| 1 | Some 200 years ago, when Thomas Jefferson built an 'academical village' in the | |
| 2 | rolling greenery of his native Virginia, he put a white-porticoed temple at its centre and | |
| 3 | filled it with books.The library's prominence proclaimed his revolutionary faith in learning | |
| 4 | and truth. In today's University of Virginia, a new revolution can be glimpsed.A modem | |
| 5 | and password let both staff and students study thousands of volumes of literary, historical | |
| 6 | and philosophical works as well as reference texts, bibliographies and even the manuscript | |
| 7 | papers of Jefferson himself. The texts are in a state-of-the-art database system; the readers | |
| 8 | Bare wherever they want to be. | |
| 9 | The explosion of available electronic text may be the greatest change in learning | |
| 10 | since collections of books displaced oral traditions of storytelling. As such, it might seem to | |
| 11 | spell the end of the library. A world's worth of huge, digitized, downloadable, searchable | |
| 12 | databases will eventually be available anywhere you can get a dialing tone. All the | |
| 13 | contents of all the libraries, say some visionaries, will be everywhere. And the library itself | |
| 14 | will be nowhere. | |
| 15 | As visions go, this is short-sighted. Just as there are storytellers in an age of reading, | |
| 16 | there will be libraries in the electronic world. Old traditions will live on, old paper will be | |
| 17 | stored until it rots. The thoughtful and the quirky will still want to convene in reading | |
| 18 | rooms. But libraries should not just be pleasant relics. They should have an active role as | |
| 19 | places to get information - particularly for those unable to afford computers, modems and | |
| 20 | the rest. There are several ways of trying to prevent the electronic age from widening the | |
| 21 | gap between the haves and the have-nots. Public libraries offer one of the better ones. | |
| 22 | After all, forcing information providers to make their wares freely available to | |
| 23 | everyone would give them no incentive to put anything at all on to the network. The cables | |
| 24 | that bring pay-per-view films into the house will bring pay-per-view learning, too. And | |
| 25 | some people will not be able to afford to pay. For these people, a public library system | |
| 26 | should remain a basic resource for learning. It cannot provide access to everything; but it | |
| 27 | can provide access to a lot. | |
| 28 | The paradoxical point about this computerized world is that if access is not to be | |
| 29 | rationed by price, then another bottleneck is required: the need to go somewhere. People | |
| 30 | who want information badly enough to go out of their way for it should be able to get | |
| 31 | more free material than those willing only to click a switch at home. The journey is, in | |
| 32 | effect, a simple and workable means test - as it has always been. Copyright holders have | |
| 33 | been willing to have their books available in public libraries, provided that nobody can | |
| 34 | copy them in their entirety.Walking to a library and being ready to wait to use a library | |
| 35 | book were, they thought, so inconvenient th at those who could afford to, would still buy | |
| 36 | their wares. So it should be with information on line. | |
| 37 | It will not be possible to let people consult every part of the information network for | |
| 38 | free. Libraries will have limited money to spend on electronic data,just as they have little | |
| 39 | money to spend on books. But by clubbing together to get good rates for unlimited access | |
| 40 | to a body of basic information, public libraries could provide a collection available to all | |
| 41 | without fee. It would be no meagre thing - probably, in time, far bigger than the current | |
| 42 | contents of most libraries. And it would be more than just a safety net for the have-nots. It | |
| 43 | would be a meeting place in cyberspace, available to anyone prepared to go to a library. It | |
| 44 | would be the sort of useful democratic monument that the Jeffersonian spirit demands despite | |
| 45 | its lack of graceful porticos. |