`Every advance in science leaves morality in its ancient balance; and it depends still on the inscrutable soul of man whether any discovery is mainly a benefit or mainly a calamity."
The above words are those of G.K. Chesterton. At the time, in 1922, it most likely did not occur to Mr Chesterton that by the end of that century a major conservator of his own and other's works, the library, would be radically changed by the technological advances of which he spoke.
The word "library" stems from the Latin, Librarius, meaning "books". It is not surprising, then, that the library has become so synonymous with the printed media. However, the question we must ask ourselves now is not whether the library and the computer are compatible, but whether the library can survive in the 21st century without an increased employment of modern technology.
The largest problem which a library faces nowadays is its inherent unwieldy nature. The computer is the solution. Through digitisation, the extremely voluminous can be reduced to mere pits and planes on a plastic disc.
This also provides an answer to the dilemma of overuse of paper supplies. One single palm-sized disc can hold an amount of information equivalent to 330,000 sheets of single-spaced text. Not only is the computer beneficial to the planet at large, it also possesses excellent qualities for the good of the library itself. A computer disc would be a much more defensible ward for the librarian than a book. It is cheap and easily replaceable, and with a small investment each individual library could acquire its own disc copying machine. Keeping the library up to date with the latest publications could be easy as downloading them into their new "books".
We would also be spared ever having to deal with a catastrophe similar to that which occurred in Alexandria in AD 391, when their famous library, containing hundreds of thousands of handwritten manuscripts, reputedly the whole of man's collected knowledge, was destroyed in the aftermath of a civil war. Furthermore, just as computerisation will revolutionise the way in which we read our books, it will also metamorphose the way in which we find them. Cross-referencing in the library is nearly always confined to a search through an astounding volume of cards. Technology changes all of that. Type "Napoleonic Wars" in a library computer and you will be instantly instructed to do everything from finding War and Peace in the Historical Fiction section to listening to Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture in one of the libraries sound-booths.
The puritanical amongst us feel that the advent of the computer marks a departure from the library's main aim. What is the aim of a library, however, if not to be a repository of our knowledge and act as a gateway for all to the world of information? What better way is there to do this than to allow through technological advances?
It would be foolish for any of us to assume that modern technology is no more than a fashionable trend, or that the printed book will never be replaced. When the printed book was first introduced during the Renaissance, many were slow to a accept it. Federigo da Montefeltro, an Italian leader of the Renaissance said that he "would have been ashamed to own a printed book". Less than 20 years later, Martin Luther used a printing press to publish the famous Ninety-Five Theses.
We must not hold blindly onto an aged invention which has been superseded by a more practical one. The computer age is a view of things to come, which the library must grasp and embrace wholeheartedly.
Kevin O'Callaghan is a pupil of St Mary's Secondary School, Moyderwell, Tralee, Co Kerry
