One of the unintended side-effects of our technologies is the way they eat up library budgets and displace our original priorities. In the early days, especially, I suspect a lot of us thought that there'd be a major one-time expense, buying the workstations and doing the wiring, and that from then on, the budget would go back to normal. I don't think any of us foresaw the rate of change, the speed with which state-of-the-art would become obsolete.
We had to update operating systems repeatedly just within an eight-year period. During that same time we had to update browsers repeatedly to keep up with the introduction of Java and advanced audiovisual systems, and we had to update word processing and spreadsheet programs. As speed of download became a critical issue, we had to move from modems to high-speed connections. I'm sure most of us didn't anticipate the security problems that would require us to buy and continually update anti-virus software and programs like Fortres for every single machine, to keep outsiders from rewriting the scripts for our public computers.
Many of us, when we began introducing public computers, got by with two or three of them; how many of us anticipated that eight years later we would have twenty or thirty public computers and still have users complaining that there weren't enough? I don't think many of us expected our traditional indexes to become expensive full-text databases, or that widespread user expectation that they could just look something up online and print it out would require us to buy more and more of those databases.
How many of us understood at the outset that people would want to print out what they saw, and how much it would cost us to buy (and continually upgrade) the printers, set up networks, buy paper and expensive cartridges?
How many of us realized that we would need to hire full-time techies to make sure our computers and networks stayed up and running?
And those are just the obvious, visible costs.
Some administrators don't understand even now the time costs, for librarians, who have to keep running just to stay in place, learning each new operating system and database, and then relearning them as they change -- and that's not even counting the overwhelming job of keeping up with new, important resources on the ever-changing Internet.
Administrators may not realize how much time librarians now have to spend simply teaching individual users how to use the machines and databases, or how much time they spend troubleshooting equipment problems. Librarians who were trained to be information experts suddenly had no choice but to become good tinkerers with the machinery or watch customers stalk away in disgust. Challenging as that can be when the machines are right there in front of them, librarians also have to field questions from users at home wanting to know why they can't connect to library databases.
I don't think most of us understood the training costs for libraries that provide librarians with time and money to attend meetings and workshops, and time to read the professional literature, or what it would cost to offer workshops and training brochure and other how-to information to users. (Of course, in some libraries, and many schools, that's not an issue because teachers and librarians are expected to learn everything on their own in their spare time.)
And I doubt if any of us anticipated the kind of resentment that can creep in, as the need for new computers, new programs, new connections, new technical support staff, gradually eats away at our budgets, using money that might otherwise have gone for books and periodicals, for more librarians and higher salaries. The techno-economic imperative is a lot like Audrey, in Little Shop of Horrors, getting bigger all the time and a lot harder to resist when it says "Feed me."
* * * * *
COOL QUOTE
Interactivity's key premise is that, at long last, I get to direct the action… I'm told I'll soon be able to sit in my living room and press a button routing the movie/book/CD/experience-mechanism in the direction I want it to go…
Which gets me to one of my problems with the interactive future: When I'm finally free to direct where everything goes, I'll never go anywhere I don't intend. In fact, I'll never learn anything new, just keep recycling a few of my favorite things…
Nor do I need to have a "conversation" with Thoreau in which I determine what's interesting and get appropriate text bytes in response. If it took him two years to live the book, nine years to write it, and six drafts to get it right, I can at least shut up and let him determine what's interesting.
George Felton. "A Read-Only Man in an Interactive Age." In Minutes of the Lead Pencil Club, Pushcart Press, 1996.
* * * * *
You are welcome to copy and distribute or e-mail any of my own articles for noncommercial purposes (but not those by my guest writers) as long as you retain this copyright statement:
Ex Libris: an E-Zine for Librarians and Other Information Junkies.
http://marylaine.com/exlibris/
Copyright, Marylaine Block, 1999-2001.
[Publishers may license the content for a reasonable fee.]
