Knowledge for Sale

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Here's why: Too frequently, the trend toward standardization leads to similarly bland collections across the continent. Investors and travelers may find what they need, but where are the street newspapers, pamphlets about squatting and tenants' rights, and titles like Dwelling Portably about how to live out of a car? The stacks burgeon with books on how to manage businesses, but there's far less about how to organize a union or cope with being a rank-and-file employee. Ask young people about libraries. Do they expect to find recordings by indie bands or periodicals like Maximumrocknroll, Punk Planet, Venus, or Razorcake? Ask new immigrants. Can they find recorded music or community papers in their languages? Ask Neo-Pagans. Can they read Reclaiming Quarterly, PanGaia, and newWitch?

True, public libraries have always acted as cultural gatekeepers. In her book Purifying America (University of Illinois Press, 1997), Alison Parker describes the ALA's initial role as "guardians of public morals" in the decades after its founding in 1876. Many librarians at the time scorned popular novels for their morbid influence on readers. To some degree, libraries still function as guardians of public ideology, but they're less likely to be the ones defining what that ideology is. The market and its values now largely determine what the masses read and hear.

Libraries now carry all sorts of popular media, including graphic novels, comics, and popular music. But because librarians tend to purchase whatever gets widely reviewed, their collections bulge with mainstream fare -- works produced by the handful of giant conglomerates that own the big publishing houses and, in fact, dominate global media. The result: Books and items from other sources, especially local ones, get overlooked. They're rendered invisible by the ways that materials are ordered and catalogued in the country's ever more centralized, standardized library system.

Another form of de facto censorship can be traced to the computer, a machine that's usually celebrated for letting knowledge free. As more people come to libraries for Internet access, more money goes to buying new workstations, often at the expense of magazines and books. Many patrons find it hard to believe that the best information is not always on the Web, librarians say, or that search engines like Google can actually perpetuate errors by ranking results by the number of hits. Meanwhile, other reference sources gather dust.

The rise of digital storage has created its own problems. Electronic documents created from scanned texts are often rife with mistakes caused by failures in optical character recognition. The Eserver.org edition of Thoreau's essay "Life Without Principle" converts "scared" into "seared," "honest" into "holiest," and "bridge" into "bride," to name but a few howlers. After generations of scholarly effort to fix corrupted literary texts, the e-book era could delete those gains with a mouse click.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print