by James A. Gollata

Keynote Address for the Wisconsin Association of Academic Librarians Annual Conference. Presented at opening luncheon on Wednesday, 17 April 2002

I have chosen as my title for this talk, "Keepers of the Flame in a Brave New World: Academic Librarians in the 21st Century," but before we can assess where we are as academic librarians and where we are going in this century, it will perhaps behoove us to examine the origins of this image, and to further walk ourselves through the history of academic librarianship from its genesis to the present, and then perhaps into the future, if we can indeed be so prescient.

I have often heard or read of the image of the academic library as "the heart of the institution" and the academic librarian as "the keeper of the flame." I have often used this as a general quotation by way of introduction in various meetings and assemblies when referring to the library, with incredibly various responses from faculty, staff, and administrators. But let us go back to the very beginning, and examine the origin of the image, perhaps taking a few liberties along the way.

In the beginning, was the word, it has been said. And who was charged with carrying on that word? Besides the priests and other religious devotees, ultimately, it was the librarians. To mix our mythologies, consider the story of the Titan Prometheus, suffering creature that he became. Taking pity on the poor mortals, who fumbled in the dark without heat or light, he stole from heaven and gave them the power of fire: FIRE -- which warmed these mortals and illuminated their environment and their minds. For fire is knowledge; light is understanding. And fire and light are powerful. When Oedipus Rex receives light (in another story from the Greeks) for example, -- this light being the knowledge of what he has done (he's been very busy breaking various laws) -- he goes blind. This thing called knowledge is indeed a very dangerous thing, this light needs to be handled carefully. And what does the generous Prometheus (who gave us THE WORD) receive for his pains in helping mortals achieve light, receive flame, attain knowledge? The jealous, elitist god Zeus sees that he is chained to a rock, where a vulture daily comes to peck out his liver. It's simply not enough that the liver grows back each night. Prometheus pays a large price, indeed.

We move ahead in time. With this new light, with this knowledge and the power to create, come poetry and drama and song, which, after many years of oral tradition, are put down for the future. The thoughts of Plato, the plays of Aeschylus (including Prometheus Bound) the business dealings of Sumerians and Assyrians and Babylonians, the narrations of epics and the recounting of mythologies, all are "written down" in some form, whether marked on papyrus, or scratched into wet clay, or carved onto wood or stained onto rice paper, and are eventually printed in various forms and formats, over centuries from China to Germany to beyond to now.

Great libraries appear. Some disappear -- like that at Alexandria, perishing in an unfriendly flame, gone like Atlantis, gone into the mists and mythology of time, much written about and rued and regretted and even mythologized, but now finally
re-appeared, reincarnated in a new form. Always, during all this time, there was and is a need for the keepers of the flame, the individuals who will organize and preserve and make accessible the ever-growing knowledge set down by these mortals who insist on creating more and more knowledge.

More and more knowledge and more and more sophistication lead to the need for organization in these endeavors, and in the Middle Ages the university springs up in Europe, particularly in Germany, east of Prometheus and west of Atlantis. The
university spreads westward, and great institutions are created: the Sorbonne, Oxford, Cambridge, eventually Harvard and Yale, and ultimately the many public and private universities and colleges in Wisconsin.

What do all of these institutions have in common? Besides the teaching of various disciplines to students, whether by the lecture method, or "reading" for exams, with tutoring (as in England), or independent study, whether as in a college or university, all of these needs must have a library. Gutenberg has arrived, and THE BOOK has come into supremacy. And who is to be certain of the preservation and availability of THE BOOK, and its periodic friend, the journal? The librarian. And, again, in this case, more specifically, the academic librarian. The keeper of the flame.

In the 19th century, British writer Thomas Carlyle wrote "The true university these days is a collection of books." And he was, we would perhaps like to think, correct, at least for that day.

C.P. Snow, British novelist and essayist, produced, in 1959, back when books were still predominant, a book entitled The Two Cultures, based on his "Rede Lecture" (spelled R E D E), and given at Cambridge. In it he expounded on the differences between the "literary intellectuals" and the scientists, and how they seemed to not be able to understand or communicate with each other. He recounts an anecdote in which A.L. Smith, an Oxford don, is dining at Cambridge. Smith attempts conversation with two men, one on either side of him. Neither does anything but grunt. "Then," Snow reports, "rather to his surprise, one looked at the other and said, 'Do you know what he's talking about?' 'I haven't the least idea.' At this, even Smith was getting out of his depth. But the President, acting as a social emollient, put him at his ease by saying, 'Oh, those are mathematicians! We never talk to THEM.'" Snow tells this story as a not so rare example of the way in which the humanities and the sciences were not only opposites but speaking entirely different languages. In The Two Cultures, A Second Look, he continued his monologue on the dichotomy, defending his earlier work from the criticism that had ensued, and ended: "Changes in education are not going to produce miracles...With good fortune, however, we can educate a large proportion of our better minds so that they are not ignorant of imaginative experience, both in the arts and in science, nor ignorant either of the endowments of applied science, of the remedial suffering of most of their fellow humans, and of the responsibilities which, once they are seen, cannot be denied." Little did he know what was to come. Little did anyone know.

The situation, of course, has changed immensely and immeasurably since Snow's time, and the humanities and sciences, and academics and technicians, have had no choice but to work together. The ivory tower is now made of silicon. We have
moved from the world of the illuminated manuscript and the printed book to the universe of the pixel and the illuminated screen. Europeans immigrated here by way of ELLIS ISLAND. Our on-line catalogs migrated by way of ELLIS 2000. The
immigrants, for the most part, were VOYAGERS; many of us now use a system entitled VOYAGER, although, as we are often peering through a window at what we seek and even covet, we might feel more like VOYEURS.

Of course there have been scoffers. English psychologist Havelock Ellis (there's that "ELLIS" again) has been quoted as saying: "What we call progress is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance." Pablo Picasso reportedly asked:
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." (To verify this quotation, one could look it up on any number of Picasso websites.) The Lead Pencil Club, with Henry David Thoreau named as an honorary founder, emerged a few years ago. Its intent was, as in Sven Birkarts admonition in The Gutenberg Elegies, to "refuse" technology as much as possible, and to use lead pencils (which, of course, use graphite, not lead). I sent in my membership fee to this society, out of curiosity more than anything, and received a certificate with my name -- in pencil, of course, and misspelled -- and never heard from them again.

Other critics recommend that we go back in our minds, in order to achieve a literary peace within. Billy Collins, current U.S. Poet Laureate, writes: "Our supersonic digital age demands rapidity. And, understandably, students want colleges to speed them toward their future goals. But the true tempo of education, and the best thing about any college, is a slowing down of things to an earlier, more human, pulse -- the leisurely pace of deliberation. Education may be the way to slow back down from the computer to the television, to the newspaper, to the essay, to the novel and, finally, to poetry."

There are other critics, those who don't quite object to technology, but who don't much care for some of the jargon or word-changes that occur because of it. Anu Garg, editor of the online daily magazine, "A Word A Day," (which often uses more than one word, by the way), defines the word: "Retronym (RE-truh-nim): An adjective-noun pairing generated by a change in the meaning of the noun, usually because of advances in technology." He writes: "When I grew up, there were only
Coke, turf and mail. Nowadays, Diet Coke, new Coke, artificial turf, and email have spawned the retronyms real Coke, Classic Coke, natural turf, and snailmail or hardmail. Once there were simply movies. Then movies began to talk, necessitating the retronym silent movies. Then came color movies and the contrasting term black-and-white movies. Once there was television. Along came color television and the retronym black-and-white television. Then came cable television and the retronym on-air television. And here are some other retronyms I pray will never come to pass -- graffitiless wall...teacher-staffed school, monogamous couple...double-parent family...[and]... nonelectronic book."

Although I earlier invoked the image of the contemporary voyeur, I maintain that we have ALWAYS been voyeurs, librarians and library patrons alike. Whether we have peered into printed periodical indexes or card catalogs or at microfiche or
microfilm or into computer screens, even with full-text, or books, or journals, we are voyeurs. In the words of Alfred Korzybski, "The map is not the territory," and I would add that, just as justly, information is not necessarily knowledge. Kissing
a photograph is not the same as kissing the person. "Reading," according to one writer, "is a socially accepted form of hallucination," and reading, for facts or for pleasure, whether short-term reading or sustained reading, does not produce
knowledge until the human mind has dealt with the information it has taken in and worked with it in tandem with other information and life experience -- to make it knowledge. "Information" isn't guaranteed as "knowledge" any more than
"graduated" is necessarily "educated." It is the duty of the college and university to provide the means and opportunity, in the liberal arts tradition, not of training for a livelihood, but for attempting to teach how to live one's life after beginning to earn a livelihood -- To provide the mental tools and mindset for lifelong learning, both in one's profession or vocation and also in one's life as a human being. -- To provide the opportunity to make a positive difference in both the physical world and the world of the mind, beginning simply by KNOWING the difference, and then by knowing enough to care.

The job and duty of the academic librarian is to make available the physical and potentially mental materials for creating knowledge -- to keep the flame alive. The duty remains the same, but the job has changed considerably during recent years, at least in terms of what we call the "delivery" of all of this "information." Does the medium of the message matter? or is it most important that we keep the flame alive, no matter in what material manner?

Even my cardiologist knows! During a treadmill stress test last fall on the third floor of the local hospital in a cold room as I walked superfast on the endless rubber road while being monitored by way of more than a handful of suction-cupped wires leading from me to a computerized machine (talk about a metaphor) my cardiologist commented on the incredible changes that had occurred in academic libraries in the last ten years. He expounded on the changes he had seen and how amazed he was by them all. He asked questions about the current status of the profession and about the most recent developments in academic libraries, and I did my best to answer as I attempted to keep from shooting off the back of the treadmill. A good metaphor for trying to keep current, yes, but I was more impressed with my doctor's knowledge of the current status of academic libraries. Even my cardiologist knows!

Many years ago at a dinner party, Harold Ross, founder and editor of The New Yorker magazine, was being bored to death by an ingenue who kept chattering on and on and on incessantly. Eventually he turned, looked at her, and asked: "Madame, have you NO unexpressed thoughts?" This is like THE INTERNET. Every worthy and crackpot and thinker-out-loud and non-thinker and scholar and clown and sage can join in the dinner party of the community of the Internet. And they can bring anything to the table that occurs to them. Sorting out that chatter, that undeciphered space noise, is one of the jobs of the academic librarian. Helping the scholar, the student, the patron, navigate among the items of space junk and the asteroids and medieval cartographers' dragons of the unknown is the charge that the academic librarian must embrace, and more valiantly than ever before.

But to what extent and at what cost?

In the 1950s Beat Poet Allen Ginsberg published the long bravura piece entitled Howl, which begins:

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machin-
ery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating jazz...."

This lament can easily be translated in terms of academic librarianship, thusly:

"I saw the best librarians of my generation transformed by
automation, book-starved maniacal naked,
whisking themselves through the virtual streets at midnight
looking for a quick fix,
angelheaded former librarians burning for the post-modern heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the computers
of night,
who without poverty or tatters yet hollow-eyed and high sat
up keystroking in the supernatural light of
virtual offices floating across the laptops of cities
contemplating everything but jazz...."

I offer this image mainly to illustrate that many librarians have vanished from view, transformed by demand or voluntarily through Frankensteinian means into creatures with titles like: Assistant Provost for Technology, or Vice President for Virtual Education, or the Comptroller of Cybernetics, or even Associate Chancellor for "the Liberal Artist Formerly Known as PRINT."

The people in the humanities didn't speak to the scientists in C.P. Snow's day, the liberal arts had nothing to say to technology, or vice versa, and now the two cultures have merged into one. "Where are the Snows of yesteryear?" The high priests produce "magic from machines" and "learning via logarithms," and there is no turning back. There cannot be, and there shouldn't be.

This is where we are. Where are we going?

Predictions and Observations:

Prediction 1. The printed word will endure. My own imaginary bumper sticker proclaims: "They can have my books when they pry them from my cold, dead fingers." I am neither the first nor the last to point out the plethora of printed books and the quantum multiplication of used and new bookstores in the past decade. Bookstores have become more user-friendly, and in many ways, better-stocked. There was a time when it was nearly impossible to have a book ordered by a bookstore. The hound-eyed gatekeeper-from-hell clerk or owner would smugly explain that it would be necessary for them to order ten copies of a title in order to accommodate your puny request, and that this they could not afford to do. Now special orders are "de rigueur." There was a time when even just a little more than casual browsing was forbidden. I remember seeing a cartoon, during the heyday of the Evelyn Wood programs, with an irate clerk declaring to a potential customer with an open book in his hands: "You're not browsing, you're one of those speed readers." One could almost envision a sign that said: "You browsed it, you bought it." And one could even hear: "You gonna buy something, or what? Whadya think this is, the library?" A few years ago an article entitled: "Is Barnes & Noble the New Academic Library?" was published in Library Journal. Despite the admonition of one writer that Barnes & Noble is "more barn than noble," I should like to offer the opinion that, although I do like to patronize the locals and the independents, Barnes & Noble, and Borders, and even other chain bookstores, aren't really the enemy. At least not the enemy of libraries. I once asked a visiting old timer in the Eldershostel program on my campus, who I happened to know had patronized a local tavern the evening before, how he had liked the establishment. He replied that there was no such thing as a bad bar. I would like to adapt his pronouncement to the idea that, with few exceptions, there is no such thing as a bad bookstore. Barnes & Noble, then, isn't the enemy. But it isn't an academic library, either. In answer to the question, "Is Barnes & Noble the New Academic Library?" I would reply, "No, but it IS the new academic study hall." And a manic one at that. Being there is like lounging inside Books In Print, complete with music and coffee and people passing by in conversation and shouting into their cell phones and spoiled and manic kids running around unsupervised, and without any library indexes or catalogs or judicious selection. And despite the common belief that most of the clerks in Barnes & Noble are
M.A.s in Library Science waiting for the right position, or ANY library position, the bookstore is not a library and cannot take the place of a library. There is perhaps very little discernible academic distinction or direction in an environment in which one "studies" among great works such as The Dialogues Of Plato, The Poetry Of Emily Dickinson, and Ventriloquism For Dummies. In the movie "You've Got Mail," about the expansion of a large bookstore chain, among a few other things,
including an improbable love story, the Tom Hanks character refers to the customers during a meeting as "readers." His "all-business" father responds: "Don't romanticize them, son." We can romanticize the bookstores as much as we like, and I do, but let's not "library-ize" them. Bookstores will endure, as bookstores. And the printed word will endure, AS the printed word.

Prediction 2. As new developments occur, future "old" methodologies and tools (some not yet invented) will be abandoned and will sometimes disappear on their own. Technologies come and go, and some literally disappear. Paper yellows and dissolves, microfilm (once the answer to everything!) loses its images (remember the pronounced salvation of silver halide?) but no matter, since microfilm has been recently abandoned in great quantities. Un-subscribed. Discarded.
Technologies come and go. Betamax has gone the way of 8-track, into that great country and western pickup truck in the sky called obsolescence. CD-ROM, once "the bee's knees" and "the cat's pajamas," will, with some exceptions, soon go the way of expressions like "the bee's knees" and "the cat's pajamas." And the virtual world is no exception. Where we once were worried, in what now seems like such simple times, about the terror of "book mold" in our collections, a new high alert declares that there is, according to the Chronicle of Of Higher Education Daily News of just last Wednesday (!) a new phenomenon called "link rot" -- defined as "hyperlinks to Web pages that have moved or ceased to exist." Moved or ceased to exist! Another way of saying: "Disappeared." The news continues that the "rate of link rot is similar to that of the decay of radioactive substances. The links in the three courses [studied] had a half-life of 55 months." This has enormous ramifications for online courses, according to investigators, and they recommend that "scholarly societies...consider compiling archives of the
best online material...." It's just a matter of time before "link rot" invades our libraries. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Prediction 3. New technologies will change the identification of patrons. I recently was reading a newspaper advertisement for the adoption of dogs and cats from an animal rescue agency. Why I was reading it, I have no idea. The ad stated: "All of our animals have been neutered or spayed, and microchipped." Microchipped! When critters are microchipped, who is next? PEOPLE are next. Whether with DNA screening or visual scanning or thumbprint or handscan, materials will circulate (if they continue to circulate at all) through the use of a computer-read scanning of our bodies or parts of our bodies.

Prediction 4. Perhaps a more whimsical prediction, perhaps not. New technologies will change our location of physical materials in the library. When students and faculty head out to the stacks (since there will still be stacks) the patron will have activated the book or other material sought, and it will BEEP to acknowledge its location. It may also FLASH. It may also come off the shelf and hover toward the patron.

Prediction 5. People will continue to read the works of Nostradamus.

Prediction 6. Catalog searches and reference transactions with computerized indexers and librarians will occur orally, just as word processing can now be done. A student need only ask "Do you have a copy of Fahrenheit 451?" or
"Where can I get a hologram of the old movie Soylent Green?" or "Where can I find information on sex with clones?" to receive an oral answer in the voice of preference: whether male, female, and in which language and accent one would prefer.

Prediction 7. All academic library service will be available online at all times. Materials will be charged for later delivery, if the patron so desires, and reference questions will be asked and answered, at all hours of the day and night. The virtual library will never close. This service will occur 52/12, and using the egregiously over-used term 24/7 will be cause for dismissal or expulsion, depending on whether you are staff or student.

Prediction 8. Digitization will become pervasively ubiquitous, and rhythmically alliterative tongue twisters will dominate library jargon. Those who cannot say "digitization" three times in a row successfully will have their M.A.s electronically ripped from their academic records. Digitization will for a long time serve as a form of savior of ancient and newer records, and will continue indefinitely. In an incredible image of the blending of the ancient world and the world of today, which perhaps will bring all this together in metaphoric synthesis (and indeed, I never "met a phor" I didn't like) this was announced last fall: "Today, the field of Assyriology is going high-tech. And not a minute too soon. The Cuneiform Digital
Library Initiative, a joint venture of the University of California at Los Angeles and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, in Berlin, will provide scholars with access to an enormous database of cuneiform inscriptions. With more than
200,000 tablets scattered throughout museums in several countries (not counting the steady flow of black-market items trickling out of Iraq and onto eBay), the world's 400 professional Assyriologists have been struggling to keep from being buried alive by primary documents. The online library promises to be the single-largest, most organized, and best cataloged repository of cuneiform inscriptions in the world...." I couldn't have created a better image than this. And if we don't see both the appropriateness and utility of this project, AND its irony, it's too late for us.

Prediction 9. Academic librarians will be even more proactive than they have ALWAYS been, they will be seen as even more important than they were in simpler times in their roles as keepers of the flame, and they will be the very first of the academics to stop using the term "proactive."

These are complicated times. But these are simple times, too. Simpler than we think. One cannot totally predict the future. The future has always been the big frightening gollywog around the corner. It's always there, always ready, but not to pounce-- rather to slide in, and generally with plenty of announcement. What, indeed, was the big announced mystery of last year, the big invention to beat all inventions and change the world as we know it? It turned out to be a sideways scooter called "Segway," and it won't be ready for general public purchase for some time. Major inventions and developments don't happen overnight, dropped into our libraries with a sickening and final thud. They develop over time, and there is usually plenty of warning and the opportunity to work with the changes, and the hope to help make them positive. It is true that some things change seemingly on a daily basis, and that our interfaces and upgrades and codings and linkages and accesses transform and regrow overnight like the liver of Prometheus. But the main inventions, the really big challenges, don't come along that frequently. Our continuing job is to be alert and creative and to incorporate those developments which best serve our patrons, our students and faculty.

And it's important as well to keep sight of our goals and objectives as we serve our patrons. I read some time ago the story of the president of the Avis car rental agency (I believe it was), who was concerned, especially in that his company wasn't "Number 1," and believed that the company had lost direction. He felt that the company was too concerned with many distracting activities that were not part of the business, and that the corporation was wandering off into business areas that had nothing to do with its reason for being. To remind himself of the purpose for and goal of the company (other than making money), he had a sign made for his desk that read: WE RENT CARS. He looked at the sign every day, and several times a day. He locked in to the goal, and jettisoned a number of activities in the company that had nothing to do with that purpose and goal, and things improved. They improved a great deal.

I found myself rather inspired by that story, and thought of all the distractions from library goals that presented themselves every day. I had a sign made for my desk, and read it every day, several times a day. A year went by, but unfortunately there had been no improvement in all the demands on my time and in the direction that I thought we should be going. It seemed that everything and everyone conspired to divert me from my goals and the specific goal of the library. Then, one morning, I had an epiphany. After I read that sign for the first time that day, I said to myself: "Wait a minute. We don't rent cars!" After that morning things really changed, and all for the better.

My point is, of course, that it's great to remember the goal and the objective and the mission, and especially good to refer to it often and keep your eye on the reason why you are where you are. Its paramount that you know the history of how you arrived at where you are, and the reasons for where you are, and the real goal of your enterprise. Beyond all of the developing technology and the new tools and the new terms and procedures to learn and the mutability of work and life and the unknowability of the future in the library world, be certain that you UNDERSTAND who your clientele are: the students, the faculty. WE SERVE PATRONS.

We have NOTHING to fear but NOTHING itself. OBLIVION, not PROGRESS, is the enemy, and in words from Desiderata, "Whether or not it is clear to you, the universe is unfolding as it should."

We have all joined the new priesthood of technicians, it seems. We needn't be the inventors or the hardware or software specialists, but we certainly can learn to work as best we can with developments as they occur. We can embrace, rather than reject. And we can continue to embrace, as well, the history of the word, and specifically the printed word. It will endure. And WE will endure, in whatever medium. And while preserving the past, we can be creative within this brave new world, and we can continue, ALWAYS -- in whatever manner necessary -- to keep the flame.

-- James A. Gollata is the Director of Miller Memorial Library at the University of Wisconsin-Richland