Daedalus articles from September 1996

Daedalus archives from September 1996

Preface to the issue "Books, Bricks, and Bytes."
September 22, 1996... This issue of daedalus celebrates a centennial, that of the New York Public Library, one of the world's largest and most distinguished libraries. It owes a very great deal to two presidents of that institution, the late Father Timothy Healy, who...

What is a digital library? Technology, intellectual property, and the public interest.
September 22, 1996... What is a digital library? In attaching the adjective "digital" to the noun "library" the future seems to be reconciled with the past. Over the last century the United States has built a marketplace of ideas upon three institutions - libraries,...

Libraries, the Library of Congress, and the Information Age.
September 22, 1996... Northrop Frye, the late brilliant Canadian critic, once said that our only real crystal ball is a rearview mirror. If you take that mirror and look back one century, you would read in the newspaper of any major city in America that people were...

Buy or lease? Two models for scholarly information at the end (or the beginning) of an era.
September 22, 1996... Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I've tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice....

A library historian looks at librarianship.
September 22, 1996... American libraries have the reputation of being the best in the world - easy to use and with collections appropriate to their purpose. Some are also among the largest in the world. In fact, three of the five largest libraries, exclusive of those...

Librarianship: a changing profession.
September 22, 1996... QUESTIONS ABOUT THE FUTURE OF LIBRARIES AND LIBRARIANSHIP Like many librarians today, I view recent technological developments in information and telecommunication technologies with a mixture of excitement, nervous anxiety, and paranoia.(1) In...

Libraries and publishers: a partnership at risk.
September 22, 1996... People in general do not willingly read, if they can have anything else to amuse them. - Samuel Johnson The year was 1979. At a preliminary planning meeting in Albany for the White House Conference on Libraries and Information Services,...

Searching for the catalog of catalogs.
September 22, 1996... A library is a home for books, a storehouse of collective knowledge, a connection to past generations, and a mental passageway to new worlds. For me, however, these are second degree realizations. My primary experience of libraries, the...

The yin and yang of knowing.
September 22, 1996... Information theorists and practitioners have announced the information revolution. They tell us that computer and communications technologies will transform every aspect of our lives, from the way we know what we know to how we choose to govern...

The centrality of communities to the future of major public libraries.
September 22, 1996... "Skate to where the puck's going to be, not to where it has been. Anticipate. Anticipate." - Walter Gretzky (Wayne Gretzky's father) Major urban public libraries in the United States are undergoing a renaissance. Dallas began dramatic...

Redefining community through the public library.
September 22, 1996... The news media portray american communities in disarray. Robert Putnam describes how Americans have ceased to join one another in neighborhood activities.(1) Distrust, fear, and diversity have forced Americans to partake of solitary and...

American public libraries: a long transformative moment.
September 22, 1996... One Sunday morning, as I read the Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine, I came across an article entitled "Beyond 2000 - The Jobs of the Past, the Jobs of the Future,"(1) and between sips of coffee and a few twinges of paranoia, I learned once again...

Bricks and bytes: libraries in flux.
September 22, 1996... THE LIBRARY AS MONUMENT Is a library a collection of books, or is it a building? Historically, collections have needed buildings for storage, conservation, and access. The community has had need for a building - especially if it is a national...

A distant mirror: the story of libraries in South Africa.
September 22, 1996... South Africa. The images that come to mind are bittersweet: an inauguration; the tall and slightly frail figure of Nelson Mandela, statesman and saint from Robben Island, superimposed on an election; long, straggling lines of voters patiently...

Libraries, social inequality, and the challenge of the twenty-first century.
September 22, 1996... Libraries, especially national libraries, constitute what are known in the sciences as "reduced models" of their country's social reality and ideological complexity. A few years back, Peru's national library was closed because it was discovered...

The history of the French National Library.
September 22, 1996... France, like many countries with a long history, has grown older without realizing it. The French National Library, located in a building primarily designed during the nineteenth century, had been the model of an open library, welcoming...

Problems of Russian libraries in an age of social change.
September 22, 1996... With their immense intellectual potential and comprehensive holdings of world culture, Russian libraries comprise an integral part of the international library community. They perform a mission of enlightenment at a defining moment in Russian...

Making the transitory permanent: the intellectual heritage in a digitized world of knowledge.
September 22, 1996... THE RISING TIDE OF KNOWLEDGE Scholarly texts and information have long since ceased to be identified exclusively with printed publications on paper. To an increasing extent, information is being provided and disseminated in digital form,...

Allocated parts: the story of libraries in Germany.
September 22, 1996... The library system in Germany is somewhat complicated and sophisticated. To fully understand the contemporary situation, one needs to go back in time and consider the outlines of the German constitutional tradition. In Germany, the states...

The story of libraries in India.
September 22, 1996... One of the oldest civilizations and the seventh largest country of the world, India has a kaleidoscopic variety of people and a rich cultural heritage. It has a population of approximately 800 million, of which only 50 percent could be considered...