This article appeared in the print version of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette
and was converted to e-text by [log in to unmask] - more about Pitt's
Information Science program is at http://www.lis.pitt.edu

--- article from Post Gazette 15 November 1998 ---
Sunday - November 15 - Page Turners (Dawn of digitized books ought to
worry
libraries, but does it?) by Michael Newman, staff writer Books as anyone
who's seen Tom Wolfe's latest can attest, are physical objects, and the
libraries that hold them are as real as the gum on the bottom of a reading
room chair.  The library - and the gum of course - will always be there.
But what about the books? Books, as it turns out, are being attacked on
two fronts.  First there is the movement toward so-called "electronic
books" that can be downloaded and read on a special computer.  Then there
is the movement toward digitization, the mere transfer of text from page
to screen.  Electronic books are about as rare as a Stephen King first
edition.  Few such books are currently available, and devices such as the
Rocket eBook, designed for reading them, are expensive at about $500.
Yet some analysts expect that there will be 50,000 such books in the
format within a few years. Digitization, in contrast, is proceeding at the
rate of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pages per day.  On the internet,
1,000 classics are available at the site of Project Gutenberg
(www.gutenberg.net).  Initiatives such as Carnegie Mellon University's
Universal Library Project aim to place "the collection of mankind's works
on the Web "to educate and inspire all of the world's people." At the
University of Pittsburgh the ambitions are not so grand.  "I am not sure
that digitizing everything is very useful anyway," says Elizabeth Shaw,
project manager at Pitt's Digital Research Library Center.  Instead,
librarians at Pitt are focusing on a more manageable chunk of the
collection of mankind's works.  They are working on putting books and
material relating to Pittsburgh's history on the web.  The library's
Historic Pittsburgh Project, which thus far includes a bibliography of 384
books and the full text of 10, was begun last summer.  Researchers hope to
get the full text of all 384 books online eventually, and to add to their
collection in consultation with the community. The site at
digital.library.pitt.edu/pittsburgh/html, features such forgotten and
(perhaps justly) unheralded works as the "History of Colonel Henry Bouquet
and the Western Frontiers of Pennsylvania, 1747-1776," by amateur
historian Mary Carson Darlington.  Then there are such curiosities as the
1907 program of a war-memorial ceremony at Fifth Avenue High School and a
speech, comparing Pittsburgh and Virginia, for a 1916 gathering of the
Chanber of Commerce. Which raises a question:  Besides confirming that the
Chamber of Commerce meetings have always been boring, what exactly is the
use of this stuff? That's part of the adventure according to Pitt's
librarians.  In the brave new digital world, no one really knows how these
materials will be used.  The research library, as the name indicates, is
intended for scholars, but it may well mean that ordinary citizens end up
using it more than anyone. "There are a lot of amateur historians in
Western Pennsylvania" says Doris Hayashikawa, coordinator of the digital
research library.  "I've felt a real connection with the community," even
with such a meager collection. There are also practical concerns.  Part of
the reason Pitt researchers decided to focus on history is that materials
published before 1923 are in the public domain, free of copyright
restrictions.  "Copyright problems are much greater than technological
ones for digital libraries," Hayashikawa says. The work involved in making
a work "digital" in fact, is almost laughably old-fashioned.  Librarians
use optical scanners, which look just like cope machines, and read each
page of a book and turn it into digital text.  For older books that are
more frail, there's a contraption called a "planetary scanner" which
cradles a book so its spine remains intact.  It's a time consuming and
expensive process; at Pitt, the cost of digitizing a work is about $1 per
page, but it is not unusual for cost to exceed $5 per page. Thus the focus
of Pitt's project is on historic books and objects.  Even then, says Phil
Wilkin, director of the project, "we can easily find 800 to 1,000 books to
digitize with no trouble at all." The larger issue, of course, is not
which books to digitize.  It may take a few decades, or even centuries,
but no one really doubts that most books will be on the Web some day.
The larger issue is how this transformation will affect readers, writer,
and not incidentally, librarians.  It is an issue that librarians have
spent more than a little time considering.  Most schools of library
science including Pitt's now offer courses in such fields as
telecommunications policy, database management and computer programming.
Most of them now call themselves school of information science - a more
marketable, and librarians would argue, a more accurate term. Pitt's
School of Information Science dates its roots to 1901 and the
establishment of the Carnegie Library.  It now has 700 plus students, and
professors and researchers at the school are involved in such projects as
taking a computer inventory of every school in the state and building high
speed networks.  It's a long ways from learning the card catalog system
and the correct placement of the "Quiet Please" sign, not that most
librarians don't know that, too).  We're really focused on individuals and
how they use technology," Dean Toni Carbo says.  And as technology makes
more information available, she says, the need for people trained in how
to find and use that information will only increase. Many graduates get
jobs, not in libraries, she says, but in corporate research departments or
in government archives.  "It's a little disturbing, because they are
starting to get paid more than our faculty are."  Still, libraries are at
the core of the school's mission.  And with the rise of digital libraries,
which by definition do not exist in any particular place, are open 24
hours a day, and let readers wander in from any old computer and browse
unsupervised through the stacks ... well aren't librarians just a little
bit worried? Not really, Hayashikawa has noticed that, as more historical
resources are put online, interest in the library's collection has
increased.  "We're finding that usage of our paper resources goes up," she
says.


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