Touched by the Turn of a Page

The announcement last week that Google would begin digitizing the collections of several major research libraries evoked a memory from my graduate student days at the University of Pennsylvania. I was trying to find a journal in the library stacks when I happened on a 1929 book by Sterling Leonard on 18th century doctrines of English usage. The card in the pocket inside the back cover showed that it had last been checked out 12 years earlier by the great medievalist Albert C. Baugh, reason enough to give it a look.

Some years later, I sought out Leonard's book in the Stanford University library, and found that that copy also held a yellowing card with Baugh's delicate signature. It left me wondering whether every library in the world was holding a copy of Leonard's book on its shelves just so someone could happen on it every dozen years or so.

That's the vision of the ubiquitous universal library that scholars and technologists have been dreaming of since 1945, when Vannevar Bush conceived the Memex machine, a theoretical analog computer that could display all the books in the library at a scholar's desk. With the development of the World Wide Web, that came to seem plausible. In 1995, IBM ran a commercial that showed an Italian farmer proudly explaining to his granddaughter that he had just gotten his degree remotely from Indiana University, which had put its entire library online with help from IBM. A lot of people took the conversion as a done deal, and the university librarian was obliged to explain that, to date, only a fraction of the library's music collection had been digitized.

A great many scholarly and scientific journals have come online since then. But to most people, a library still means books: The Google announcement signals that the virtual library has become a reality, even if it will be a while in the making. It will take a decade to digitize 15 million books and documents from the Stanford and University of Michigan libraries, and more time than that before most other research collections are online. And although readers will have full access to books in the public domain, they won't be able to view more than a few pages of books that are still under copyright.

In the scenario of that IBM ad, the digitization of library collections seemed destined to obviate the need for paper books and brick-and-mortar libraries. As Al Gore described the vision in 1984, "I want a schoolchild in Carthage, Tenn., to come to school and be able to plug into the Library of Congress."