Naylor: Eye of the Storm
Naylor: Eye of the Storm
t seems such a short time ago since it was low on the horizon. It was still difficult, then, to be sure the seascape was changing. The burgeoning expansion of electronic communication had small beginnings in the late '60s and '70s with
automated library in-house systems and online database searching. Even as recently as three years ago, we were still arguing about those minor tropical storms called Archie, Gopher, Veronica and WAIS. Now, World Wide Web stands massively higher than the other technologies, the defining symptom and possibly the continuing cause and focal point of an information hurricane. Will World Wide Web still dominate the librarian's vision five years from now?
It would be a brave person who would confidently bet that it would not have been succeeded by some further and even more defining statement of the technology. Even if it has, by then, become just a part of the history of the technology of information communication, we can be sure that the wind of change will still be blowing strong in the librarian's world.
Out there on the ocean, when the wind blows stronger, there 
are some sailing ships that head for harbour, whether from timidity or following a shrewd appraisal of their own seaworthiness. Others, however, go looking for the eye of the storm, some prompted by foolhardiness, but others knowing that where the wind blows the strongest, the fastest passages are made.
There is so much apocalyptic talk among librarians about the meaning of the Internet for the future of libraries.
At the same time, there are plenty of courageous spirits among us whose nostrils are flaring at the smell of opportunity. We need to take a closer and more considered look at this new primal force to see whether a better understanding will help more of us to confront the threat more wisely or even seize the opportunity more forthrightly.
Something seems to have happened in volume terms. In the late '80s, the then Bibliographic Services Division of the British Library was warning us that we could be submerged by the growing flood of published literature. The graph recording titles published annually seemed to be pushing inexorably towards the 100,000 a year mark and beyond. Maybe it still is. The potential of desktop publishing threatened to burst that barrier quicker and more decisively. Now the stories of exponential growth are all about the World Wide Web, its connected terminals numbered in increasing millions, its information resources already beyond counting. I used to be confident about the practical limits on human intellectual creativity; how could we read or write much more, since no miracle could possibly multiply the hours of our lives? I'm less confident now.
What the Web has done is to merge two territories of communication. Once, I talked with my friends in a small enclosure, but had to enter the great terrain of print on paper to communicate my thoughts more widely. Now every immediate thought can be shared with the world almost as easily as with the local barman. The fear of being overwhelmed by the sheer quantity is an atavistic one, but Malthus wasn't entirely right (nor entirely wrong for that matter).
It was said in the '60s that Chemical Abstracts was growing so fast that, in the early twenty-first century, the annual quantity of its umpteen copies would weigh more than the whole world, but over time that remarkable threat to the basic laws of physics seems to have reached a compromise with reality. So let's all breathe deeply and slowly and reassure one another that we, and this startling electronic fecundity, will probably come to terms gradually, just as happened in the centuries following the eclipse of the scriptoria by Gutenberg's generation.
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