Dr. Billington delivered the keynote address at "Exploring the New Media: Partnerships in Electronic Publishing," the second annual national electronic publishing seminar, held at the Library and the ANA Hotel March 14-16.
Cosponsored by the University of Virginia and the Library, the meeting was aimed at helping book, journal and other publishers form the partnerships necessary for successful multimedia and Internet publishing.
"We discovered that everybody needs partnerships" in the new publishing environment, said Beverly Jane Loo, director of publishing and communications programs for the university.
Panels of specialists discussed such topics as "Content Comes First" and "The Future of Copyright in a Networked World," as well as the general theme of forming partnerships for marketing and publishing online publications.
The roster of speakers included: Marybeth Peters, register of copyrights for the U.S. Copyright Office; Bob Stein, president of the Voyager Co., a leading CD-ROM publisher; George A. Peterson, director of educational media for the National Geographic Society; Randi Benton, president of new media for Random House; and Eric Gagnon, president of Internet Media and author of Business on the Internet.
Excerpts of Dr. Billington's remarks follow:
It is appropriate that this meeting is being held at the Library of Congress. The idea of knowledge-based democracy, propounded and exemplified by Thomas Jefferson, the founder of this Library, is being threatened in our time in a peculiar fashion by the flood of information generated by the new technologies and by the relentless advance of the audiovisual, multimedia world. We talk about the Information Age, not the knowledge age. The first outline of a proposal sent to me by a legislator some years ago talked about the need for forming "nodal points of local information dissemination"; I picked up the phone and said, "These things already exist - they happen to be called libraries."
I am haunted by the thought that all this miscellaneous unsorted, unverified, constantly changing information on the Internet may inundate knowledge, may move us back down the evolutionary chain, back down from knowledge to information, from information to raw data. We may be falling away from, rather than rising up to, wisdom and creativity, those twin peaks that are humanity's highest intellectual attainments. Instead of a knowledge-based democracy, we may end up with an information-inundated demogogracy. Information itself is sometimes degraded into "infotainment" and "infomercials" and various other crudities, raising the problem of whether we can go on creating - let alone, making use of - knowledge.
The ideal of open access is in the first place threatened by the fact that this flood of information may have the unintended effect of dividing us into information "haves" and "have nots." This is a real and increasing threat not because anyone is trying to monopolize access to information but simply because the costs and constraints faced by open, public institutions are such that more and more people will have to buy highly priced equipment and highly priced private services to get important information.
The communal nature of libraries is threatened by the growing notion that you can get everything you need in your own home, that you don't have to go anywhere to get anything. We already have the image of the lonely nerd sitting before the screen, slowly mutating from a normal human being into a kind of goggle-eyed extension of the screen and the keyboard. Lost is the idea of a gathering place in a community where people of different backgrounds seeking different answers still come together in a place which acquires meaning for the community as a whole. A place of real community, not virtual community. There is, in short, a threat to the concept of a center of knowledge, like a library, as a place.
And finally, the culture of television poses a long-term threat to the culture of serious reading and study. Even among the college-educated, television has already substituted a time-consuming passive spectator habit for the activity of reading; it has substituted mindless spurts of emotion for the train of thought on which the civilized use of the human intellect has always been based.
It seems to me that libraries, librarians, museums, museum-keepers, archivists, other keepers of the artifacts of culture, publishers and publishing houses all have important things to say about these threats. First of all, the flood of unsorted, unverified information will not replace knowledge in the country if librarians succeed in making their own transition from simply being information dispensers to becoming sophisticated knowledge navigators. At the same time, they need the assistance of electronic publishers who must employ the tools that are at hand or being developed to facilitate speedy, successful document navigation. But if that is all libraries, archivists, museums, and publishers do, we will not achieve what has traditionally been done to strengthen democracy and opportunity on a continental scale in a diverse society.
The very flood of unsorted information makes more important than ever the need to organize knowledge and provide ready navigation through it. The excessive specialization and use of guild jargon in academia combined with the deluge of unsorted, electronic information increases the need for discriminating knowledge navigators, both in schools and libraries, who will add the value of judgment and the warmth of human mediation to all this unintelligible material. Editorial houses must assist them, in turn, by providing these navigators with subtle navigation tools, new kinds of sextants and compasses for those who sail the seas of electronic information.
Words and sounds and images are being factored into zeroes and ones in the digitization process. These materials will, in a sense, be dehumanized even more unless they are re- humanized by the knowledge navigator.
Libraries as places will also be needed in the future because human mediation will be needed in locations where both the new technologically dispensed information and the old repositories of knowledge in books are present in the same place. There will need to be human mediation in a shared communal setting, where electronically dispensed information is linked with a storehouse of human memory, with human judgment and with the miscellaneous humanity of the community itself. The role of libraries, becomes more, not less, important.
