It looks like a library, but why are these students talking? And working on laptops while the books stay on the shelves? Libraries are metamorphosing before our very eyes. Photo by S. Peter Lopez

Issue: Winter 2005

Paper to Pixels

In a world of metadata, digital surrogates and geo-spatial searching, the future of libraries is a huge, tantalizing question mark.

By Diane Krieger

What will the library of 2050 look like? Will it even occupy a building? If so, will that building contain any print documents, or merely serve as a nerve center for librarian-programmers to do their digital thing? Some envision a mega-wired venue for collaborative study: neo-salons for scholarly discourse.

It may feel like sacrilege to contemplate such a future. That’s to be expected. People form emotional and spiritual bonds with libraries, explains Lynn O’Leary-Archer, director of USC Libraries. “They go in and feel they’re having a religious experience,” she says. “The Doheny engenders that all the time. It’s almost a sacred space.”

To bibliophiles – and O’Leary-Archer readily admits to being one – the idea of the Edward L. Doheny Jr. Memorial Library denuded of its thousands of monographs and journals, the oversized tomes weighing down its reference shelves, the banquet-style tables that invite a scholarly sprawl of notes, books and papers seems unthinkable.

Yet librarians are thinking about it.

Here’s why. USC Libraries currently spends nearly a third of its $8.1 million annual acquisitions budget on digital information – e-books, reference databases, indexing and abstracting services and licensing agreements with so-called “content aggregators.” The library contracts with some 300 commercial vendors whose products include now-indispensable research tools like Lexis-Nexis, ProQuest, FirstSearch and Britannica Online. This virtual universe is continually expanding in the race to bring ever more content to scholars. Electronic serials, which are sometimes accompanied by a print version, are not even included in these totals, so the percentage of resources devoted to digital resources is likely much higher.

Meanwhile, the days of printed journals are numbered. Most periodicals already appear in digital form; many of their print counterparts have fallen by the wayside as academic niche publishers embrace the economies of electronic distribution. Today, e-journals account for roughly 30 percent of USC’s periodicals – that’s about 5,000 titles, including 1,500 in medicine and law alone. Librarians estimate that within five years, e-journals might make up 90 percent of the USC collection as their paper-based forebears die off.

E-books are taking off too, though their future isn’t a sure thing yet: The university’s virtual monograph collection currently stands at 20,000 titles, with new ones coming online all the time.

Half of the print collection is already in off-campus storage. These low-demand titles can still be “paged” (requested electronically) for later pick-up at Doheny’s circulation desk. But they rarely are.

The majestic card catalog room – its walls lined in American walnut drawers – is now an endearing anachronism. Doheny Library officially retired the old card catalog more than 10 years ago; librarians had stopped adding new cards in the 1980s. The drawers themselves now stand empty; for a $10,000 donation, your name can be engraved on the handsome brass fittings.

Libraries are metamorphosing before our eyes. O’Leary-Archer calls the present moment a “hybrid stage“ – the uneasy bridge between a paper-based and a digital society. In this period, libraries must respond to a spectrum of users, ranging from digital illiterates to child technophiles.

But in the not-too-distant future, we can expect libraries to shift from quasi-digital to mostly digital – and quite possibly to fully digital. What does that mean? Like it or not, we’re going to find out.

Director of USC Libraries Lynn O’Leary-Archer in Doheny Library’s majestic card catalog room, now an “endearing anachronism.” Photo by S. Peter Lopez

No one is predicting the death of books yet, but in the scholarly universe, librarians face economic realities that cut sharply against paper. Duplicating print and electronic collections is obviously a bad idea – wasteful, impractical, increasingly just plain impossible.

Sooner or later, a choice will have to be made, and the frugal, forward-looking librarian knows which way the winds are blowing.

“We’re seeing a very strong trend toward moving as much as possible of our current acquisitions to an electronic format,” says Todd Grappone, head of the library’s information development and management cluster. “There’s no doubt we’re going more and more digital and pursuing strategies to support that.”

O’Leary-Archer echoes that sentiment: “When you look at the future of libraries – virtual versus physical – virtual is where the real potential exists,” she says.

Everyone knows that in the post-industrial age, the amount of knowledge being generated has exploded; today, most of this new knowledge is “born digital” (library jargon for content that springs into being without disturbing a tree). The remaining print-based information, moreover, is often reborn as “digital surrogates.”

The question arises: When a library stops being a building stuffed with books, what is it?

“Libraries are information,” responds O’Leary-Archer without hesitation. It’s a reassuring notion, actually. Whatever else about the future is unknown, she reasons, “we can with some certainty assume a continuing hunger and demand for information.” In one form or another, the library will always be around. And so will library patrons.

Amid this sudden virtual opulence, however, their habits and expectations are undergoing profound change. Accustomed to the heady experience of the commercial Internet, researchers have come to expect lightning speeds, seamless connectivity and user-friendly interfaces in their scholarly activities. What they want, though few will recognize the library-argot, are “federated searches”: tools that whisk the reader directly from the citation in an index to the full-text article; can skip effortlessly from one article to another referenced in a footnote (even if it’s in a different journal or a different language); can leapfrog across media, from the title of a film mentioned in the text to the corresponding streamed-video clip. Soon they may even expect to go behind the article’s findings to manipulate the author’s data.

At USC, there’s much excitement about an “institutional repository” now taking shape. In this digital warehouse – think massive searchable public hard-drive – faculty and student researchers will be encouraged to self-publish their work: survey responses, 3-D mathematical models, clinical outcomes. Much of this information is born digital anyway, the logic goes. Why not share it?

Librarians aren’t intimidated by the enormity of the task at hand. Most are entranced by the vision of an electronically unified universe. “Everything is linked to everything,” says Deborah Holmes-Wong. “That’s how it’s going to be. That’s how it already is!”

Well, not quite. Most digital content is currently obtained from hundreds of commercial vendors – prospectors mining the gold fields of the Information Age. Aside from the question of how to pay for it all – and that’s a huge question – there are issues of standardization. Different vendors have their preferred formats, coding protocols and technical standards. This virtual grab-bag isn’t going away any time soon – economically, it’s not in the vendors’ self-interest to match up their protocols.

Research libraries themselves have joined the ranks of digital content creators and curators. A good example is USC’s Digital Archive (http://digarc.usc.edu). Here, library patrons can already search across – and plunge deeply into – about 140,000 historical photographs, maps, manuscripts, government records, texts and sound recordings belonging to USC and a host of collaborating institutions. The Digital Archive is probably the most tangible proof of USC’s decade-long commitment to trailblaze the frontiers of electronic library collections.

USC’s digital imaging director Matt Gainer, with assistant Giao Luong: “[After digitizing], an entire lost world opens up before your eyes.” Photo by S. Peter Lopez

Behind an unmarked storefront next to Starbucks in University Village, through a labyrinth of cubicles jammed with conventional shelving carts, lies a state-of-the-art digital imaging studio. Here, Matt Gainer oversees an elite squad of high-tech library assistants. Since 1996, they have photographed and scanned tens of thousands of objects – old manuscripts, census cards, yellowed maps, glass slides and negatives – and painstakingly input detailed descriptions of them, embedded information called “metadata.”

The work grew out of a 1994 project led by USC historian Phil Ethington. At a time when most scholars weren’t yet comfortable with e-mail, Ethington envisioned the mind-numbing task of digitizing and databasing thousands of archival photos, papers, manuscripts, newspapers, dissertations, maps and paintings pertaining to the history of Los Angeles. The Information System for Los Angeles became the backbone of today’s Digital Archive.

“ISLA was way ahead of its time,” says Gainer. “We’re just now getting to the point where the components they were thinking about back then are becoming attainable.” Components like geo-spatial browsing, offering the ability to place crop marks on a virtual map as a way to limit a search. “We’re working on that right now. It’s brand new,” Gainer says.

Most of the records in this archive are image files culled from USC’s Special Collections and institutional collaborators such as the Automobile Club of Southern California and the region’s Chinese Historical Society.

Looking for old maps of the Sea of Korea? Pull up a chair. We’ve got 175 of them, in color, fully zoomable and soon-to-be searchable not just by subject, but across time and space.

The beauty of the Digital Archive is it makes accessible fragile artifacts normally encased in Mylar or kept inside temperature- and humidity-controlled vaults: more than a thousand Chinese cultural artifacts excavated from below Union Station; nearly 100,000 housing surveys gathered in 1939 by the Works Projects Administration; 16,000 photographs from the morgue of the defunct Los Angeles Examiner; hundreds of back issues of the city’s first Spanish-language newspaper, El Clamor Publico. All this and much more is consolidated and searchable online through an elegantly simple Web interface that Gainer and Grappone tweak endlessly, adding new features and functionality that users take for granted.

A researcher using this Web-based archive can pull up a map of Watts from the 1930s. She can zero in on a particular neighborhood and effortlessly compare it to contemporary maps and satellite images. She can enter a street address. Up come more archival maps and photos. Opening a digital surrogate of a glass negative too delicate ever to be handled by a patron, she can greatly magnify portions to recover incredible details lost to the naked eye – the name on a shingle, lettering on a billboard, the styles of hats and shoes on passers-by, the ratio of pedestrians to automobiles. With each mouse-click, the search goes deeper and gets richer.

More projects are underway. In one of several with the Survivors of the Shoah Foundation, USC makes available at very fast speeds the foundation’s enormous digitized collection of video testimonials given by Holocaust survivors.

Elsewhere, USC and two partner institutions are working together to develop a federated search capability. The brainchild of USC dean of libraries Jerry Campbell, the ambitious Scholar’s Portal (for a beta version, see http://usc.hostedbyfdi.net) aims to integrate the electronic catalog and a selection of licensed databases on each of three campuses, the University of Arizona, Iowa State and USC.

Historian Phil Ethington: At a time when most scholars weren’t yet comfortable with e-mail, he envisioned digitizing and databasing the history of Los Angeles. Photo by S. Peter Lopez

Traditionally, library excellence has been a function of time and money. It’s no accident that America’s first college was founded largely on the bequest of John Harvard’s superb private library; in the 1630s, that British clergyman liquidated his patrimony, invested everything in books and set sail for the New World.

Nearly 300 years later, USC was just getting started; the Doheny Library opened in 1932. Today, Harvard’s physical collection is estimated at more than 14 million volumes. USC’s stands at around four million volumes.

Few universities could hope to make up such a gap, and the current generation of USC librarians shrewdly decided not to try.

“Some years ago, we made a conscious choice not to compete with university libraries that have large print holdings, because we knew we could never catch up,” says former librarian Marianne Afifi, who until recently oversaw the university’s electronic resources. “We began to concentrate on electronic resources in the early ’90s when they first came on the scene.”

USC belongs to the pioneering Digital Library Federation (www.diglib.org), whose 32 members are the field’s recognized stars. In May of 2005, USC ranked 12th among institutions worldwide implementing the Open Archive Initiative (www.openarchives.org), a consortium of nearly 700 digital collections that has identified a set of standard protocols for creating “metadata” (the searchable descriptions underlying any digital object) and for sharing this metadata with other institutions through an electronic process called “harvesting.”

Other programs to watch include UC Santa Barbara’s Alexandria Digital Library (www.alexandria.ucsb.edu), featuring a geographical search tool for viewing its collection of 15,000 satellite images. The multilingual Perseus Project (www.perseus.tufts.edu), based at Tufts University, gives researchers in the humanities access to thousands of digitized documents from the ancient world through the American Civil War. The UC system’s California Digital Library is another ambitious multilayered archive (www.cdlib.org).

On her desk in the executive suite of Doheny Library, O’Leary-Archer displays a 4-inch librarian action figure. Silver-haired, in ankle-length skirt and sensible shoes, she stands with index finger pressed to pursed lips, frozen in the perpetual act of shushing.

“I got this at a library meeting I recently attended,” she says, smiling indulgently. Such creatures may still exist somewhere on earth, she asserts, but “not in my libraries. Shushing is not allowed here.” In the trendy “library-as-public-space” model that has largely supplanted the dusty library-as-quiet-place-for-solitary-reflection paradigm, researchers are encouraged to talk, lounge about, even snack and sip coffee.

In Leavey Library – recognized as the nation’s first mostly digital library – the computer workstations that have superseded the study carrels of yesteryear are wide enough to accommodate two chairs, a blatant invitation for chatter and collaboration.

“We’re building a café in this library,” notes O’Leary-Archer. Efforts are underway to develop a spill-proof mug that will be welcome in Leavey’s reading areas and alongside its myriad electronic resources.

“I usually have a cup of tea or a Diet Coke when I’m working at my computer,” explains O’Leary-Archer. “Why shouldn’t our users? Makes perfect sense.”

Four USC’s facilities – the Doheny, the Leavey, the Science and Engineering and the Applied Social Sciences libraries – have been designated “technology- and resources-rich learner-centered spaces,” wherein scholars are encouraged to reinvent what it means to study – whether that’s trying out a new database, meeting up with a lab partner in a public computing room, or sitting alone with a laptop in a dorm. While the stacks still close every night, most digital services keep running 24/7.

“There’s no avoiding the fact that there are students who go through four years on this campus, and faculty members who work here, who never enter the library,” admits O’Leary-Archer. “But they use the library all the time.”

The old library was about service; the new library is about self-service. It’s about making everything accessible, regardless of who owns it.

At first blush, this “open access” philosophy sounds a bit, er, radical. But rivalry among research libraries is very “old school,” O’Leary-Archer says. In the 21st century, the librarian’s motto is “share and share alike.”

Access to information, the logic goes, is a basic right – one that shouldn’t be held hostage by commercial interests. Thus, we see a movement afoot calling for the fruits of federally funded research to be freely disseminated. The National Institutes for Health has been pushing hard for that. “The vendors grumble,” says O’Leary-Archer, “but our tax dollars pay for this information. And then we have to pay again [in the form of subscriptions and digital licenses]? That’s very strange.”

Last winter, Stanford University head librarian Michael Keller spelled out the goals of open access in a New York Times article. “Within two decades,” he said, “most of the world’s knowledge will be digitized and available one hopes for free reading on the Internet, just as there is free reading in libraries today.”

O’Leary-Archer agrees: “We all feel that way. I think you would not talk to anyone in the library who doesn’t. But there are realities that stop that from being the case. It’s still a dream scenario.”

If you’re dreaming, why not dream big? Afifi sees the open-access imperative stretching across national frontiers. The library of the future, she wrote two years ago in the newsletter of the USC Academic Senate, “must also meet the needs of the people of the world who have been less fortunate than we have been, either because of socioeconomic realities, war, corruption, dictatorial governments or natural disasters.”

No shushing allowed: In Leavey Library, computer workstations are wide enough to encourage chatter and collaboration as students study. Photo by S. Peter Lopez

If they hope to keep up with the never-ending information explosion, librarians in the digital age clearly should be rethinking old business models. And they are.

“Libraries are coming together in consortium arrangements to try and become a broader bargaining force with vendors,” O’Leary-Archer says. “It’s good. It increases our buying power, makes us stronger negotiators.”

For the last century or more, each of the 122 libraries belonging to the elite Association of Research Libraries has individually purchased most of the English-language books to appear in print. “When a new title comes out, UCLA buys it, we buy it, Occidental College buys it, Cal State L.A. buys it,” says O’Leary-Archer. “One of the questions librarians are asking themselves is: Given the economics of libraries, why do we all have to buy this when we could digitize it and share?”

Such collectivism cuts both ways. In the long run, librarians may face the prospect of having to narrowly specialize their holdings. “In the future, most likely because of fiscal necessity, only a few libraries will be the great repositories of a wide variety of materials,” predicts Afifi, who is now associate dean of libraries at Cal State Northridge. “The majority of libraries will have to tailor their collections much more to specific groups and to certain classes of centralized users.”

Don’t expect that to happen soon, though. “Maybe in 50 years,” Grappone estimates, “there’ll be some really specialized chemistry library that everyone relies on. That could happen. Though,” he backtracks, “it’s kind of hard for me to picture any school without a library – I wouldn’t want to send my kid to one.”

The electronic transformation portends profound changes for specialty libraries too. At USC’s Helen Topping Architecture and Fine Arts Library, the race is on to digitize a teaching collection of 200,000 transparencies. Though still favored by some art historians, the conventional slide show is rushing toward extinction. Kodak cut its lifeline last year, when the company stopped manufacturing projectors and carousels, explains slide librarian Michael Bonnet.

At the music library, a database called Classical.com is taking the shine out of USC’s no-nonsense 10,000-plus CD collection. The service, which consolidates the catalogues of 25 major classical labels, lets users listen to 35,000 works any time, anywhere, on demand. Private record labels are beginning to offer their own educational download licenses. Meanwhile, the Smithsonian Institution is negotiating with university libraries, including USC, to sell rights to its large digital archive of American folk music recordings.

Written music is no less amenable to digitalization. At the cinema-television library, staff are now scanning the hand-written scores of film composer Dimitri Tiomkin. The 6,000-page archive contains his original musical sketches for Giant (1956) and It’s a Wonderful Life (1941). In another project, the cinema library is digitizing and making publicly available 80,000 still photos from the USC-based archive of producer David Wolper, whose credits include Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971) and the seminal T.V. miniseries “Roots” (1977).

Many other USC-owned, high-interest collections would readily lend themselves to digitization. How about a database containing all the films, artworks, recitals and stage performances of USC student artists? Or class lectures by star professors, such as the 200 or so videotaped movie commentaries of the late, great USC film scholar Frank Daniel?

Across USC, librarians are queuing up at Matt Gainer’s door. Few librarians have greater job security than USC’s digital-imaging czar: The demand for his services is inexhaustible.

Not so long ago, possessing research skills meant knowing your way around ponderous opuses like Books in Print and The Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature. Searching the catalog meant thumbing through file-drawers full of cards – typed, alphabetized and lovingly placed by the hands of generations of librarians.

What a difference a few decades makes! As the library has changed, so too have librarians. Indeed, no other profession has changed as dramatically, O’Leary-Archer contends. Over the last 40 years, the stereotypical buttoned-up matron has morphed into someone who looks a lot like Todd Grappone.

The quintessential “blended librarian,” Grappone is a cross between computer scientist and content-management specialist. Though he holds the time-honored master’s of library science degree, Grappone has spent the last 20 years honing new skills at the cutting edge of digital information management. At USC, he’s in charge of so-called “middle data” – the convergence between digital and analog materials. He designs customer interfaces for library patrons and, as he puts it, “supports the supporter”: builds applications and code for front-end reference librarians.

Grappone sees the new librarian’s role as that of an advocate, even an aggressive peddler of content. In olden days, a librarian would wait passively for patrons to shuffle over and pose a question. The digital paradigm “puts that model on steroids,” Grappone says. As information grows and changes, the librarian should be continually introducing new resources to clients, he believes. “In medicine you may see an information specialist who goes on rounds with clinical students.”

He looks at the “collection” as a set of relationships between library tools and users. Within five or 10 years, Grappone envisions the ability to customize this relationship for each patron, taking into consideration not only search terms, but factors about the searcher. “We may see that you’re majoring in astronomy and minoring in music,” he says. “We may know where you’re logged in – for example, a user room in the science and engineering library – and based on that, we may make assumptions about what other resources you might want to look at.”

Rewind to the present. A huge amount of the work in a conventional library involves maintenance of the print collection. First catalog, shelve and bind. Then circulate, which entails checking out, tracking, sending overdue notices, collecting late fees and so on. Once returned, the book has to be checked in and reshelved. If it has been lost or abused, there’s the nuisance of assessing fines and reordering from the publisher, and then the whole process starts over again.

Most of these tasks have no place in a digital library.

Little wonder, then, that half of USC’s collection is already in storage, and that the university is on the lookout for more off-site warehouse space.

The devil’s advocate asks: Why not just set a match to the whole thing?

Matt Gainer recalls digital library conferences in the late ’90s where he heard heretics whisper that blasphemy. “They’d say, ‘We’re going to get a grant and digitize these things so we can free up some shelf place,’” he chuckles.

No one talks about that anymore. Putting books in storage shouldn’t be seen as a prelude to trashing them, O’Leary-Archer says reassuringly. The university has no plans of doing that now or in the future.

Still, the question of what happens to all the paper in a post-paper age is troubling. Books, explains USC chief archivist Claude Zachary, “aren’t inherently valuable in and of themselves, except perhaps to scholars of printing.” How, then, do we assign value to an obsolete medium loaded with nostalgia?

There are two reasons no one is talking about bonfires. One is persistent uncertainty about the preservation of digital content. (Anyone with a drawer full of five-inch floppy disks knows what we’re talking about.) “There’s no question at the moment that the most durable medium remains paper,” says O’Leary-Archer.

But there’s another reason, best understood with a visit to Zachary’s fiefdom on the second floor of Doheny Library. This is the treasure room of the University Archives. A few feet from Zachary’s desk lie the library’s crown jewels. Safe from damage or theft in a climate-controlled vault, they include a four-volume, first-edition, hand-colored double-elephant folio of James Audubon’s Birds of America; the score of Igor Stravinsky’s opera The Rake’s Progress in the composer’s own hand; and stacks of pencil-marked compositions sketched by Ingolf Dahl and Alfred Newman. The vault is pretty crowded. According to Zachary, the library will install several more as USC’s Special Collections grows.

And make no mistake, grow it will. Just this summer, USC acquired an archive of primary source materials on visionary documentary filmmaker and Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl.

Curiously, in the digital age, old media – if they are unique – are more precious than ever. In April, the University of Texas at Austin purchased the Watergate papers of journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein for a cool $5 million; a few weeks later it shelled out $2.5 million for the copious documents of novelist Norman Mailer. In 2002, UCLA made headlines when it paid $1.1 million for author Susan Sontag’s personal archive.

USC archivist Claude Zachary: “Some record has to be kept for cultural memory of who we’ve been.” Photo by S. Peter Lopez

It’s easy to confuse an archivist with the ultimate pack rat, but pack rat is the wrong metaphor. He’s actually a ruthless winnower: Only 2 to 3 percent of an organization’s total production makes it into a good archive. Choosing what to keep is Zachary’s greatest challenge.

Clearly, paper continues to matter quite a lot even in the digital age. An example from history may help explain why. Consider the effect of print on hand-lettered manuscripts. Did the advent of the printing press diminish the value of hand-lettered parchment manuscripts? From the distance of a half millennium, not noticeably. The first Bibles to roll off the Gutenberg press are priceless objects, and so are the earlier books of hours that medieval monks and scribes painstakingly illuminated by hand. (The British Library has exquisite digital surrogates of each at www.bl.uk. Or you can view the real artifacts in person at the Huntington Library in Pasadena.)

It’s true that manuscripts were always precious and rare. But today, books are super abundant. So are baseball cards, yet still they can become treasures. Such is the way of all cultural ephemera. “Some record has to be kept for cultural memory of who we’ve been,” Zachary explains. He points to DC comics. Once churned out in mass quantities, over time they have become rarities, and hence, precious.

For example, many, many cubic feet of Zachary’s domain are devoted to preserving the correspondence, transactions, decrees and speeches coming out of USC’s Office of the President, from the days of Marion Bovard to the present. “That’s a permanent keeper,” he says of this repository of institutional memory, “and I don’t think there’ll ever be budget for scanning it all.”

Even if there were, digital surrogates, while useful, could never take the place of unique cultural artifacts. “There’s an intangible thrill to holding an original object,” says Zachary.

The work of USC biblical archeologist Bruce Zuckerman sheds light on this matter. Scholars of ancient texts and inscriptions once had to travel to remote, inhospitable places for their research. Many ancient finds remain in situ, carved into cave walls and massive rock formations; other fragments are scattered throughout museums and libraries around the world. There is no hope of reuniting these artifacts except through the use of surrogates.

So Zuckerman created InscriptiFact (www.inscriptifact.com), a growing digital archive now containing some 20,000 high-resolution images of ancient inscriptions, from the Dead Sea Scrolls to Egyptian scarabs. Best of all, Zuckerman pioneered methods for optimizing the images. His digital surrogates reveal details thought to be forever lost to the ravages of time – which makes them, to ancient-language scholars, better than the real thing.

“Bruce’s work allows access to a lot of information that’s buried there,” says Zachary. “Still and all, they’d never think of throwing the original away.”