Libraries and Learning
The Skeuomorphic Library
March 10, 2016
I have students read Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think” every spring. Bush was a scientific bureaucrat who helped organize the work of the Manhattan Project. In 1945, just before the fruits of that project were used to destroy two Japanese cities, he published his thoughts about what scientists would do in peacetime, focusing in particular on the problem of managing a proliferation of information. He envisioned a desk-sized machine called the Memex that scientists could use to index, consult, and annotate scientific literature using a variety of developing technologies such as microfilm. On a more visionary note, he predicted computing, voice recognition, artificial intelligence, and hypertext. He didn’t take into account how copyright and the way we fund scientific publishing restricts sharing and reuse, but hey, he couldn’t guess everything right.
The part of the essay that always grabs me, though, is where he describes the mechanical mean of storing and retrieving information and how it cannot replace the way people actually think – through connections grasped on the fly. “Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of systems of indexing,” he wrote. “The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain.” He imagined that we could improve upon the mechanized indexing of information by allowing scientists to create, record, and share trails of association, given automated access to the record.
In many ways, citations serve as hand-coded trails of association that we create and share, but we persist in presenting them traditionally – in text at the bottom of a page, or in an alphabetical list of references. The links are the opposite of hyper; learning how to read a citation and go from it to a source remains a huge challenge for undergraduates once they realize that fine print is actually good for something other than a kind of plagiarism liability insurance. Yet the web of citations (and the automated linking of citations through Google Scholar and Web of Science) are about as close as we come to Bush’s “trails of association.” Hypertext is closer, but it hasn’t replaced hand-coded references in the worlds of science and scholarship.
We’ve seen so much change in libraries, yet it’s so hard to let go of the old ways.
Remember when we used to explain databases by saying “it’s like the Reader’s Guide, but on the computer”? Maybe you’re not old enough. It’s been more than a quarter of a century since students were likely to have actually seen the Reader’s Guide, much less used it. Yet our databases are largely still structured like an old-school printed index, and we expect people to search much as they did when flipping pages of a printed index. We’r