The Next Book on the Shelf – Essays on Paths to Learning and Understanding, Then, Now and To Come

On an August morning in 2013, over 2,000 at the International Legal Technology Association’s first keynote address, futurist / visionary Scott Klososky pressed the crowd for memories of technologies past, as he shared visions of the future. “Remember”, he said, “when you entered a library (his emphasis) and pulled a drawer from a cabinet of drawers, drew out an index card (still his emphasis) and read the number 189.11. What was that number?” To the great relief of those of us of a certain age, many in  the crowd murmured “Dewey Decimal System.”

The thoughts of “library”, “card catalogue” and “Dewey Decimal System” roused me the next morning to begin here  series of essays on the physical and virtual paths to learning, understanding, sharing that we have experienced, are now experiencing and may experience in a present and future flooded with technologies that did not exist, and were hardly imagined in my childhood. I welcome your company on this journey, through responsible comments and discussion.

Pocantico Hills Central School housed a public library that doubled as our elementary school library, and the setting for my first encounters with the Dewey Decimal System. The “old building”, opened in 1932, a gift of John D. Rockefeller, whose family’s estate surrounded the school, and whose father’s decisions to purchase all of the commercial establishments in the hamlet of Pocantico Hills meant that the school was the only non-church public building. The library then, with its rich, dark wooden shelves, housed a few thousand books, both those for the school and those for the adults living in the school district. So a second grader, eager to read, could begin not only to pull those cards, but to explore the shelves of books to which they led.

The number led to a shelf, and a book. In the pages of the book, perhaps, the answer to the question, the story sought, by the search of the card catalogue. (I know, the most common spelling now is “catalog.”)  The Next Book on the Shelf (and perhaps the next, and the next), to the left or the right, though, could bring unexpected delight and insight, its subject close, but not quite the one revealed by the search of the card catalogue.  The accidental, serendipitous paths of discovery that could be found in the Next Book’s table of contents and index enriched my thoughts, ideas, connections and knowledge.

Near the door of that long room, on the bottom shelves, the volumes of the encyclopedias beckoned – World Book (supposed accessible even to elementary school readers), Americana (our more contemporary response  to the mother books) and the mother books themselves, the Encyclopedia Britannica. Look up an article to start, but find it and begin to turn the pages. The alphabetized collection of topics was not as orderly as the shelved books, but the sense of discovery perhaps stronger.

Skip ahead to college at The University of Chicago and the opening in 1970 of its Regenstein Library. The card catalogues were now wood and steel drawers, and the catalogue alone occupied more space that all of that school/public library. Regenstein opened its stacks, and the shelves and their Next Books grew extraordinarily in number. So did the richness of the Library of Congress classification.  It felt that one could spend a lifetime exploring those shelves, discovering not just one author’s answer or thoughts, but several, even dozens, devoted to just QB  – Astronomy.

When we opened the book, signposts and maps of tables of contents led us through volume and chapter, editorial guides to learning and discovery. Sometimes the path was direct – finding an answer quickly. Often the path was fractal, bending and curving along a path that accumulated associations intended and accidental, or whole new paths triggered by opening the Next Book on the Shelf.

Skip again now to this computer, sitting at this moment in a hotel room in Las Vegas, with its wireless connection to the Internet accomplished through the Personal Hotspot created by my iPhone. So vast compared to Pocantico Hills, though the smell and feel of the wooden shelves and catalogue drawers is a fading memory that I struggle to conjure.

Here (or anywhere I can connect to the Internet), perhaps I can restore and renew my library experience at the Digital Public Library of America. I will take that tour in the next essay.

These memories trigger many questions about the experience of the computer and Internet driven life we have created. When we study and learn by Google search (substitute Bing, Yahoo or perhaps Dogpile), have we (and especially our children) lost the kind of mental exercise made our thinking strong? Does our new experience suffer from the resistance to “disease” that monoculture commercial agriculture suffers?Is Search at blazing speed a false substitute for study?

Far more to consider than can be packed into one essay.