NOTE: I've been spending the last couple of weeks transferring all 300 or so My Word's Worth columns to my own server, and changing the links to it on all my other pages (at least I sincerely hope I caught them all). The complete archive is now available at http://marylaine.com/myword/archive.html.
In the process, I re-discovered some columns I wrote long ago that I believe are still true and relevant to libraries. Here's one of them, written in 1995, and updated just a bit:
HARD COPY
by Marylaine Block
I love the net. I like browsing and finding things on it; I like reading people's ideas on it. But there's an ephemeral quality to the stuff on the net. Instant access has a bias in favor of the new. Last in first out reduces the value of the FIRST IN; eventually, of course, FIRST IN may get dumped altogether to make way for newer information.
Despite the best efforts of the digital preservationists and the Internet Archive, I don't think that the columns and articles I've published on the net will still be there 185 years from now, or any other of today's articles published solely on the net. But in my own library, I can browse in magazines written over the past 185 years, and read a history that was current events for their original readers. Most of them did not realize they were drifting into the War of 1812; those who did, just like today's war planners, could not be certain how it would come out.
If I was going to teach history, I'd send the kids to these magazines. After all, the hardest thing about teaching history to kids is that things that happened and people who lived before they were born aren't real to them. Kids see history as something that's finished, done with.
They don't see that, just like the people featured in those old dead magazines, they too are living in the middle of history, a history they know only bits and pieces of; they too don't know how it's going to come out. They don't know what's going to happen in Bosnia or Iraq, or if Israel and the Palestinians will ever work things out. They don't know whether the next presidential election will change our government forever, and, if it does, how that might knock their plans for their own lives off course.
I would send students to the old magazines, let them find an event that interested them, and set them loose to find out how the story ended, and how it changed people's lives.
Back in the days when I'd go down to the basement to shift periodicals, my colleagues in the library knew they'd have to come hunting for me. They knew I couldn't resist opening some of the volumes I was hefting, and that before long, I'd be lost in the past.
I'd start reading an 1835 account of the building of the Cumberland Road, and the congressional discussion of who gets to pay for the upkeep of it. Some senators argued that if the Federal government built it, the Federal government should pay to maintain it. It wouldn't be fair to make the states raise their taxes to pay for it, now, would it?
Some things really don't change much over time.
Like a 1931 Literary Digest article about how, with international air travel becoming a commonplace, germs could travel throughout the world undetected.
Or an 1899 North American Review article titled "The Logic of Our Position in Cuba," which begins, simply and succinctly, with the statement: "We want Cuba...Its annexation will be for its benefit, our benefit, and that of the world at large."
Opening up those old magazines, I'd read about Congress creating things like the Post Office that I kind of thought had always existed. Mail delivery is so much one of those assumptions we make about the way the world operates that it's hard to imagine a world in which the Post Office has not yet been founded.
Another assumption we make is that we can move to a city in the middle of a desert and nonetheless expect to take a daily shower. A 1909 National Geographic article talks about the building of the immense irrigation and dam projects that made it possible for Phoenix residents to bathe. "Future writers," National Geographic intones, "will record the irrigation movement as an epoch in our history."
Fat chance. The great American tragedy is that we do not remember our history. (The tragedy of the rest of the world is that it can't forget a single moment or grievance of its history, but that's a column for another day.) This, it seems to me, is why you see this "Sagebrush Rebellion." In a West that could not exist if the federal government hadn't removed Indians from their land, built railroads, roads and airports, given land to settlers and railroads, and brought in water by extreme feats of engineering, Westerners are screaming to get the government off their backs. Oh, please.
Of course those magazines provided casual reading for their audience, too, and many of the short stories and serialized novels came from some of the best writers of their times -- Mark Twain, Aldous Huxley, William Faulkner, Louisa May Alcott, Walt Whitman, and Edna St. Vincent Millay (first published at the age of 10 in St. Nicholas Magazine). The lithographs and woodcuts and illustrations might be by Winslow Homer or Howard Pyle or Ben Shahn, while the photographs might be by Matthew Brady or Edward Steichen.
These eminently disposable magazines, casual reading for the middle class, contain our culture as well as our history.
And that's why, when I used to head down the basement to shift the periodicals, I always told my colleagues to rescue me -- but not to be in too big a hurry about it.
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COOL QUOTE:
I received the fundamentals of my education in school, but that was not enough. My real education, the superstructure, the details, the true architecture, I got out of the public library. For an impoverished child whose family could not afford to buy books, the library was the open door to wonder and achievement, and I can never be sufficiently grateful that I had the wit to charge through that door and make the most of it.
“Now, when I read constantly about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that the door is closing and that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.
Isaac Asimov in his 1994 autobiography, I, Asimov.
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You are welcome to copy and forward 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, 1999-2004.
[Publishers may license the content for a reasonable fee.]
Please do NOT copy and post my articles to your own web sites, however. Instead, please copy a brief excerpt and link to my site for the remainder of the article.
