Page 14 - 4188

12

according to the media available at the time. No one would deny that the
modes of communication are changing rapidly, perhaps as rapidly as in
Gutenberg's day, but it is misleading to construe that change as
unprecedented.

3. "All information is now available online." The absurdity of
this claim is obvious to anyone who has ever done research in archives.
Only a tiny fraction of archival material has ever been read, much less

digitized. Most judicial decisions and legislation, both state and federal,
have never appeared on the Web. The vast output of regulations and
reports by public bodies remains largely inaccessible to the citizens it
affects. Google estimates that 129,864,880 different books exist in the

world, and it claims to have digitized 15 million of them—or about 12
percent. How will it close the gap while production continues to expand
at a rate of a million new works a year? And how will information in

nonprint formats make it online en masse? Half of all films made before
1940 have vanished. What percentage of current audiovisual material
will survive, even in just a fleeting appearance on the Web? Despite the

efforts to preserve the millions of messages exchanged by means of
blogs, e-mail, and handheld devices, most of the daily flow of
information disappears. Digital texts degrade far more easily than words

printed on paper. Brewster Kahle, creator of the Internet Archive,
calculated in 1997 that the average life of a URL was 44 days. Not only
does most information not appear online, but most of the information
that once did appear has probably been lost.

4. "Libraries are obsolete." Everywhere in the country librarians
report that they have never had so many patrons. At Harvard, our
reading rooms are full. The 85 branch libraries of the New York Public

Library system are crammed with people. The libraries supply books,
videos, and other material as always, but they also are fulfilling new
functions: access to information for small businesses, help with
homework and afterschool activities for children, and employment

information for job seekers (the disappearance of want ads in printed
newspapers makes the library's online services crucial for the
unemployed). Librarians are responding to the needs of their patrons in

many new ways, notably by guiding them through the wilderness of
cyberspace to relevant and reliable digital material. Libraries never were
warehouses of books. While continuing to provide books in the future,

they will function as nerve centers for communicating digitized
information at the neighborhood level as well as on college campuses.