My Interview with a Library Scientist

     This week I interviewed Donna Cardon at the Provo City Library. Donna got her Master's degree in Library Sciences in 2005. And no, she and I are not related.

  In beginning our discussion, I asked Donna what kind of things she studied in the Library Sciences program. Her first year she studied the history of the books, library theoretics, ideas about information and how information is passed from generation to generation. I asked her to tell me about the information cycle: "It's the process by which data is recorded, used, and then discarded."

     The information cycle is a constant thing, but I asked her if she could give me a specific example. An example of a short-lived information cycle could be a boy who might have to make a webpage for a class--he collects the data, puts it up on the webpage, the class reads it, and after a semester the webpage will be deleted. We see this in cave drawings, too. If a caveman takes his data (her example was "I went on a hunt") and recorded it on the cave wall where all can see, this information cycle has not ended because the information was never discarded. (Hopefully our blog will follow the path of the cave drawing and not the boy's class webpage!) She clearly simplified this process for me, because when I researched the information cycle it involved a little more than that, click here to read more.

     While Donna was and undergrad she worked in the Special Collections at the HBLL. Her job was to translate from Latin and catalog for other researchers and librarians a collection called the Incunabula. Donna graduated before the project was complete, and she says that as far as she knows it has never been finished.
   
     After our interview I looked up the "incunabula". The Latin word "Incunabulum" means cradle--it loosely refers to the birthplace or origin of something. "Incunabula" is just a word used to refer to early printed books, specifically those printed before 1501 AD using moveable type.

 
        Donna shared with me that before the HBLL's special collections were moved into climate controlled facilities, the smell of rotting vellum that just overpowered you when you walked into the vaults was, in her words, "wonderful." Now the books are on metal shelves, kept at a certain humidity level and temperature to best preserve them, but when the books were stored on wooden shelves ("which really isn't good for them, especially oak shelves") in much less controlled spaces, she said the smell of old books was, in a word, "lovely." She told me she loved opening the old books and seeing their illuminated pages.

An illuminated manuscript by Jost Ammon Von Ravensburg ~1440

      I asked Donna what role she felt libraries played in our society. She thought for a moment, "Really, libraries play a lot of different roles. Different types of libraries perform different functions." Libraries like the HBLL, the Library of Congress, big libraries in Europe--those libraries serve to collect and preserve history." The Provo City Library, however, has chosen not to keep books that are older than 20 years old. "Of course, we have our own 'Special Collections' but really, we aren't here to compete with the BYU library down the street. We serve a different purpose." To clarify, Donna works in the Children's wing of the Library, and their policy to only keep fairly new books is specific to their department.

    Clearly the role of libraries is changing, Donna said herself that the Provo City Library's main purpose is to entertain. As I sat in our discussion I began thinking about how at some point libraries could be obsolete, more like museums as more and more information is stored in online databases and ebooks become more widespread. "I think that in 20 years all non-fiction information will be online in databases," Donna told me-- this is kind of a shocking idea, but I guess that idea is kind of the focus of this class: how information storage and transmission has evolved over time.

      Speaking of ebooks, though, Donna told me about the Provo City Library's ebook  downloader "OverDrive". As of two weeks ago, you can download books from the library onto your ereader. There's a lot of discussion as to whether ereader lending will make local libraries obsolete, which you can read about here. But libraries are keeping up! Donna told me about a library in Oregon that got rid of their books all together and now just has kiosks where you can download to your ereader thousands of titles at the library. I couldn't find that particular library online but I did find that the Library at Cushing Academy in Boston got rid of all its books, headmaster James Tracy said "When I look at books, I see outdated technology."

Goodbye, books!

     In the Children's Wing of the Provo City Library they're also thinking about buying a public ipad for the purpose of supplying kids with interactive picture books. I laughed as I imagined a bubble-wrapped ipad sitting on a table with a chain on it (kind of like that armored book we saw at the special collections on Thursday with a chain on it!). Lending ereaders to people is also an idea that has been talked about at the Provo City Library but logistically it seems a little far-off.

        Donna and I talked about other things, too-- about the history of the book and about Roman libraries and really a lot of things to contextualize what we've been reading in our Reinventing Knowledge books and our discussions in class. What I shared with you of our discussion, however, is what I find most valuable to us because it contextualizes our very place in history. Perhaps I'm a little slow on the draw on this point but I didn't realize until this afternoon that all these junctures where folk knowledge evolved into oral knowledge then shifted to written knowledge-- we are now in one of those! I mean, I guess I just assumed we were approaching this change slowly, or that digital knowledge would never replace written knowledge but it is clear to me now that digital knowledge is speedily overtaking us as written and printed knowledge is being outmoded.