Multimedia to the People.(multimedia in libraries)

Pat Ensor sees plenty of room for multimedia enticements alongside traditional library offerings

Imagine Dr. Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech delivered just as text. Reading it and listening to it are entirely different experiences; watching it is something else again. Imagine Richard Nixon's fate--and the historical picture of him--without the release of the infamous tapes. We can read transcripts, but hearing all those expletives that were deleted is pretty much the province of historians now. Imagine Elvis Presley imitating Jackie Wilson imitating him, singing "Don't Be Cruel." Peter Guralnick describes this in his biography of Elvis, but you can hear it on an album called The Million Dollar Quartet, and it's funny and enlightening.

All of the above examples are typical of the experiences libraries too frequently fail to offer the populations they serve. Perhaps there were some logistical and/or financial factors that somewhat excused this situation in the past--but that has all changed with the advent of the increasingly ubiquitous World Wide Web. It has opened the path to the combination of sound, text, and images (moving and still) in ways that have never before been possible, especially when one considers the factor of wide distribution on a commonly available computing platform. Yet the majority of libraries still use a limited "palette" to convey information, and we hobble web access by not allowing or making unnecessarily difficult the use of a lot of …