Reflections on the Future of the Library
Hilary Schor, Academic Vice President of the Academic Senate and Professor of English and Gender Studies

I suppose everyone has a place or time in history she would return to if she could--one fascinating moment, a turning point, a crisis, some point of obscurity. I have had the same fantasy of time-travel my whole life: I have wanted to return to the great library at Alexandria, in the Mouseion, the Temple of Muses, before it was destroyed; I have wanted to return to the moment when one great library could hold the imagination of an entire globe. 

My fantasies of this library are, to say the least, not realistic, but the very difficulty of realizing this fantasy has, I believe, something important to tell us about the nature of great libraries: they are powerful tools for organizing the imagination; they are great weapons in the battle for understanding and changing the world; but they are also vulnerable, permeable, living organisms, and they can only be understood (and preserved) in a world of constant change. Alexandria, in the time of the Ptolemies, was the greatest city the world had known: it sustained a level of urban growth that challenges our own, and was not again reached until the London and Paris of the 18th centuries. The Macedonian Greeks who built this culture controlled the resources of the Nile Valley and the trade routes of the Mediterranean; they had armies and men and resources; they had a vibrant religious culture and an artistic heritage--and before they lost the library (probably to war and fire) they had some of the cleverest ways ever devised by a civilization to preserve knowledge. What lessons are there for USC in what I can only call the
legend of the Alexandria library? 

Perhaps the easiest way to demonstrate what I mean, is to point out that were I to return to Alexandria, and were the library brought back to life, I could not read any books in it. In fact, we would find no books in it; the codex, the bound volume of pages, did not come to exist for centuries, and the volumes of the Alexandria library were bound on scrolls. Literary scholars, interested in the history of the book and changes in the practice of writing, point out the difference between knowledge that comes to us in a continual scroll, an unrolling of information and story, and knowledge that comes to us in pages, turned at random, skipped about and skimmed by eager readers. The scrolls, or papyrus, texts, featured a script (if they were in Greek or Hebrew) with few markings we would recognize: as one classical scholar has put it, the reader of a papyrus roll was given very little help. There were no regular punctuation marks, headings and paragraphs were erratic even in literary texts, individual words were not normally separated. Furthermore, the texts as they were unscrolled resisted casual reading: a reader who cannot flip to a page and then turn back fifty more has a different relationship to knowledge. 

Our sense of the ways libraries preserve knowledge might be further challenged by the Alexandrian library: in a world where each copy had to be made by hand (that is, a world before both "books" and "printers") there were few copies, and very little information was available, far less preserved. There were "booksellers," but very few, and books were quite expensive--as they remained through the mid 19th century. In a time before lending libraries, books were accessible by very few--and the sense that writing was worth preserving (apart from sacred writing) was not widely shared. The Greek playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides wrote, between them, 300 plays, of which thirty-three survive; of the remaining 150-odd other writers of tragedy whose names are known, some of them quite renowned, not a single text survives. How did the Alexandria library preserve texts, in a world where little was held on to? They were ruthless. In the words of Alexander Stille, whose wonderful account of the library inspires my own, "They decreed that every ship that passed through the port of Alexandria hand over any manuscript or scroll on board for copying. The Alexandrians then returned the copy and kept the original." As he reports, they tricked the Athenians into giving them a set of the major Greek tragedies; they called upon the sovereigns and rulers of the world to send them all books worthy of inclusion in the Great Library; they summoned seventy-two Jewish scholars to translate the Torah, and gathered Buddhist texts from India and a work on Zoroastrianism said to contain two millions lines. They were pirates; they were sneaks, they were entrepreneurs. 

They were also library-builders in the most profound sense. They gathered scholars from around the world, and built the world's first think tank; they worked not just at gathering and collating and preserving but translating and creating; they saw the world of scholarship as a growing, vital one. It is a far cry from that to our current mass-cultural view of libraries, the place where you can xerox Consumer Reports articles on DVD players and find the latest John Grisham novel before your friends! But is it the same vision that inspires the libraries of great universities, as they face technological and preservation (and storage and purchasing and copyright...) issues, as great as those that faced the Alexandria library?

I think I want to suggest that our libraries have to continue to operate a bit piratically, at the same time that they continue to imagine themselves as the center of learning, however quickly it changes and remakes itself. The most important point made by current scholars of the book, at a moment when the library is increasingly being thought of not just as a holder of book but a dispenser of 'information,' in a wide array of new forms, is that new information technologies do not come out of nowhere, and they continue to build on the old technologies of the past. It is a joke among computer people, for instance, that the most reliable way of storing information continues to be paper, because while one "operating system" or another "word processing system" might be introduced tomorrow, whereas paper will be paper will be paper. The texts of Aeschylus held by the Alexandria library, in short, would be easier to read than the draft of my dissertation, written in Word Star on a Kay Pro computer purchased in 1984! 

Real scholarship, the pursuit of truth, the invention of ideas and the shattering of conventional ideas of knowledge, all this depends on libraries: on a living, breathing library, which is at once the repository of the imagination of the past and the true incubator of the ideas of the future. For scholars working with literary, historical, cultural texts, no single thing is as important as the proximity, ease of access, and continued availability of the tools of our trades: the books, articles, collections, ephemera of the past. From the time I first checked out my own books at the library at Western and California in Chicago, to the moment I first held a "fashionable annual" from the 1840s in the North Library of the British Library, or walked under the great dome of the Reading Room, where Karl Marx, George Eliot, and a million anonymous, passionate readers did their stuff, I have been at once addicted to and in love with libraries, and I think that is universally true of scholars in these fields. But the future of the library matters to more people than just scholars--it matters to students who will enter these libraries and continue to ask for books; to graduate students first finding the central tools of reference and losing themselves in the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica or Diderot's Encyclopedia; to casual readers who find a novel they like on a "remaindered" shelf and go to the library to hunt down "more books like that," and discover the world of literature beyond them. Generations of autobiographies by industrial workers, slaves, and immigrants, tell us of the fascinating and the promise of books and libraries, and in a world where private ownership of both reading materials and technology remains limited by class and literary, a library is an important preserver of democracy and of the imagination.

But for a great university, a library is more than that; it is a place where scholars and students (and what, after all, is the difference?) continue to meet, continue to delve into the collection, continue to create the archive anew. Our libraries must remain flexible in the face of new technologies, and increase our ways of accessing, retrieving, preserving information and (dare I say?) knowledge, something far closer to wisdom than to gigabytes. But they must also remain centers of learning and excitement, repositories of the best of the past, places where knowledge lost in other forms continues to exist. In a recent study by the Annenberg Center, students introduced to knowledge in computer-based forms, after a giddy period of web-sites and google searches, began to visit the library; they realized that the more complicated forms of "information" existed beyond the walls of their own rooms, in the shelves of the great libraries. At USC, with the resources of Leavey's information-based model and the renovation of the beautiful Doheny Memorial library, we have both an opportunity and an obligation to preserve the print-based as well as computer-based forms of knowledge, to make our library the resource it must be for our best scholars and our most novice students. The great libraries of the past haunt our imagination for a reason; they inspire us to build (whether we be pirates, copyright-mongers, entrepreneurs or merely fast copyists!) the fabulous libraries of the future. As for me, the Egyptian government recently announced that the ruins of the great library have been found in the harbour of Alexandria; they hope to offer underwater tours of the library in the next decade, and I plan to be there, but it will be no more majestical than the library I hold in my imagination, or the library every university has a profound obligation to build, preserve, and expand.