Library: An Unquiet History by Matthew Battles
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Vulnerability of Concentrated Knowledge

Battles’s charming little book on the history of the library is a moral tale, the theme of which he frequently emphasizes. Put simply: the bigger they are, the harder they fall. Until modern times, the largest collections of human knowledge were without exception subject to destruction, either by accident, purposeful vengeance, or governmental directive. The conclusion has to be that although libraries are rather quaint places to hang out and read, they really are an ontologically high-risk institution.

It strikes me that the library is intellectually high-risk as well. Collections must be organized to be of any use. This implies a system of classification by which ‘similar’ items are catalogued and usually stored near one another in the collection. The purpose of such a system is obviously to facilitate research by associating items with each other, typically by subject, author, and epoch. But as every librarian knows, all such classifications are arbitrary. No book neatly fits into a single category and ultimately it is placed in one for the convenience of the librarian not that of the reader or researcher. Battles describe classification systems as “an opaque cabalism of numbers and letters defiant of intuition, replete with the formulaic rigor of ‘scientific’ bibliography.” I think he’s being kind.

Nevertheless very large collections like the Library of Congress tend to exert an organizing power which is a virtual monopoly. The LC system of classification has become an unofficial worldwide standard. Part of the reason for this is economic: it is expensive to train and employ cataloguers who are competent in the use of the arcane coding conventions of the trade. Cheaper by far to buy the cataloguing records of the LC and use them in one’s own less prestigious institution. These lesser entities, including Battles’s Widener Library and Oxford’s Bodleian, may quibble with the arcana of the coding but they don’t mess with the LC’s decision on where a book belongs and how it gets connected to other books.

The economic efficiency of classification, therefore, becomes the ‘vector’ for the spread of the LC system; and also, therefore, for the spread of the errors as well as the arbitrariness it contains. In my own little college library in Oxford, which specializes in philosophy and theology, for example, the LC classifications could only be considered incompetent and were rejected en masse. This was a great annoyance to our Bodleian ‘partners’ who set a formidable standard of anal/obsessive authoritarianism. My suspicion has always been that the arbiters of taste within the LC hierarchy had very little knowledge or interest in either philosophy or theology. I have no reason to believe that their ability in, say, quantum physics or post-modern fiction is any better.

Part of the problem, perhaps the major part, is that librarians themselves have become obsolete ever since the explosion of learning in the early eighteenth century. Leibniz, it is said, was the last man to know everything; he died in 1716. If so, he would have been the last competent cataloguer. Since then, the best any librarian could do would be to venture a vague guess about what is connected to what in the soup of knowledge. But he or she needs a job after all: no libraries, no librarians; no need for classified collections, no need for libraries. QED. But the pretense persists that libraries are necessary. Librarians are the fascist enforcers of the classification scheme. Aside from ensuring quiet and returning books to the stacks, they have no function. A security guard watching a monitor and a robot could serve just as well.

Any modern classification system, particularly because it is fixed in its general structure, is an anachronism. It’s not merely the old fashioned card catalogues which are out of date; it is the basic concept of librarians that collected knowledge is necessary and can be classified, as if it were an expanded version of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, that is simply wrong. These classifications exist not for readers, who can now search for documents by any terms they wish through a half dozen publicly available search engines, but for librarians who otherwise would become either warehouse assistants trained by Amazon or contract programmers.

As one who enjoys the feel, the smell and the craft of books, I am sad that, based on Battles’s narrative and my own experience, the library as an institution is a dead man walking. Its physical vulnerability, the impossibility of maintaining the conceit of a ‘universal’ or even a complete specialized collection, the irrational and unnecessary systems of library classification are compelling facts. Additionally, as Battles suggests, most published material is junk and not worth either the cost of classification or the space to store it. This historical fact becomes more apparent everyday as the internet churns out more and more of it. Do I trust any of the functionaries in any library to decide the toss about what constitutes junk versus intellectually important material? Hardly.

The space of the library might, therefore, still be useful for a quiet read, but the miles of shelving and the skills of an army of cataloguers constitute a depreciating liability not a cultural asset. And maintenance of such an asset is not a very skilled or necessary profession. But there is an upside: WalMart greeters might qualify for new career possibilities.

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