[57] in Public-Access_Computer_Systems_Forum
FYI France: the Bib.de France at Berkeley -- part 2 of 4
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jack Kessler)
Wed Apr 22 09:58:53 1992
Date: Wed, 22 Apr 1992 08:47:59 CDT
Reply-To: Public-Access Computer Systems Forum <PACS-L%UHUPVM1.BITNET@RICEVM1.RICE.EDU>
From: Jack Kessler <kessler%well.sf.ca.us@RICEVM1.RICE.EDU>
To: Multiple recipients of list PACS-L <PACS-L@UHUPVM1.BITNET>
----------------------------Original message----------------------------
This is the second of four reports on the four-session conference held
April 10-12 at UC Berkeley, on "The Bibliothe`que de France and the
Future of the Library". There were presentations at this session of
other new, large projects, resembling that of the Bibliothe`que de
France, which are being pursued by the New York Public Library, the
Library of Congress, and the San Francisco Public Library.
Dorothy Gregor, UC Berkeley's new head librarian, played the role of
emcee a second time. She stated, as the theme of this session, a
question which might have served as the theme of the entire conference:
"What mix of library with and without-walls are we building?"
William Walker, New York Public Library's associate librarian, had a
specific answer: libraries must shift, he said, from offering
comprehensive programs to offering "targeted" services. NYPL currently
supports 86 libraries: 4 privately-funded research centers, and 82
publicly-funded branches around the New York City area. In all, they
have 8 million users per year for their over 47 million items. Their
most recent trend, said Walker, has been the establishment of
"targeted" centers: 1) the Humanities, Social Science and Special
Collections, at Fifth Avenue, 2) the Library for the Performing Arts at
Lincoln Center, 3) the Schomberg Center for Black Culture in Harlem,
and now, 4) SIBL -- a new Science, Industry and Business Library, to be
located in Manhattan's old B.Altman's building -- 200,000 square feet,
1/3 of the building, at 34th and Madison. This is not all that NYPL has
been doing, Walker emphasized: 1.5 million volumes were moved only last
summer into 88 miles of new shelving built beneath the park behind the
Fifth Avenue building. But "targets" now are in.
NYPL's SIBL will contain 2.5 million non-circulating reserve volumes,
obtained from an unbundling of the Economics and Public Affairs
collection and a unification of various Science collections. Walker
bowed in the direction of the French, saying that he well-appreciated
the political difficulties they no doubt were having changing the old
BN classifications to suit the new B.de France system. SIBL will
contain a circulating collection as well as a closed reserve. One key
to its service will be new materials handling and document delivery
techniques derived, in some part according to Walker, from
consultations with the French and from ideas from the US National
Library of Medicine. He wants, "to move scanners and photocopying
machines to the requested materials, rather than move the materials"
and, to this end, will locate copying stations within the closed stacks
at the end of shelf rows. SIBL will have, in addition, 500 reading room
seats, all wired for laptop use, a 100-station Electronic Information
Center offering Internet connectivity, and a formal training center for
teaching both staff and users online techniques. (This arrangement
it seems must change, as workstation definition now is changing: users
won't want to do their word processing in one place and their network
use in another, now that their laptops have modems and Windows and even
a little multi-tasking -- those 500 laptop positions are going to need
telephone connections, so Walker can save on expense by combining them
with his Electronic Information Center, and now he gets to undertake
the thorny problem of defining online user policy for plug-in laptops.)
Prosser Gifford, of the Library of Congress, gave a very different
answer to Dorothy Gregor's question, "What mix of library with and
without-walls are we building?" He concentrated on LC's efforts to
establish library service for the new legislatures of Eastern Europe.
For 40 years there, from 1948, there has been a lack of information not
only from the outside world but among neighbors, Gifford said. There
even was a Kafkaesque, anti-information bias: "what one knew was less
important than who one knew". Operating in the dark is not a good
"adaptive strategy for democracy", he said, and LC wants to help the
countries "rebuild the fabric of civil society". Library and
information service as policy, then: very different from the economic
motivations which appear to prevail in New York.
LC's first approach is to establish some sort of online connectivity
for Eastern Europe: an Internet or an EARN connection, said Gifford.
The Frost Task Force report, on the information deficits of the
legislatures, produced $15 million for fiscal 1991-2 for collection
acquisitions, for hardware and software, and for staff training. The
greatest need, however, said Gifford, was for an "intelligent server on
a network to be used to search multiple databases".
You could sense the mouth-watering beginning in the room. The front-
end designers and intelligent interface theorists present sat up in
their seats. Shoulders hunched down immediately, though, when Gifford
announced that LC had chosen ASTRA, the Italian scientific information
system's interface, as the front-end for their WEBNET, their East
European information system now to be operated from the Radio Free
Europe installation in Munich. One wonders whether Gifford or LC know
of WAIS or Z39.50 or other US-based efforts to design an "intelligent
server on a network to be used to search multiple databases"?
It then was San Francisco's turn in the limelight. Kenneth Dowlin,
librarian of the San Francisco P.L., put on a remarkable performance.
His presentation appeared at first glance to be somewhat distracted: he
wandered over topics, casually assembling a list of seemingly-
interesting but apparently-unrelated ideas. Suddenly, then, shafts of
light began to pierce through. Demolition for his project had begun
that morning, he announced as proudly as had architect Perrault the day
before the commencement of the French project. Dowlin observed that his
building is one of the few libraries designed before it was handed to
the architects: he and his staff had worked out their concept well in
advance. He observed that, architecturally, "a library building is
almost a textbook example of reconciling opposites": readers, tourists,
and books -- some like light, some don't, some are quiet, some aren't.
Then Dowlin took, to the delight of the always-conceptual French and of
many others in the audience, his plunge into concepts:
1) A library project like his, he said, represents a competition
between a need for "connectedness" and a need for relevant, timely
information. We are "awash in bits and bytes" in the age of electronic
information, Dowlin contended. This "information" comes to us in
undifferentiated "glops": we need current news, which typically is
packaged in small, unrelated, pieces, but there is little systematic,
critical approach to electronic information. This last he calls our
need for seeing the "connectedness" of what we are shown. It is to this
latter effort -- the effort to show connectedness -- that all
libraries, including any new "electronic" library such as his own or
the Bibliothe`que de France, should be dedicated.
2) Dowlin then made a distinction between learning and credentialing,
bemoaning the latter and praising the former as being the true purpose
of a library. The idea that schools will "educate" by awarding
"credentials" to students who have learned nothing infuriates him. That
said, said Dowlin, "a public library is not an educational institution
-- we are a learning institution". Training students to handle concepts
is school but not library business, he contended. "We have reached the
point in our society where the human mind cannot contain all the
knowledge known to humankind -- the library now becomes the knowledge
bank of our society." Interactive information systems, Dowlin asserted,
are the key media which will enable learning to take place amid the
great mass of electronic and other information which is being assembled
in his library, at the Bibliothe`que de France, and elsewhere.
"I would contend," Dowlin told the audience, "that what cracked the
Berlin Wall was technology". He was there when the Wall came down, he
said, and was greatly moved by the idea that if it hadn't been for all
those radios and television sets in the Eastern sector, with antennas
and rabbit ears pointing to the West bringing in a constant flow of
information about the quality of Western life, the Wall might never
have come down. There is a risk, though, he warned, that on our
shrinking globe we may create, via information technologies expensive
in both time and money, a separation between the information "haves"
and the information "have-nots". He perhaps consciously here was
echoing the original mandate of the French President, evoked by Mme.
Waysbord the day before, that the B.de France should bring information
to the people, and not just conserve the books.
Dowlin perceives, he said, a gradual merging of technology occurring.
The different techniques which once handled the storage (printed works,
film) and the transmission (telephones, telegraph, mail) of information
now are being united in electronic techniques -- computer, video, audio
-- which can handle both; and increasingly these electronic techniques
"talk" to one another. He has on order, he said, a briefcase-sized
system which will "contain" the contents of hundreds of books, which
he'll be able to transfer to other places via its cellular telephone.
For libraries, Dowlin hopes this technology will become both a tool and
a driver. Basic paradigm shifts are needed, he said. From being
pointers and retrievers, libraries must become facilitators and
organizers; from fortresses, libraries must become pipelines;
information banking must yield to information connectedness; "just in
case" collecting must yield to "just in time" delivery of information;
he echoed Walker's comments, saying that old collection emphases on the
"whole world" must give way to new "focused resources".
"The book is a technology, not an icon or a religion", Dowlin
declared. He sees the move contemplated by San Francisco as being a
"move from a warehouse to a communications center". His views might
infuriate book antiquarians, and perhaps might be better presented in
the delicate manner of Mme. Waysbord, as a balance between
"conservation et diffusion" rather than a choice between the two.
Still, Dowlin's views provide the driving force for one side of that
equation, the side which largely is motivating the moves to upgrade
library service both in his city and in Paris.
Cathy Simon, architect for the SFPL project, also was a forceful and
effective speaker. Her erudite allusions to the world outside that of
library service -- the world of City Beautiful movements, Daniel
Burnham, the grand facades of the Bibliothe`que Ste. Genevie`ve, and of
the existence of neighboring communities which might not use the
library but still might care what it looks like -- were much
appreciated by the non-librarians in the audience.
The SFPL building looks now, even more than does the B.de France, as
though it was designed by a committee: neo-classical facade on the
outside, steel and glass modernism and functional post and perhaps
post-post-modernism on the inside. Simon defends the design vigorously,
insisting that the old building, which faces the new, also is a two-
sided "L" shape classical exterior containing a functional core, and
that the new building echoes and reinforces the old. How odd this
argument must sound to the French, who have completed a glass
pyramid in the courtyard of their venerated Louvre, erected the Tour
Maine-Montparnasse in the center of one of their more famous old city
neighborhoods, built the new Arch of La De'fense at the end of the
visual Louvre-Champs Elyse'es-Arc de la Triomphe axis, plonked down
the Pompidou "urban oil refinery" in the middle of the quartier des
Halles, and now are erecting the B.de France on their Left Bank!
Simon's community perhaps has more concern for "what the neighbors
might think" than does Perrault's, or perhaps it has less imagination.
Next: the Library of the Future, theory and practice.
Jack Kessler
kessler@well.sf.ca.us
