The battle of the book: the research library today.

In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England and France a boisterous debate, traditionally known as the "Battle of the Books" raged for many decades. The issue at stake was one of style: should we accept the "Antients" (to use Jonathan Swift's spelling) as our models and exemplars in matters literary, given their immemorial legacy of acutely expressive prose and verse, or should we rather forge a "Modern" style and manner befitting our own age and its peculiar requirements and contingencies? Charles Perrault in France in the 1695 preface to his Contes sided resolutely with the moderns, and this on moral grounds: the ancient fables taught a destructive morality. Interestingly enough, he singled out the pernicious effects of certain misogynistic classical tales on young girls' moral nature and declared: "I maintain that my fables deserve more to be related than most of the ancient tales ... if one considers them from the moral aspect."

Similar debates took place at other times and in other cultures. In ninth-century Baghdad, to name but one, poets argued strenuously over whether it was better to ape the style of those earlier desert-dwelling bards who had made the original glory of literary Arabic or to forge an idiom and manner reflective of the overly refined and courtly world in which the poets actually lived. The scurrilous wag (and great poet) Abu Nuwas went so far as to lampoon the early poets and to state that the only thing he himself sought in the ancient ruins was a good stiff drink.

Today, it seems, we are confronted with a new battle of the books. Ours, however, is not between two competing and irreconcilable types of book but between the book itself and its would-be surrogates, whether these latter take the form of CD-ROMs, video disks, digital encryptions, or indeed, formats and media not yet invented or even imagined. It is thus a battle of the book itself, rather than merely of one type of book against another. And in no institution has this battle been waged more confusingly or more protractedly over the last twenty-five years than in that supposed asylum pacis, or "haven of peace," the epithet which the great German scholar and library director Adolf von Harnack once gave the research library.

In a certain real sense, of course, this is a phony war. Books and computers work well together and have proved complementary, even symbiotic, on numerous ventures (Is publishing itself even conceivable now without automation?). But each format has come to stand for something in the minds of its adherents: if not a style, then a stance. For the book lover, it is the affection and reverence for tradition coupled with the conviction that the book as a medium is essentially unimprovable. (I should alert the reader that I share this conviction, even though I presided over the implementation of two large automated systems in libraries where I was the director.) For the advocate of automation, by contrast, tradition is itself the problem; there are bold and innovative electronic ways of building collections and of running libraries. The computer holds out the promise of resolving many of the old intractable problems: lack of space, deterioration of paper, the cumbersomeness of making bibliographic and intellectual connections using printed sources alone. The zealous computer fanatic sees the book lover as troglodytic; the staunch book lover regards the computer fanatic as barbaric. As you might suspect, both sides are right and both sides are wrong.

In developing his fable about the Library of Babel, Jorge Luis Borges noted that the library, which was a model of the universe, was infinite and unending. So, too, it often seems, are the problems underlying the history of research libraries over the past few decades. In what follows, therefore, I use a broad brush, all the while recognizing that the topics raised could each demand many pages for a full and nuanced treatment.

To understand this period of almost incessant change, two factors must be recognized. First, until quite recently, this has been an era of unprecedented budgetary crisis for libraries (and often for the universities that support them), with crunches and squeezes and freezes and clawbacks--the terminology alone is terrifying--of varying intensity affecting nearly every fiscal year since the affluent 1960s, and accompanied by staggering increases in the prices for both books and periodicals. And second, this has been the period in which, not by coincidence, automation began to be introduced swiftly--often, all too swiftly--into libraries, initially as a cost-saving strategem and then, increasingly, as an alternative to the long-accepted but expensive standard practices and services, such as original cataloging or collection-building by means of professional bibliographers, among other possible examples.

It is not easy to summarize this period dispassionately but all observers would agree, I think, that the effects of both of these factors have been far-reaching, occasionally destructive and quite often traumatic. The trouble with budget cuts is not solely that they restrict growth but also that they open up opportunities for crisis managers, who for the most part have no stake in, or love for, the libraries they administer but grasp crises as opportune moments for self-promotion or the promotion of some not-so-hidden agenda. And the trouble with automation is not that it is itself unsuitable or deleterious to research libraries but that it has furnished an irresistible pretext for sweeping change, often for its own sake rather than for the sake of the libraries or those researchers who depend on them.