Whither the post-modern library?

Wisner, William H. Whither the Postmodern Library? Libraries, Technology and Education in the Information Age 133p. Jefferson, McFarland,2000 ISBN 0-7864-0795-6 £18

This is a sad rather fascist little book, which uses the debate over the demise of the card catalogue as a metaphor for the decline of civilisation. Further the author’s own life and its share of personal tragedies is spread before us in the sort of agonising detail of which only Americans seem capable, again in an attempt to illustrate how the world has gone to the dogs. It could all be summed up by singing a verse of “Yesterday”, except that Macartney’s song represents the sort of low culture which he heartily detests. No doubt the world was a better place when we were young and in love and gazed at the stars and read Shelley, but the link to subject tracings is at best tenuous.

He regrets the absence of debate about the demise of the card catalogue, neglecting the fact that a lively debate on this did happen – but electronically on the bulletin boards he despises. He is an unrepentant champion of the little man “I don’t care about consortia. I’ve never even met one. I only care about [individuals].” He lambasts twentieth century philosophy and hates Wittgenstein and existentialism. Paraphrasing Spengler he believes that the decline of civilisation as we – or at least he – knew it “was inevitable from the moment a clerk in the Ohio College Library Center in Dublin transmitted the first cataloguing record out into what then passed for cyberspace.”

The author has a simulacrum of learning. He would have Latin restored to the curriculum so that we can all read Virgil in the original, but has a rather wobbly understanding of the difference between the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages and a romanticised notion of a scriptorium in Iona saving the culture of the world from the Barbarians. He quotes Kazantzakis as a mark of erudition and yet ignores Kavafy in whose famous poem about the barbarians, the point was that they never came. He suggests that “someone” deserves the Nobel prize for inventing Boolean searching, presumably not knowing that George Boole was dead forty years before the Nobel prizes were created. And yet the central message of his book is that the solution to technology is a liberal education. Curiously, this view comes from an intensely illiberal view of the world. He also believes that science can only flourish in a democracy, where “the science-democracy-capitalist construct…is the greatest good for the greatest number that has ever existed.” Sitting as he does on the Mexican border he sees “that vast brokenness to the south” where “poverty, corruption and suffering [are] written across the heart of a whole continent”, part of a tide of unreason lapping round the First World of Europe and the USA.

The only reason to read this odd little book is the author’s wonderful command of vituperation. He hates bosses: “I have worked with library directors who have ranged from political geniuses to certifiable imbeciles, and I am convinced that most fall towards the lower end of the scale”; and media moguls “…the CEOs in their cordovan shoes stepping quietly on dolomite floors to their panelled office suites will never permit reading to revive.”; and system vendors “our vendor has the warm, understanding heart of a Mako shark.”; and salesmen whose belief in “greed-soaked capitalism…is really driving all the smug talk of a new globalism by businessmen in bespoke suits flipping open their laptops on the Concorde.”

This extended rant against the world comes from an author who sees himself intermittently as either a latterday Don Quixote or perhaps a gentle knight sans peur et sans reproche. The author is a reference librarian from Laredo and perhaps he thinks of himself as the poor cowboy in the wonderful song “The Streets of Laredo”:

We beat the drum slowly and played the fife lowly,

And bitterly wept as we bore him along,

For we all loved our comrade, so brave, young and handsome,

We all loved our comrade although he’d done wrong

But in the end he’s really another Alf Garnett – without the saving grace of supporting West Ham