Boston’s state legislators are taking a play from the book of Vietnam. They decided in order to save the Boston Public Library, they’d have to destroy it.
First, they allowed the institution’s state funding to shrink from $8.9 million in FY 2009 to $2.4 million in FY 2011. The funding cuts forced the library into plans to lay off workers and shut four libraries. In response, our Boston delegation filed legislation that would eliminate all state funding if library officials carried out the plan they were forced to put in place because of the cuts these same legislators originally imposed. The plan is in the state Senate right now.
Our legislators’ threats imply that they know more about running a library than do library trustees and staff, a doubtful proposition. They seem to be stuck in the Viet Nam era on that point too—that libraries are the same as they used to be.
As far as I know, the trustees and staff have not faced in detail the consequences of losing all the funding. But I can see one likely outcome. The punishment could force the library out of the 1960s model of librarians, buildings, shelves and books into the 2020-era faster than the institution would prefer to go. It could mean plunging the library into digitization faster than the public might want.
The 2020-era has already begun at the BPL, just as it has at libraries around the world.
It’s somewhat equivalent to the time we stopped standing in line for bank tellers and started plugging a piece of plastic into a slot to deposit or withdraw money. Some people bemoaned the loss of face-to-face contact. But others soon saw the visit to the ATM as time saver and a way to avoid rotating tellers with whom one had no relationship anyway.
But the change in libraries is more profound than the change to ATMs. It starts in the Boston Public Library’s Digital Imaging Department, a place that didn’t exist five years ago. The principles here start with the idea that information comes in many forms. Whatever form it takes, the information should be available to all in a format easy to retrieve and use. Finally, it should be free to the user.
To understand what was happening I went over to Copley to meet production manager Thomas Blake, a professional photographer with a degree in library science. His department occupies two medium-sized rooms in the interstices where the old building meets the new on the second floor. “There are 20 million objects in this building,” he said. “We’re going to digitize everything.”
Well, not yet everything. Books under copyright still aren’t in the digitizing pile, although e-books have shown it can be done. But Blake’s staff of three full-time and two part-time “scribes” have been hard at work with specialized cameras digitizing death masks, photos, posters, John and Abigail Adams’s letters, 20,000 books whose copyright has run out and one of the extant copies of Shakespeare’s First Folio. At $234,000 for the equipment and under $200,000 to run the department since 2007, it is a bargain compared to buying books and maintaining buildings.
Google is digitizing books too. Blake said that the BPL, in partnership with the non-profit Internet Archive, does the work for about a quarter of Google’s cost. When Google does the copying, it might be free for libraries, but the restrictions on use were unacceptable to the BPL, he said. In a Google-digitized book, for example, you can’t cut and paste into your own document. In a BPL-digitized book, you can print the entire book.
This is how the new BPL works for your fourth-grader. For a report on Paul Revere, she sits down at the family computer, gets on the BPL’s web site and finds 79 online texts, many with pictures, about the patriot. If these aren’t enough, she can search the catalogue and order more materials to be delivered to a branch library or the central library the next day.
Let’s say your neighbor is researching an incident that took place in your neighborhood in the 1940s. Now, he must go to Copley’s newspaper department, search their computers for the dates, submit slips to the librarian for microfilm or microfiche, wait for them to be delivered and then operate the clunky machines on which he can read them.
After the newspaper collection is digitized, he could find the same articles in city and neighborhood newspapers through an online search at his home computer.
These changes will probably mean that libraries will be able to operate in smaller buildings, with fewer librarians, little on-site storage and less equipment. More buildings are likely to go away.
Knowing that change is difficult for people, especially Boston people, I imagine these changes will be accompanied by anxiety, complaints and the usual accusations that it’s being done without public input.
The public will be right about one thing. If we’re all sitting in our homes doing our research and reading, and the libraries are closing because the funding has been cut, we’ll lose their function as community builders.
Books will not disappear, but digitization will come. We can let the librarians figure out digitization. Our task as Bostonians will be to figure out how to maintain the sense of community as libraries change.