to achieve (whether achieving simply for a grade, a career, or genuine learning for the sake of growing up and coming home in the world). The books are somehow talismanic of their better selves.
The books represent relationships with the outside world, with history, with what many students would like to become. Those who see students as merely "revenue units" will never understand this. The symbolic power of books and libraries is easily underestimated but nonetheless potent, as every aspiring authoritarian and dictator knows. The enduring portent of book-burnings and the novel Fahrenheit 451 are a mirror image of book-wrapt. A library without books would turn its users into academic refugees—and maybe that is the intent of reductive and disruptive digital capitalism. As ever, books somehow slip the net, and with them their readers.
Disclosure: I have known Reid Byers although I doubt he would remember me. I knew his father, Arthur Byers, who for many years was Secretary of Princeton Theological Seminary. Reid was educated there as a Presbyterian minister several classes before me.
Image: Theodor-Heuss-Haus, Feuerbacher Weg, Stuttgart-Nord Arbeitszimmer von Theodor Heuss (mit einer Auswahl seiner Bücher) Public domain in wikimedia
(This post continues thoughts prompted by Prof. Mary Beard; see my previous post for context.
Up close and personal, card catalogs were less loved by those who created and maintained them than by some (or many) of those used them. Nicholson Baker's celebrated articles sought intentionally to denigrate librarians who were well aware of the shortcomings. Less expert users asked for—and often received—a lot of help using card catalogs. They were subject to all kinds of degradation, including a few obnoxious professors or other users who simply ripped out cards rather than write notes about which books to search for in the shelves. By far most card catalog users were respectful, but some weren't and they caused other users and librarians hours of trouble. Somehow Nicholson Baker and others just don't want to remember what working daily with a card catalog was really like --the bad with the good.
Nicholson Baker's celebrated take-down of newspaper digitization was even more precious. Librarians who had to work with old printed newspapers day in and day out often hated them for good reasons. Printed on cheap, acid-based paper, most newspapers quickly deteriorated. As they deteriorated, they gave off motes of dust that included nearly microscopic bits of acidified paper that bore inks with ingredients such as lead, arsenic, cadmium, and titanium. A large room full of old newspapers (often located at a basement level) was a mildly toxic environment, toxicity intensified by paper mold. Digitization of content undoubtedly obliterated or obscured some content, but was the only practical alternative to substantial structural, conservation, and labor costs. Baker has apparently preserved many newspapers in his home. I wish him well; I wouldn't set foot in the place, no matter how gracious (or hostile) he might be.
Back to card catalogs: what was lost in the transition to digital catalogs? (—with a pit stop for microfiches.)
In a word, contexts.
A reasonably current academic library collection in a given subject, in the card catalog era, could offer a fair (though not exhaustive) representation of monographic publications. (Journals, manuscripts, archives, and special collections far more variously.) When a user found a run of cards by an author, or particular work, or subject, the size of the run (sometimes helpfully marked by separator cards) could given an impression of amount and range of scholarship. For students, this could be instructive, such as "I've never heard of Plotinus, but here's a large run of cards by or about him." A run of author's works (collected or in summary) was visible in a way not apparent by citations on a screen.
Individual cards could also communicate meanings in an almost tactile manner. Was a card well-thumbed? (—smudged by frequent contact with fingers.) Where cards were filed under an author's last name, did that last name change? (—because of marriage, divorce, immigration, honorary or aristocratic titles, etc.) Were some cards much more thumbed than others? Did that suggest books that were popular, or ignored? Were corrections typed or inked in, death dates added, and what about the see: and see also: references? Did the same work show differences in British and American editions? (—beyond spelling)
Online searching leads easily to the "keyhole" result: I found one thing that I'm looking for online, and remain unaware of a considerable number of resources (some potentially very helpful) which did not come to the surface because of the vagaries or keywords. Discovery services and AI-aided searches (Yewno) haven't yet overcome this. A user confronted with a three-inch set of cards by or about Iris Murdoch is less apt to settle for just one text or resource, and hardly merely the first five cards (equivalent to the first five Google search results).
Librarians, and occasionally users, added handwritten notes, some officially and others much less so. Some were in "library hand" (the official standard for handwritten information), others were less legible in various comments, sometimes underlines: "2nd ed." --! or: "Vol. 3 never published." Occasionally: "Ask librarian." Readers might introduce editorial comments, which while discouraged were impossible to prevent. I remember seeing the author card for William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale marked with red pencil: "Bullshit." At Firestone Library, a few cards author cards for F. Scott Fitzgerald were noted, "University Cottage Club." At Speer Library (Princeton Theological Seminary, home of many students of John Calvin), the wonderful cross-reference card "See, Holy. See: Holy See." was marked in early 20th-century pen, "That seeing they may see, and not perceive." (—a reference to Mark 4:12 in the Authorized Version.)
These notes could have a down side: hostile remarks about racism, integration, and Martin Luther King, Jr., or Franklin Delano Roosevelt, or Joseph McCarthy. In the U.K., I suspect that Margaret Thatcher might have received similar treatment had not the rise of digital catalogs prevented it.
In a card catalog, a user could more readily get a sense of the run of centuries-old scholarship on some subjects: the successive translations of Augustine's Confessions, or Dante, or Petrarch, for example. One might also glean insights into local scholarship: famous scholars who served their universities on committees, or as Deans, Rectors, or Wardens, or who even participated in local politics. This was particularly true in the mental interaction of the catalog with the shelves (stacks): physical co-locations that were enhanced or obscured by cataloging.
Card catalogs also encouraged library serendipity: the user seeking one thing but finding another, as well as surprises for the uninitiated: the undergraduate who discovered that the editor and author G. E. M. Anscombe was female, or that Jack Lewis was also C.S. Lewis. As indirect teaching devices, card catalogs ensured a slower pace of searches and research that had the effect of leavening the learning processes, as well as sometimes frustrating the learner. As a librarian, I could not count the number of times I was interrupted (while filing cards) by users who needed help, and those encounters frequently led to various kinds of both library and subject instruction. In my experience, users frustrated by online searches (searching has always been frustrating!) are far less apt to seek help, but just live with partial or unhelpful results.
As social centers for both librarians and users, card catalogs encouraged interaction in the web of library support that was so crucial for young scholars. Invariably three users and a librarian would converge on one drawer, or set of drawers, at a time, leading not only to patient negotiation and cooperation, but acquaintance. Searching an online catalog is a much more individual, even lonely, experience.
I very much wish that 21st century academic libraries could develop better and clearer ways for young scholars to interact with each other and their mentors. I agree with Prof. Beard: the web of library interaction has suffered, because of technology, economies, and the drift of digital culture suggested by the new verb "to friend." Alas, there is no going back, but social serendipity might strike again. The readiness is all.
Prof. Mary Beard has again spurred me to thoughts and second thoughts about librarianship (see September 3) -- this time about card catalog. (NB She spells the word in the traditional British manner; I follow the American custom of dropping the final -ue.)
In her always stimulating blog A Don's Life (paywall) she wrote a few days ago about the agonies of migrating her e-mail from a previous system (Hermes, a successor to Eudora) that worked pretty well to Microsoft Outlook. As a veteran Outlook user (both the installed app and the web version), I sympathize. "It repeatedly deletes emails in mid-composition" (—so I think she is using Outlook via Office365, but I'm not sure). Heaven knows that anything Microsoft is bound to cause trouble, probably more than it's worth. "No one ever got fired for choosing Microsoft" is undoubtedly true of campus IT departments, but its users are bound to be less happy. The law of unintended consequences holds true for Microsoft as anything else: As the system grows more complex, it grows unwieldy. (I can wax nostalgic about Sendmail that used to be part of freeBSD, but I desist.)
The same frustrations continue when Prof. Beard encounters her bank's allegedly upgraded online system: bank online systems are notoriously opaque and seem to be designed to frustrate the customer. Providing "better customer service" leads back to the law of unintended consequences.
Which brings our good don to library "catalogues."
It is all uncannily reminiscent of the demise of library card catalogues twenty-five or so years ago. For those of us fighting to preserve the old-fashioned card catalogue, or even the older-fashioned guard book, it was a losing battle. There are certainly advantages to an online catalogue (you can search it from anywhere, for a start, and you can introduce different search terms, and so on; I am not blind to these). But if you know the author and title, there is no quicker way to find a book than a card catalogue. When did any high-tech librarian ever allow that there might be some losses in the online method (just like there are losses in the voice-recognition banking system)?
Many of us have been through various iterations of this. Who remembers when we were told that microfiche library catalogues (remember them?) were state of the art? A bit of humility on the part of the cyber-planners would not go amiss. I almost hope that I am around when the energy crisis really bites, and people are scurrying around to resurrect their card catalogues. Last laugh …
Much of this hits home. I have been a librarian throughout the period of digitization (1980s), first of library catalogs, then of journals and books themselves. (The latter much less far along than the former, thankfully.). There was too much ridiculous boosterism over the decades, especially in the 1980s, and a good bit of techno-cultural imperialism as well. Too many firms had too much to sell, and over-sell. To every era its excesses. Even a smidgen of humility was lacking.
"When did any high-tech librarian ever allow that there might be some losses in the online method?" I knew librarians who were haunted by the losses, and I can remember numerous personal conversations. Those confutations never reached print because of the prevailing orthodoxies both within and outside the profession.
I remember feverish rebuttals and whispered partial agreements with Nicholson Baker's celebrated and idiosyncratic "Discards" essay in The New Yorker (paywall) in 1994, expanded in his book Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, 2001. Baker's counter-assault borders on the airing of personal grudges, and in twenty-year retrospect strikes one as alternately prescient, precious, and privileged to the point whining. (I do enjoy linking to the OCLC record for Baker's book, a bit of bibliographic snark.) The contretemps up to 1998 is nicely assessed by Cox, Greenberg, and Porter in "Access Denied: The Discarding of Library History" (JSTOR); see also a bibliography of responses compiled by the Association of Research Libraries. (FWIW the Wikipedia article isn't bad.) Baker's polarizing polemic over-determined what might have been more useful discussions.
Several personal observations from that period and since:
"When did any high-tech librarian ever allow that there might be some losses . . ." introduces a straw person. Such a figure is all to easy to ridicule when a considerable majority of librarians are trying to cope with the vagaries of any kind of bibliographic technology (including cards) while responding as humans to humans and their needs. I've met almost stereotypical "high-tech" librarians in years past, but fewer rabidly enthusiastic as time goes on. The bloom has been off that rose for some time. Most librarians are by now too experienced with the vagaries of information technology to be fooled easily.
So-called "known item" searches are undeniably frustrating with almost all of the library service platforms. Librarians are the first to know those frustrations, since we spend a good deal of time searching for known items (to make sure we haven't already purchased them, for one thing). "But if you know the author and title, there is no quicker way to find a book than a card catalogue" —unless, that is, you're not sure of the spelling of the author's name, or its "authorized" form, or you get the first word of a title wrong. If you're looking in a card catalog that isn't too large, the problem isn't too large. If you have a very large card catalog (like I knew at Firestone Library, Princeton University), the desired bit of information might be drawers away. Not to mention the vagaries of conference proceedings, technical reports, and series titles.
I used to file catalog cards, knew the ALA filing rules backwards and forwards, including a few local exceptions. The placement of the "main card" (usually the "author" card) was the most important, because that had the full list of "tracings," or the other cards in the set: as necessary the title card, uniform title card (especially for translations), series title card, series corporate author card; the subject-heading cards usually went into an adjacent "subject catalog" because the authorized Library of Congress subject headings could become so complex. Any of those cards could be misfiled; student files would typically leave their file cards "above the rod" so that their work could be reviewed, and when they became expert enough they could be allow to "drop the cards" or "pull the rod." I became expert enough that at Butler Library, Columbia I was entrusted to file "New York" author and title cards, distinguishing carefully between New York State, County, City, University, New-York Historical Society (that hyphen was important), among others.
"But if you know the author and title, there is no quicker way to find a book than a card catalogue" --if the card has been correctly filed! My digression above is simply to point out some of the numerous points that could go wrong.
"Who remembers when we were told that microfiche library catalogues (remember them?) were state of the art?" Thankfully the era of microfiche catalogs is long gone. This early 20th-century technology turns out to have been a transitional format although that was not realized at the time. Microfiche catalogs were undoubtedly worse than card catalogs --the only benefit they produced was for a library, that it need sort cards only once. For users, microfiche catalogs provided all the headaches of cards and microforms in one demonic package. Microfiche catalogs were a supposed economy that undoubtedly was never achieved due to the costs of the technology and distribution—the very definition of a false economy.
It is incredible to think that library computer automation was once sold as "money-saving." In salary terms, probably this was true, because a significant number of low-level employees could be re-assigned to other tasks, or cut. Remaining professional-level employees ultimately cost more (they became even more skilled), as well as the new employees (technical support) that the new systems demanded. Online catalogs have produced results that card catalogs could not produce, but they have not saved money. That was always a false argument, especially in the long run as systems needed to be updated, migrated, and secured.
"I almost hope that I am around when the energy crisis really bites,and people are scurrying around to resurrect their card catalogues." Well, the good professor will be left in a damp, dark, and completely unventilated library (except for openable windows, not always a building feature). No card catalogs will be resurrected: academic libraries are now just too large. In the event of society-wide, massive and distributed power failure, a great deal of journal and monograph content will simply vanish, at least for almost all users. That is truly worrisome. The remaining print collections will be too large to produce another card catalog at a time when society and universities will doubtless have quite a list of far more pressing problems. There really is no going back. The apocalypse may feature books, but not catalogs.
I was reminded of the irrevocable character of historical change a few months ago when I visited the Lyman Allyn Art Museum in New London, Connecticut. Once New London was a major shipping and trans-shipment point with excellent natural mooring (with a draft too shallow for later times). Now the small city is dominated by a college, the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, and Electric Boat and related industries (EB across the river in Groton; it makes submarines). Lyman Allyn was a wealthy merchant and his daughter left the manor house, art collection, and substantial bequest. The Museum library now means essentially a large room for presentations (and yoga sessions), but the actual books of the library are still located on the inset shelves, including the card catalog. A real card catalog with a substantial portion of the tangible collection it represents, still intact and on site! It was a beautiful experience to work through a drawer of cards again, but with a catch: I doubt that anything has been added to this library since the 1980s. I am certain that over the intervening years some books have been lost. Nevertheless—there it was, a real card catalog that turned a room with with a lot of books into an actual library. The only thing missing, sadly, was a living librarian. Should anyone begin to work with the collection again, there will be no recourse but to verify its contents with reference to online databases (even informally, such as LibraryThing).
A second blog entry asks, "What was lost when catalogs were transitioned from cards to computers?"
A few weeks ago I read Joshua Kim’s blog entry The Great Remain, and thought of several responses. Joshua wonders about “some [large] number of people who work in higher education who remain in their jobs, even though they have saved enough money to stop working.” His guess is that this number considerably exceeds those who have left in the widely-proclaimed Great Resignation of 2021 (and likely 2022).
My first observation focuses on “even though they have saved enough money” —this is a condition that is hard to specify further. I’m over my officially designated “retirement age” (66) and in talking with my trusty TIAA representative, “enough” is a moving target.
I was surprised that TIAA’s actuaries suggest that I should plan for “enough” until I’m 98, or 2051. (Social Security Administration indicates estimates 85.4 years, so I don't know what accounts for the difference.) This is a lot longer than retirement planning used to consider feasible. Unless I put it all into a guaranteed annuity now (or soon), I have to consider how much more some of my funds might grow in that roughly 30 year period. This is tough: my anticipations of the next 30 years fluctuate between “growth” as the world economy shifts to a more sustainable basis, disaster (we’ll never pull off that shift), or muddling through (that shift, but only sort of). What do you think will happen?
So “enough money to stop working” is really hard to quantify for most of us except those in the upper income echelon amongst academics, who will always have enough. “Partner income” (where applicable) as a consideration is also frought: how healthy is that person? What does the partner do, and for how long?
At any rate, I share Joshua’s perception that in fact many people in academic who could retire from their present positions and present income instead choose to remain. Joshua suggested three large reasons for remaining: mission, identity, and “institutional rigidity.”
“Mission” is a tricky one, especially for those of us in private higher ed. Even at a more “liberal” (read: mainstream) Catholic institution, the concept of mission has become rather dented in the past 15 years. Does higher education in fact drive increasing social and economic stratification? Do we inadvertently contribute to an increasingly technocratic “winner take all” society and hence forced into the culture wars? Is this what I signed up for 40 years ago? My sense is that a lot of the missions of higher education (which vary significantly) have changed since the 1970s, and my own sense of participation in that has diminished.
“Identity” can be especially tricky: Joshua points out the way that in academic job and identity become conflated. This is especially difficult for the clan-like identities of academic disciplines: “I’m a sociologist, historian, virologist, medievalist.” It can be less difficult for those whose professional identities run concurrent to other significant life commitments, such as family, social service, or religious commitments. I surmise that more than a connection with a specific academic role (professor, dean, librarian, counselor), connections to specific kinds of responsibilities (teaching, research, consultation) bind identities significantly, and are expressed with reference to one’s academic clan. I know at least two retired Provosts who describe themselves as a “historian” or a “biologist,” even though neither has published in some years. Neither would call themselves "retired Provost" (assuming anyone else even knows what that means) or even "retired administrator" or "retired VP."
The loss of identity upon resignation from academia reflects the wider loss of identity all retired persons face in a society that assigns economic and moral weight to activity: working, producing, earning. I read one person, a significant leader in a growing industry who retired, who said “I went from being Who’s Who to who’s that? in a week.” Ageism and the denial of worth and even (at extreme) humanity of those who are older –especially if they are not healthy in ways that show—will become a growing social issue as Baby Boomers swell the number of retired (and has already become a more contested issue than some years before).
Finally, what Joshua calls “institutional rigidity” (I prefer “inertia”) is a push-me/pull-you. I know individuals who should retire, but whose habits and fears keep them in place, even at the cost of their own greater happiness. I know several who hang on because they know that their institutions will discontinue their positions and maybe even their departments or disciplines, after they leave, and they value their own contribution enough to want to continue to make it. The vaunted “change of priorities” as academia is “disrupted,” or whatever the flavor-of-the-month bureaucratic language is.
Institutional inertia does indeed make stepping down feel like stepping off a cliff, rather than taking a single stair step. Academic work doesn’t have to be a binary role: you do it full time or you don’t. But it has certainly evolved that way. Just try telling that to human resources departments and university attorneys. For all that some individuals refuse to retire, academic organizations refuse to make it any easier. One inertia begets the other.
I wonder how long the “great remain” will last. Already I know of four academic library deans or directors in the small state of Connecticut that have retired in the past 18 months. I know of many others in the various clans of academia who thus far have wanted to hang on in their jobs to see their organizations through the pandemic until “things get back to normal”—and now no one knows what that will look like. Do we all face an endless parade of COVID-19 virus mutations? A whole new pandemic from a different virus or some other cause? I wonder how many will retire and leave with regret between January and June 2022, out of sheer exhaustion. The last two years have been very hard, by any measure.
I expect that most full-time positions will be filled in the future by contingent workers, whether in teaching or elsewhere, as the institutional drive for so-called efficiency, economy, and agility trumps most institution’s former academic mission. I expect that the increasing precarity, and economic and social stratification in academia between the haves and have-nots, will intensify and come to resemble the combative polarization of the culture wars. Whether I leave my own position or not, I can’t figure would whether the time is right, or will be permanently wrong beyond anything I can fix.
It's not a happy time to retire, but then, when would that be?
I sit in my study at home, and the combination of some bargains on AbeBooks and the digital world means that I don’t spend hours biking from one library to another, waiting for books to “come up”, standing by the photocopier etc etc. The new system is convenient, cost-effective and I love it. But I do sometimes wonder about its effect on the general world of the library. My early academic career was based in the bricks-and-mortar library. It was where I got my books, but it was also where I got many of my friends and the people to talk to about my (and their) work. I didn’t need wellbeing classes (I have to confess that the phrase “wellbeing” has precisely the opposite effect on me!). I had the day-to-day support network of the library. (It wasn’t all quite so virtuous, but that is another story, for when I retire, folks.)
There is also what it does to the staff and the whole infrastructure of the library. I rather dread that the library will become the “treasure house” of some precious, rare books – while everything else is done “off-site” or “online”. And I dread that there will be whole cohorts of staff who, instead of doing the admittedly tough job (but with human contact) of fetching books for readers, and of reshelving, are in the bowels of the basements doing wall-to-wall scanning.
—Mary Beard, A Don's Life
Prof. Beard writes about "scan and deliver" services for physical books otherwise inaccessible due to restrictions necessitated by the pandemic. Such services have become ubiquitous and many will probably survive the return to "normal" (whatever that word may come to mean). She fears that "there will never again be the kind of 'library culture' that I grew up with.
I believe I understand and can sympathize with many of Prof. Beard's fears. I'm a couple of years older than she, and given different retirement rules in the U.S., I'm still on the job for another academic year as a University Librarian of a small, regional, Catholic university of no particular consequence, that specializes in pre-professional and professional programs and is only slightly similar to Cambridge. I was educated in American liberal arts colleges and graduate schools in Classics and the History of Christianity, doubtless not to the level of Oxbridge scholarship, but with just enough familiarity to have participated in a library culture similar to what Prof. Beard remembers when I was in Princeton.
I've been in librarianship since professionally since 1985. In 1981 my first library staff job was typing catalogue cards at the Institute for Advanced Study Historical Studies Library. I have witnessed the disruptions of library services and scholarship in the ensuing decades, from the first generation of computerized catalogues and integrated library services to contemporary discovery and AI services.
I'm not about to claim that the "library culture" of which Prof. Beard so capably writes was neither so supportive, nor so good as it really was. (In my case, at least.) The library and information technologies of the time really did inadvertently foster a sense of collegiality and supportive community spirit. Those technologies—printed books, card catalogues, seminar rooms near relevant collections, in-person services with library staff of all kinds—enabled me to finish papers and degrees and often enjoy the process. Although it has become fashionable to claim that such technologies were based on the reality of "print scarcity" (such as: only one reader per book per time), it can be said equally that such technologies fostered collegiality, sharing, and personal contact on a day-to-day basis. How many times did a professor recommend a book which he or she had already checked out, often sitting adjacent? —so that when I had searched for the book and learned that it was in circulation, I had to ask him or her for it? Inconvenient? certainly. Personal contact? Definitely —even when personal contact was not always pleasant.
My only point is that present and future digital library technologies could (or perhaps do) foster collegiality, personal community, and supportive community in different manners from the past.
For example, in the 1990s I was working up a dissertation on the early works of an obscure Carolingian bishop. With present digital means, I might have learned that a German in Munich, an American in Toronto, and a professor down the road (in Trenton, N.J.) were working in different ways with the same author. Given the realities of the time, I learned about the last of those through our mutual acquaintance of a professor in Princeton. I learned about the second author when his presence at the Institute for Advanced Study facilitated an official invitation that he become a member of my dissertation committee. I learned about the first (the German in Munich) only after he had published a book that challenged some of my working assumptions. Digital technologies might have facilitated significant interaction with these scholars more quickly; the participation of all of us in digital networks might have given a chance for mutual discovery.
The library culture of the latter 20th century certainly was not always "virtuous" (Prof. Beard's term). There were some very real downsides. Much of the library work of the pre-digital eras was tedious and encouraged a mentality of slavish conformity to obscure and sometimes obstructive rules (both the formal: cataloguing; and the informal: we don't ever ask University Library X to supply anything via hand-written interlibrary loan requests on paper ALA forms, because we don't like them). At times, the former library culture formed a kind of dystopia utterly opaque to scholars and readers on the outside, but very much limiting their work in a manner of which they were unaware.
Libraries as cultures will continue to evolve, and not necessarily towards a dystopian future of cohorts of basement-dwelling, low-paid staff scurrying about the bowels of the treasure house. Neither heaven nor hell is likely.
Libraries are and will remain services, spaces, and resources—and online books, journals, and digital scholarship of all kinds will never be exactly obvious for everyone to find. The nature of learning is that its trails of evidence and citation are intricate and intersect in odd ways at unpredictable moments.
The "day-to-day support network of the library" will only disappear when humans are entirely removed. Perhaps that will happen in a distant someday, but not soon (despite administrators' and funders' concerns about productivity, cost, and impact—whatever those terms might mean).
Library users (readers, patrons) will continue to seek the level of support that they desire. (Some never wanted to interact with anyone else at all under any circumstances—the social loners or sociopathic misanthropes will always be with us.).
Those who really want support will, I truly believe, be able to find it from the same sources as always: peers, unexpected companions, acquaintances in other disciplines, unanticipated friends at a distance, and intelligent, informed, libraries oriented to both service and scholarship. Library readers (users, patrons) will cultivate the same good will and good humor from those staff who retrieve off-site materials, or who manage to locate or gain access to unsought but pertinent online resources.
Is outlook too sanguine or or sunny? I hope not. Libraries have been around a long, long time. I have had to explain to Provosts and Deans given to excessively short-term thinking that the temporal horizons of librarianship is decades if not centuries, and not only the next quarter or fiscal year. Matthew Battles (Library: An Unquiet History) reminds us that libraries, as centers of culture power, prestige, and legitimacy, have been targets for destruction from organized armies, terrorist organizations, and not-so-benign neglecters —as well as scheming academic administrators. Libraries have nevertheless survived, as have their users, and while the support networks they have fostered for scholars have sometimes (and tragically) gone into eclipse in evil times, they have re-emerged when times, technologies, and powers change.
Prof. Beard anticipates retirement from active faculty service, about the same time that I anticipate retirement from library leadership. It's hard to say good-bye and Godspeed without fearing decline, both personal, academic, disciplinary, and institutional. Without those good-byes, there can be no hello to another kind of work and life. I look forward to reading what Prof. Beard will write in the coming decades, from perspectives and prospects.
Thank you to Prof. Beard for consistently informative and provocative thinking over the decades. With more to come!
I noted with interest last Saturday the card catalogue* in the Hendel Library of the Lyman Allyn Museum in New London, Connecticut, which I was visiting for the first time (though I have lived in Connecticut since 2006). I noticed the familiar build-in wood drawers for the cards, and on a whim opened one of them, expecting to find it empty (as usual). To my surprise, I encountered real catalogue cards and nary a library computer in sight.
I hasten to add that the Hendel Library is a beautifully furnished room in the Deshon-Allyn House, built in 1829, and which combines Federalist and Greek Revival design elements. The library is not really a functioning library, but an event space available for rentals. I expect that the collection has been static for decades, and some of the books probably exhibit familiar problems of aging and minimally cared-for collections. The room features a large hand-crafted model ship by Pasquale Montesi, an Italian immigrant and former sailor in the Italian navy, who settled in nearby Norwich in 1898, and ran a fish market there. Montesi crafted his models on the basis of memory and intimate knowledge of sailing ships, without blueprints or drawings. (Hence the design elements are not to scale.) Most visitors to the Museum see an elegant room with a large ship model, and ignore the surrounding library.
I began to wonder: how many card catalogues still exist? Where are they located? Are any actively maintained? —even informally, and not according to cataloguing rules as known to several generations of cataloguers, since OCLC printed its last catalog card on October 1, 2015 (sent to the now-defunct Concordia College of Bronxville, N.Y.), and Library of Congress Distribution Service (still active digitally) printed its last card in 1997. I am considering putting out a call to discover where card catalogues still exist. This is not to fetishize card catalogues: I wouldn't want to go back to them, but they are or were a notable technology in building scholarship and literature in the 20th century.
*A note on spelling: catalog and catalogue are both acceptable in American usage. Catalog is sometimes used as a noun, and catalogue as a verb. Catalogue as a usage predominates in British and world-wide usages. I prefer catalogue (and I was once a cataloguer, but for me the spelling is not a matter of doctrine or politics.
In The New York Times recently (December 24, 2021), Julie Lasky (real estate beat) 
