I came across an interesting article in the Chronicle of Higher Education recently. The title is “5 Myths About the ‘Information Age” by Robert Darnton. The author points out that there is a lot of confusion about the nature of the “so-called information age” which has lead to a “collection of misconceptions.”
Myth 1 “The book is dead.”
Wrong: More books are produced in print each year than the previous year. One million new titles will appear worldwide in 2011. The latest figures indicate a healthy market. The book business is booming in developing countries like China and Brazil. One nontraditional growth area is self-publishing authors and “micro-niche” print-on-demand enterprises. The population of books is increasing, not decreasing.
Myth 2 “We have entered the information age.”
Every age is an age of information, each in its own way, and according to the media available at the time. It is true that the modes of communication are changing rapidly, but misleading to construe that change is unprecedented.
Myth 3 “All information is now available online.”
Only a tiny fraction of archival material has ever been read, much less digitized. Some judicial decisions and legislation, state and federal, have never appeared on the Web. Google estimates that 129,864,880 different books exist in the world, and it claims to have digitized 15 million of them, which is about 12 percent. How will it close the gap while production continues to expand at a rate of a million new works a year? How will information in non-print formats make it online en mass? Half of all films made before 1940 have vanished.
Myth 4 “Libraries are obsolete.”
Throughout the country librarians report that they have never had so many patrons. Libraries supply books, videos, and other material as always, but they also are fulfilling new functions: access to information for small businesses, help with homework and afterschool activities for children, and employment information for job seekers. The reduction of want ads in printed newspapers makes the library’s online services crucial for the unemployed. Libraries will continue to provide books, and will function as nerve centers for communicating digitized information at the neighborhood level.
Myth 5 “The future is digital.”
True but misleading. The information environment will be overwhelmingly digital, but the prevalence of electronic communication does not mean that printed material will cease to be important. Manuscript publishing actually expanded after Gutenberg and continued to thrive for the next three centuries. Radio did not destroy the newspaper; television did not kill radio; and the Internet did not make TV extinct. In each case, the information environment became richer and more complex.
Lana Ewell
Library Director
