Libraries of the future

Information overload
Information overload circa 1965. From the book: It has for some time been increasingly apparent that
research libraries are becoming choked from the proliferation
of publication, and that the resulting problems
are not of a kind that respond to merely more of the same —’ever and ever larger bookstacks and ever and ever
more complicated catalogues. It was with this realization
that the Ford Foundation in 1956 established the Council
on Library Resources to assist in attempts to discover
solutions to these problems and to bring the benefits of
modern technology to the correction of maladjustments
for which modern technology is to a large degree responsible.

Pages, Books, and Libraries
On page 5 there is a great section called: Pages, Books, and Libraries

Excerpt:
As a medium for the display of information, the printed
page is superb. It affords enough resolution to m.eet the
eye’s demand. It presents enough information to occupy
the reader for a convenient quantum of time. It offers
great flexibility of font and format. It lets the reader control
the mode and rate of inspection. It is small, light,
movable, cuttable, clippable, pastable, replicable, disposable,
and inexpensive. Those positive attributes all
relate, as indicated, to the display function. The tallies
that could be made for the storage, organization, and retrieval
functions are less favorable.
When printed pages are bound together to make books
or journals, many of the display features of the individual
pages are diminished or destroyed. Books are bulky and
heavy. They contain much more information than the
reader can apprehend at any given moment, and the excess
often hides the part he wants to see. Books are too
expensive for universal private ownership, and they circulate
too slowly to permit the development of an efficient
public utility. Thus, except for use in consecutive
reading — which is not the modal application in the domain
of our study— books are not very good display devices.
In fulfilling the storage function, they are only fair.
With respect to retrievability they are poor. And when it
comes to organizing the body of knowledge, or even to
indexing and abstracting it, books by themselves make
no active contribution at all.
If books are intrinsically less than satisfactory for the
storage, organization, retrieval, and display of information,
then libraries of books are bound to be less than
satisfactory also. We may seek out inefficiencies in the
organization of libraries, but the fundamental problem
is not to be solved solely by improving library organization
at the system level. Indeed, if human interaction
with the body of knowledge is conceived of as a dynamic
process involving repeated examinations and intercomparisons
of very many small and scattered parts, then any
concept of a library that begins with books on shelves is
sure to encounter trouble. Surveying a million books on
ten thousand shelves, one might suppose that the difficulty
is basically logistic, that it derives from the gross
physical arrangement. In part, of course, that is true,
but in much greater part the trouble stems from what
we may call the “passiveness” of the printed page. When
information is stored in books, there is no practical way
to transfer the information from the store to the user
without physically moving the book or the reader or both.
Moreover, there is no way to determine prescribed functions
of descriptively specified informational arguments
within the books without asking the reader to carry out
all the necessary operations himself.
We are so inured to the passiveness of pages and books
that we tend to shrug and ask, “Do you suggest that the
reading — which is not the modal application in the domain
of our study— books are not very good display devices.
In fulfilling the storage function, they are only fair.
With respect to retrievability they are poor. And when it
comes to organizing the body of knowledge, or even to
indexing and abstracting it, books by themselves make
no active contribution at all.
If books are intrinsically less than satisfactory for the
storage, organization, retrieval, and display of information,
then libraries of books are bound to be less than
satisfactory also. We may seek out inefficiencies in the
organization of libraries, but the fundamental problem
is not to be solved solely by improving library organization
at the system level. Indeed, if human interaction
with the body of knowledge is conceived of as a dynamic
process involving repeated examinations and intercomparisons
of very many small and scattered parts, then any
concept of a library that begins with books on shelves is
sure to encounter trouble. Surveying a million books on
ten thousand shelves, one might suppose that the difficulty
is basically logistic, that it derives from the gross
physical arrangement. In part, of course, that is true,
but in much greater part the trouble stems from what
we may call the “passiveness” of the printed page. When
information is stored in books, there is no practical way
to transfer the information from the store to the user
without physically moving the book or the reader or both.
Moreover, there is no way to determine prescribed functions
of descriptively specified informational arguments
within the books without asking the reader to carry out
all the necessary operations himself.
We are so inured to the passiveness of pages and books
that we tend to shrug and ask, “Do you suggest that the
document read its own print?” Surely, however, the difficuhy
of separating the information in books from the
pages, and the absence, in books, of active processors,
are the roots of the most serious shortcomings of our
present system for interacting with the body of recorded
knowledge. We need to substitute for the book a device
that will make it easy to transmit information without
transporting material, and that will not only present information
to people but also process it for them, following
procedures they specify, apply, monitor, and, if
necessary, revise and reapply. To provide those services,
a meld of Library and computer is evidently required.