The day will soon come when nobody watching Beauty and the Beast will understand why Belle is excited about a library. As everything goes digital, people no longer acquire things, and when they do they can't be sure those things remain theirs. One of the major reasons I bought my house was because I built a library into the great room where the entertainment center once stood. I wanted a library. I wanted a center of learning. Library no longer means the same thing.
Having extra time before class tonight, I decided to go explore the new student union on campus and ended up in the library. It's the strangest library I've ever entered, and it reminded me of that described and predicted by Orson Wells in his book "The Time Machine". Our new library has no books on the shelves. In fact, it doesn't even have any shelves. It does have lots of work stations with plugs for computers for both power and internet which is admirable and desirable, but there isn't really a library. Essentially, it's a large study area, and I don't even really understand why they have a librarian. What does she do? She confronted me, and I told her I was exploring. Some of the studying students looked up, and a few smiled, but I felt out of place without books. Everything's online, and I don't know how to feel about that.
I'm just barely old enough that I remember having to go to the library to get work done. Our professors put exams and other materials on reserve that we could go use for an hour or so. I remember the magic of holding something in my hand as I learned from and about it. I also think of all the amazing books in old university libraries that are not and probably never will be digitalized. What will happen to them? You can still go to the library to study and use a computer, but where are the books? I know having the books open in front of me allows me to switch back and forth between them more quickly than if I'm doing it online, but that may be because I am the last vestige of a bygone era who finds it cumbersome to use a tiny computer in my hand.
Even more importantly, computers introduce the bias of the programmer to the search parameters and make it difficult to find useful information unless you know the boolean operators. Just Monday, I ran a search on a popular search engine and noticed two problems. First, as aforementioned on this blog, the engine returned sponsored results that have nothing to do whatsoever with what I want. If you can buy your way to the top, you can bias the outcomes. Secondly, it returned results that were six years out of date in some cases. In science, something that is four years old is ancient. Back when I was in school, the stacks for periodicals contained only the current year so that when you looked for something it was maybe 11 months out of date. Now, students get data that is inaccurate, irrelevant, outdated, or bought. Far too many search results are biased because people want you to come to a certain conclusion. Run a search on how to get rid of belly fat, and you will find all sorts of contradictory and conflicting claims. Some will say that aerobics work, others will say weights, and some will tell you that eating McDonalds every day will work (because it worked for someone once). Past isn't necessarily prologue, but the digital database bears the bias of the person programming it, and it's only as good as its author. When I left Facebook over two years ago, I posted a picture of myself overlaid with the caption "Sexiest Professor Ever- It's written on a photo posted on the internet, so you know it's true." My best friend once said "Most of what's on the internet is pretty useless which is probably why it's free". I also modified wikipedia articles last time I taught microbiology so that they contained a phrase for which I could search in order to catch cheaters who simply copied and pasted. Recently, the media published a false story about Ben Carson, and people believed it. "I read it on the internet" they say, to which I retort, "Then we know it MUST be true!" Publish it, and people will quote it, and that scares me. Scholarship is now biased by those who write the software, search parameters, and databases. Anything done by humans is both flawed and skewed to serve the human who made it so.
I walked out of the very pretty and expensive building with mixed feelings. I'm glad the students have a nice place to study and take care of things in their new student union. I wonder how much they will actually "learn" now that boolean operators are the only guides to actually help them find scholarly information. We know so many things that aren't true, interesting, useful, or worthy of knowing. I can't say that this will be worse than what I knew as a student, but it will certainly be different, and I will probably never visit the "library" again. Meanwhile, here's a picture of mine:
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