Savings?

Savings?

All of these changes, though, did not result in any actual dollar savings– technology generally does not save us any money in the short term. Its value is in the transformative power those expenditures hold for the future. If,for example, libraries had advanced technologically over the last two decades to the same slight degree they did from 1910 to 1930, what would they look like today?

Would there be more books on the shelves? Possibly, but there is only so much room on the shelves, and if we were buying that many more books we'd need to be doing an awful lot of weeding. Building expansions and off-site storage are expensive too. We would not be able to supplement our monograph collection by purchasing electronic products such as Early English Book Online covering thousands of English language texts from 1475-1700, or the English Poetry database that contains over 165,000 poems written between 600 and 1900AD.

Would there be more journals in the stacks? Doubtful, since once again the shelves can only hold so much. If we consider compact shelving a pre-existing technology, it is still another expensive solution. Besides, the rate of inflation of print serial subscriptions has risen much faster than library funding, which would have resulted in rampant cancellations. We would not be able to take advantage of any of the more-bang-for-your-buck electronic full-text journal packages currently available.

If a user had a research question, he would have to come into the library building and ask the beleaguered librarian to try to help him find an "old school" answer. "Let's go through Psychological Abstracts volume by volume, write down a list of articles and take the list to that video terminal to see if we still subscribe to any of the journals you find." "Well if you want price quotes on that stock for the past two months, you can go to through microfilmed Wall Street Journal day by day." "You want Census Data from the 2000 Census? Gosh, that's on the Web. Sorry, can't help you here."Overly dramatized? Sure, and in many instances of deep research, the process will always be an extensive, laborious process, but technology has greatly sped things up for our benefit.

What is even more likely in this scenario is that there would be even fewer current print sources on the shelves than there actually are now because library budgets would have been severely slashed as a punishment for libraries'resistance to the changes going on around them. Such a library would be spectacularly ineffective as a service. Since libraries have long had a tendency to be marginalized in an organization during the best of times, a library that hadn't gotten with the electronic flow would have been marginalized out of existence.