Deducing Dunces

I was talking to an Information Scientist the other day (I do actually know a few) and he reacted to my standard rant with a curious observation. After patiently listening to my unfounded theory that deep reading will be lost on future generations, and that their memorization skills will suffer accordingly, my colleague said, “I wonder what sort of creativity will be possible once that brain space becomes available.” After pondering this statement for a while, I realized where I had heard it before: Sherlock Holmes. In Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet, Dr. Watson is shocked that Holmes has no knowledge of the Copernican model of the solar system. Holmes dismisses his own ignorance by using an analogy to compare the human brain to a small storage attic:

It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.

If Holmes and my Information Scientist friend are correct, we must ask then what exactly is “useful” information? Do we free up the millennial’s mind by forsaking deep reading only to fill the vacuum with cute cat videos and 140 character weather updates? Are the Information Scientists actually rewiring the human brain to focus on the trivial? Here at True Archives we answer a resounding “YES!”

A Frontier of Ignorance Mashup

Here in the True Archives world we say that those who get their information from an electronic screen simply lack the deep reading experience that leads to understanding, creativity, and historical perspective. We have no empirical evidence that this is true, but who cares? Lack of authoritative data never stops us from insisting that printed books belong in the archives, under the custodial care of archivists rather than Biblioposers. On rare occasions we can even cite scholars that agree with our hysterical, undocumented claims, like Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, the author of The Printing Press as an Agent of Change:

"When ideas are detached from the media used to transmit them, they are also cut off from the historical circumstances that shape them, and it becomes difficult to perceive the changing context within which they must be viewed.”

So, in other words, as Information Scientists work overtime to marginalize the codex they are destroying the ability of future generations to actually understand what they are reading on the screen! It’s like a whole new frontier of dumbness! Is it not time for the Frontier Archivist to deal with this threat????

Mission Creep

Here in the True Archives world, we know who the "creeps" are that seem to be gaining in power every day; the dreaded Information Scientists. First they came to libraries with their MARC records and their automated catalogs. "Don't worry," they soothingly hissed, "This will just make finding books so much easier for your patrons." But then finding the book itself was no longer the goal. Once the purpose of the computer morphed into finding pixels instead of the codex, the book became an obstacle to be removed. Only the heroic archivist can see through their nefarious plan to eliminate print and paper, and react by expanding repositories to accommodate the book as well as documents. But what if archivists fall asleep at the switch? What if they do not heed the call? Will they awake twenty years from now into a bizarre world of screen-obsessed skim readers? Impossible, you say?????

Like a Fire Bell in the Night

Thomas Jefferson can be faulted for a lot of things (especially things we needn't dwell on here) but his warning quoted in our title today regarding the rending asunder of the United States was prescient to say the least. Here in the True Archives world we constantly preach about the dangers of jettisoning the codex for a brave new world of superficial skim readers, and occasionally we get a few allies in our warnings. The historians at Colby College know the disappearing book portends a disappearing intellect, and that millennials will never learn to craft engaging historical essays without the constant referral of the legacy of those who came before. But the Information Scientist doesn't care about history any more; in fact, he relishes in the creation of an entire generation that thinks, acts, and speaks as if they just landed on the planet. This betrayal of Clio is indeed one of the darkest aspects of the digital age.

Development Dangers

All of us who toil in the vineyards of archives know we are the prime partner of our host institution's fund raising people. After all, who has the coolest stuff in the library? Not the Information Scientists, who can only point to their sterile rows of computer monitors where one may sit and look at the same mind-numbing stuff that everyone else is dawdling over. Our stuff is unique, rare, and sometimes bizarre, but it is always interesting, and that is why the development people love us so much. In the True Archives world, we relish the role we play in helping rich folks find some worthwhile place to stash their disposable income, but at the same time we want to make sure it is THEIR income they are forking over!

Hypocrisy, Thy Name is True Archives

By now it should be obvious that my lone voice, crying in the wilderness of cyberspace, is simply one more example of the abandonment of print. After all, if I was truly devoted to the dissemination of information on paper I would have started a real magazine with the title True Archives. But instead here I sit, using computers to create my mocking covers and then turning to the likes of Twitter to broadcast them as widely as possible. It doesn't matter. In this universe I don't have to be consistent, except when it comes to attacking that ultimate villain, the Information Scientist and his loathsome sidekick, the Biblioposer!

If the Shoe Fits

Biblioposers love to present themselves as hep, a-go-go advocates of the brave new world of Information Science. They loathe the old image of pencil-stuffed-hairbun-wearing dowagers and want to be seen as full partners in cutting edge technologies that are threatening to stupefy the planet. But every once in a while they must play to an audience that remembers books and their profession's former identity as custodians of the codex. When that happens Biblioposers trot out the old symbols again and reclaim their time-honored role. The duplicity becomes more obvious as books disappear to make room for more computers and services that are totally alien to the institutions that Andrew Carnegie so nobly funded. In the True Archives world, we can see past the disguise.

Why Dontcha Just Scan That Old Stuff and Toss It?

Millennials want to be able to push buttons and then say "Look Mom, I am doing research!" We can only imagine the depth of historical inquiries that are based on such "drive-by" analysis of primary source material, but the problem with this approach goes far beyond the superficiality of the produced essays. There is a sense that once archival material becomes digitized, the need to retain the paper original is gone, and that archives simply waste resources by maintaining environmentally controlled storage spaces for ink on dead tree by-product. The evil Information Scientist greedily views our plush reading rooms and controlled storage space as opportunities to expand their empire of personal computer screens. Their arguments for deaccessioning historical documents will only become more strident as time goes on.

FutureWorld

Don't you just love retro science fiction? It seems pretty quaint now to think about early "atomic age" predictions of Godzilla-like monsters rising from a primordial muck activated by radiation. But the Information Scientist is giving us a future just as frightening: a world where attention spans are shortened and literacy is no longer dependent on reading. What would happen to aliens like Michael Rennie in The Day the Earth Stood Still if they came to Earth and found a population so engrossed with their electronic toys that they didn't even notice the visitation?