Book_Winter2009:Book Winter 2007.qxd 12/15/2008 9:53 AM Page 87

Anthony Grafton

Apocalypse in the stacks? The research
library in the age of Google

Research libraries take up a vast

amount of physical and psychic space.
They inhabit spectacular buildings,
old and new, which occupy prime real
estate in cities and on campuses. They
mount costly, splendid exhibitions of
everything from ancient manuscripts
to 1960s comic books. Every external
clue suggests that they matter deeply,
both to individuals and to institutions
with deep pockets. And the story told
by the buildings is con½rmed and en-
riched by their collections.

American research libraries are the
envy of the world: for complex histor-
ical reasons, our monoglot and often
xenophobic society has created some
of the biggest and most cosmopolitan
collections of texts of every kind the
world has ever known. Do you want

Anthony Grafton, a Fellow of the American
Academy since 2002, is the Henry Putnam
University Professor of History at Princeton
Università. His recent books include “Codex in
Crisis” (2008), “What was History?: The Art
of History in Early Modern Europe” (2007),
and “Christianity and the Transformation of
the Book: Origen, Eusebius, and the Library of
Caesarea” (with Megan Williams, 2006).

to pore over incunabula? You can ½nd
thousands of them in the Northeast at
Harvard’s multiple libraries; in Wash-
ington, D.C., at the Library of Congress;
in the Southwest at the Huntington Li-
brary; and dozens of points between.
Care for Tibetan religion? Your best
bet is Bloomington, Indiana. The man-
uscripts of James Joyce? Shuffle off to
Buffalo. General collections are in some
ways even more amazing. Anyone who
has done research in the greatest Euro-
pean libraries–libraries whose collec-
tions of manuscripts and rare books
dwarf American ones–knows that not
one of them offers an open-stack collec-
tion of books and periodicals from the
last two centuries to rival the top ten
or twelve university libraries in North
America. The American model–easy
to enter and simple to use, powered by
vast resources and vaster ambitions–
has played a major role in the current
dominance around the world of Eng-
lish-language scholarship.

Yet the styles of our great libraries
vary radically, and meaningfully, E
even the quickest look at the contrast
reveals that they are more labile insti-
tutions than they seem. Behind the
glorious facades, a strange kind of war
is being waged: a war between styles
of repository, reading, and research.

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Anthony
Grafton
on the
humanities

Older libraries–the New York and
Boston Public Libraries, Beinecke at
Yale, Butler at Columbia, Widener at
Harvard–and newer ones in the tradi-
tional style, like the Chicago Public Li-
brary and the new library of Rhodes
College in Memphis, proclaim their al-
legiance to ancient cultural traditions.
The names of dead white male authors,
incised in stone, parade across their fa-
cades. Columns, pilasters, Gothic curli-
cues, and Roman triumphal arches rein-
force the sense of solidity, history, alle-
giance to an older world. So, even more,
do their contents: the endless rows of
books, their spines appealingly faded
but still colorful, which march down
the equally endless Borgesian labyrinths
of their stacks.

Newer libraries, by contrast, scream
their modernity. In Seattle and Salt Lake
Città, glass curtain walls surround vast
open spaces. Gleaming banks of com-
puters seem to be everywhere: books,
not so much. The lofty atria are redolent
not with the noble rot of ancient leath-
er and buckram, but with the coffee
and fresh baked goods on offer in their
cafés, whose glitz has supplanted the
seedy glamour of old-fashioned reading
rooms. These newer libraries are cast in
a radically different formal language,
one that speaks not of books, but of in-
formation: pellets of useable data, COME
smooth, precise, and indistinguishable
as the computer screens themselves.
To many observers, perhaps most,
these contrasting aesthetics embody
radically different visions of what a li-
brary is and does. On the one hand,
there is the traditional citadel of man-
uscript and print, closed and guarded,
a hierarchical structure as neatly or-
dered as a vast set of display cabinets
for butterflies. Its expert librarians pin
every document, book, and journal in
the collection to its proper place, IL

precise category in which equally ex-
pert researchers will be sure to ½nd it.
They and their bosses assume that true
knowledge exists between the covers
of books and journals–those books
and journals that have an acknowl-
edged place in the world of scholar-
ship. D'altra parte, there is the
gleaming spaceport of the informa-
tion age, open and accessible, a vast
docking station with thousands of air-
locks, material and virtual. These give
access, for anyone who cares to settle
at one of them, to the vast buzz and
bubble of electronic information. IL
funders and designers of these hyper-
modern libraries believe that the Web
does a better job of ½nding and sorting
information than old-fashioned meth-
ods of classi½cation can. They invite
users to click on a link and plunge in-
to the virtual world, using a search en-
gine rather than a formal catalog to ½nd
what they need. Crumbling leather and
frowning curators confront Google and
Wikipedia; Gormenghast duels with
Starbuck’s. Right now, Starbuck’s
seems to be winning.

These contrasting visions are stereo-

types, Ovviamente: real libraries do not
split neatly into reactionary temples of
leather and vellum and hip, accessible
banks of humming computers–though
many journalists, even a few librarians,
write and speak as if they did. The state-
liest of paneled library halls gleam with
rows of computer screens, and the glitzi-
est of pseudo-malls still contain thou-
sands and thousands of books. But ste-
reotypes matter even when they don’t
match the facts. They frame much cur-
rent thinking and writing about librar-
ies, and they render public discussion,
and the decision-making based on it,
less productive than it should be. IL
ground is really trembling under the

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great libraries; everything about them,
from the form of books to the ways of
readers, is changing rapidly. But there
are more things in heaven and earth
than most of those who write about–
or build–libraries seem to realize.

Most of the recent public discussion,

especially in mainstream magazines,
has concerned the rise of electronic me-
dia–and with good reason. One of the
main things libraries now do for their
readers–and one of the main things li-
brary budgets now pay for–is the mass
of electronic media that has come into
existence in the last twenty years. Me-
dia available to anyone–Wikipedia,
the Google Books project, Worldcat,
Perseus–have given the man on the
Clapham omnibus and his counterpart,
the woman in the Richmond Internet
café, immediate access to a vast range
of material, as diverse in quality as in
kind: cutting-edge de½nitions of math-
ematical terminology and hundred-
year-old articles on historical problems;
½rst editions of rare books from the
nineteenth century and uncritical, un-
reliable editions of classics from the
Renaissance. The Google Library Proj-
ect and Google Book Search–closely
related projects, still in their infancy
–have already transformed the work-
ing life of anyone who does serious hu-
manistic research, especially at schools,
colleges, and universities that cannot
afford large libraries of their own. IL
occasional sight of a scanner’s ½nger or
other body parts in a Google Books im-
age detracts little from the greatness of
what this remarkable company has al-
ready wrought. Sit in a café nowadays
and you can compare not only weed
whackers and auto insurance policies,
but also multiple editions of Thomas
Paine’s Common Sense or Goethe’s Faust.
One thing libraries try to do, according-
ly, is offer enough fast computers and

ef½cient enough WiFi that many visitors
will choose to do their Web research in
the library, rather than in the attractive
alternatives outside it.

Media available to libraries through
purchase offer more: they can display
texts whose originals are guarded by
copyright restrictions or housed, be-
cause of age and fragility, in rare book
collections–and in a polished visual
and technical form far superior to what
Google can offer. jstor and Project
Muse give the reader instant command
of a century’s worth of journal articles
in the humanities and social sciences;
eebo and eco provide full-text access
to tens of thousands of books, many of
them searchable; Alexander Street of-
fers immigrant diaries and letters, nar-
ratives of the 1960s, searchable data on
more than four million Civil War sol-
diers, and Harper’s Magazine from 1857
to 1912–all grain for the mills of genera-
tions of thesis writers. Publishers offer
more and more books in electronic, COME
well as paper, form, and university li-
braries ½nd that their clientele are hap-
py to use these virtual books. This last
shift yields some savings in purchase
prices, not to mention binding, shelv-
ing, and preservation costs. Even the
latest scholarship is now available on
screen. More and more academic jour-
nals offer (to paid subscribers) their
current and past issues in electronic
format, which many academic readers
prefer. Audio and video media prolifer-
ate as well–and immediately become
indispensable.

Every major library does its best to
choose the right array of for-pay media
for its particular set of readers and list
those media in an ef½cient, user-friendly
modo. Within living memory, library cata-
logs were dull, monochrome printed
records of strictly print media, on cards.
Somehow they have blossomed into col-

The research
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Anthony
Grafton
on the
humanities

orful, multilayered guides to sources of
many different kinds, including books–
for many of which they provide thumb-
nail images of dust jackets in living col-
O. They are just the sort of virtual Vir-
gils that students who arrive at college
equipped with laptops, iPhones, E
iPods may be willing to follow into the
Web’s vast heaven and hell of informa-
zione. It’s an astonishing achievement.

Yet this efflorescence of electronic me-
dia on every library’s website comes at a
price. Some of the suppliers of electronic
texts and databases–jstor, muse, E
Alexander Street, for example–willing-
ly cut bargains with poorer institutions,
supplying the materials most urgently
needed at a fraction of what complete
subscriptions would cost. Others are less
generous. Journal publishers, which of-
ten began by offering free electronic ac-
cess to institutional subscribers, now
tend to sell separate electronic subscrip-
zioni, for which they charge as much
as for print. In 2007, Oxford University
Press, Per esempio, listed print and on-
line subscriptions to the historical jour-
nal Past & Present at $245 for institutions in the United States. Institutions that wanted the journal in print or online only paid $234–no great savings there.
A few years ago, Stanford University’s
library system considered moving all of
its subscriptions to journals published
by Elsevier, the world’s largest publisher
in the sciences, to electronic form, only
to discover that the price would be 90
percent of that for the printed journals,
and that the cost would actually rise if
individual subscriptions were canceled.
More important still, the money for
electronic acquisitions and the comput-
ers and WiFi systems needed to access
them comes not from pots of fairy gold,
but from the budgets once devoted to
acquiring books and periodicals. Simi-
larly, the expert time required to choose

among the thousands of available data-
bases, add links to library web pages,
and guide faculty and students must be
provided by a staff that is often declin-
ing in numbers. The brilliant constella-
tion of databases that dazzles any user
of a modern library home page is a cost
center as well as an asset, one that takes
up something like a third of any major
library’s budget.

This would not be so severe a prob-

lem if the printed book and journal
were really the media equivalent of the
whooping crane, delicate and doomed.
Infatti, print is booming. Print-on-
demand technology has brought pro-
duction costs down, and Web-based
marketing has made it possible to lo-
cate buyers for books of very limited
interesse. Thanks to these conditions,
the number of new books published in
various ways is actually rising from one
year to the next, even as the prophets
proclaim their disappearance. Accord-
ing to R.R. Bowker, a major source of
bibliographic information, American
publishers brought out 276,649 new ti-
tles and editions in 2007, as compared
con 274,416 In 2006. This increase is
piccolo, though the total is staggering
enough in itself. Nel frattempo, the num-
ber of “on-demand” and short-run
books rose from 22,000 A 134,773, mak-
ing the projected grand total for 2007
411,422. American university presses
alone are responsible for around
15,000 new titles a year.

Every research library tries to offer
its readers a well-chosen slice of this
enormous pie. But the logistics and eco-
nomics of doing so are extraordinarily
demanding. Library budgets have long
been under strain. Journal prices have
risen, sometimes to stunning heights:
Elsevier charges more than $24,000
for a year’s subscription to one journal,

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Brain Science. Over time, the libraries
that once offered comprehensive jour-
nal collections to faculty in all disci-
plines have had to drop many of their
subscriptions, sometimes for journals
of interest to many professors. Even so,
costs for the subscriptions that remain
have risen so rapidly that little room is
left for maneuver. As the number of new
books continues to increase, the propor-
tion of library resources available for
buying them diminishes. Research li-
braries, most of which now spend in
the vicinity of 40 percent of their bud-
gets on monographs, can no longer pur-
chase all of the offerings from serious
academic presses in North America.
Take into account the growth in publi-
cation overseas, not only in Britain but
in the Euro zone and in Asia, as well as
the fluctuations of exchange rates in re-
cent years, and the ½nancial problems
come into focus.

Tight though the ½nancial constraints
have become, libraries still buy far more
material than they can make available
in the stacks. Every year, tons of books
enter every major collection: more than
a mile’s worth of new printed matter
at Princeton’s Firestone Library; a stag-
gering 5.2 kilometers at Oxford’s Bod-
leian. Finite libraries must ½nd resour-
ces and space not only for the virtual re-
sources on their web pages, but also for
these very heavy, material books, each
of which must be checked in, cataloged,
and put in place. The new books enter
the collection like a massive paper pile
driver. Compact shelving can hold them
at bay for a time; but in the end, floors
can support only so many books, E
campuses have only so much room for
library additions.

Almost everywhere, librarians must
choose between two unsatisfactory pos-
sibilities. One can move the older, rarer
books that are often the glory of a re-

search collection into offsite storage, In
order to make room for the ephemera of
hyperspecialized contemporary scholar-
ship. Or one can store the new books
–which are, Infatti, the likeliest to be
used, especially by students, and repre-
sent current developments in old ½elds
and rising new ones–while the holdings
in the stacks gradually fall out of date
and gather dust. In either case, browsing
will become less and less rewarding over
time.

This pressure seems very unlikely to
abate. Collections grow in a lumpy, un-
even way, hard to predict and impossible
to control. But one rule of academic life
in the humanities persists: to win tenure
at a college or university that sees itself
as setting high standards, one must nor-
mally publish a book–even if it will ½nd
three hundred or fewer buyers, and still
fewer readers. At the least, one must
publish articles in refereed journals.
So long as this system prevails (and de-
spite the noble efforts of the Modern
Language Association leadership a few
years ago to modify it, it stands intact)
books and articles will continue to be
written. Holdings in most subject areas,
accordingly, will grow, and parts of them
will have to be moved, pushing one an-
other around the library.

The vast American open-stack collec-
tions functioned, historically, not only as
repositories, but as memory theaters for
advanced graduate students and faculty.
Nowadays the spatial organization of
books and journals shifts so often and so
quickly that easy browsing has itself
passed into the realm of memory. Li-
brarians, in other words, not only have
to master an electronic universe that
expands with stunning rapidity, Ma
must also manage a print world that
continues to dismiss its obituaries as
greatly exaggerated.

The research
library in
the age of
Google

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Anthony
Grafton
on the
humanities

Many other factors contribute to

making the head librarian’s life dif½-
cult, and at least one of them calls for
comment here. The cultural climate
within universities–and outside them
–has changed. American libraries, Sopra
the last century, have built up not only
vast general collections of circulating
books and periodicals, but also world-
class special collections, ranging from
the rarest of manuscripts and printed
books to materials that were once seen
as ephemera but now attract the inter-
est of scholars–children’s books, for
esempio. Many ½elds of scholarship
now seen as vital–from art history
to East Asian studies–are sustained at
numerous universities by specially en-
dowed, separate collections. Tradition-
alleato, these collections grew not only
piece by piece, but also wholesale, COME
alumni who bought books or manu-
scripts gave or sold their collections
to their old universities. A shared love
of rare books and manuscripts provid-
ed an element of continuity in univer-
sity life and promoted collaboration
among librarians, scholars, and alum-
ni. University administrations made
clear that they valued these activities,
not least for the international prestige
that they conveyed: just think of Yale’s
investment in James Boswell.

Special collections, circulating and
non-circulating, continue to grow and
expand into new ½elds. In every gener-
ation, scholars and librarians realize
anew that one decade’s ephemera con-
stitute the next decade’s archive: wit-
ness the splendid collection of science
½ction at Syracuse University and the
extensive archives of zines at Barnard
and Buffalo, each of them flanked by
more traditional precious materials.
Meanwhile the history of books and
readers, an interdisciplinary ½eld that
came into being in the 1970s and 1980s,

has exploded. Scholars and advanced
students in many ½elds–classics, com-
parative literature, English, German,
history, Romance languages–have real-
ized that they can learn an enormous
amount from studying “material texts,"
the actual manuscripts and editions in
which classic and non-classic texts cir-
culated. Practitioners of this new form
of scholarship have taught us how books
took shape in scriptoria and printing
houses, traced the networks of agents
and booksellers who brought them to
the public, and recreated, from mar-
ginal annotations and other traces of
many kinds, the ways in which readers
responded to the books before them.
Electronic media play a role in the his-
tory of books, but the original manu-
scripts and early printed books play a
bigger one. Every one of them, it turns
fuori, is distinctive, thanks to the clues it
offers about early owners and readers.
And they can’t all be digitized.

University administrators praise inter-
disciplinary scholarship. But they show
less support for the centers where this
new kind of interdisciplinary humanis-
tic research takes place than did their
predecessors, who saw them simply as
deposits of human culture at its best,
a generation or two ago. Support for
special collections rarely seems gener-
ous. Recently the Stanford administra-
zione, pressed to provide new space on
campus and severely constrained by lo-
cal zoning, decided to demolish the li-
brary that had housed the university’s
superb East Asian collections and store
the vast majority of the books and peri-
odicals off-site. Faculty who protested
were assured that the half-million books
in many languages would all be available
in digital form–a Micawberish promise
at best, given that some of the alphabets
in question cannot as yet be reliably digi-
tized, and that copyright protection ex-

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tends to Asia. It is hardly in the national
interest–or Stanford’s–to make it hard-
er to study Asia, at the outset of the Chi-
nese century. Yet the decision made
sense to administrators, who had to
be reminded by scholars and librari-
ans that, as an eloquent blog post
put it,

[IO]mmersion in a specialized library
with a cohort of friends, colleagues,
intellectual critics and others around
you is an exceptionally good way to
learn and to do research. When shared
“public space,” with the resources at
hand that enrich, identify and contrib-
ute to the de½nition of that space, È
lost, the public, and private, discourse
that that space engenders is diminished.

Libraries, Poi, face enormous tech-

nical and economic pressures, Quale
are changing them in important and
apparently irresistible ways: any plan
to recon½gure or rebuild great librar-
ies must take the full range of factors
into account. Yet the transformation
over the last three or four decades in
the public that uses libraries has been
even more dramatic–or so, almeno,
much commentary suggests. One shift
seems particularly radical: the move
away from library research by natural
scientists and most social scientists.
Forty years ago, scientists, natural and
social alike, still depended on librar-
ies for journals, which published up-
to-date data and novel arguments.
In some ½elds, such as mathematics,
monographs continued to be published,
even as they disappeared from others.
In most, the article was the coin of the
realm. Whatever the preferred form
of publication, Anche se, library work
remained a familiar daily routine for
thousands of university professors,
research associates, and graduate stu-

dents whose professional interests
were not, in any central way, humanis-
tic or historical.

Between the 1960s and the present,
the system of scienti½c publication in
quantitative ½elds has undergone a
series of revolutions. Circulated pre-
prints, made possible by the Xerox
machine, turned journals in many
disciplines into archives rather than
sources of fresh data. And if the Xerox
machine slew its thousands, the com-
puter slew its ten thousands. In 1991,
Paul Ginsparg created the arXiv pre-
print server for high-energy physics.
Within a year, arXiv became the stan-
dard mode for information diffusion
nella fisica, and it has since grown to
include astronomy, computer science,
mathematics, nonlinear science, quan-
titative biology, and statistics, doing
to the photocopied preprint–to say
nothing of the formal journal–what
the power loom did to the previously
dominant handloom.

The transformation is real. In one nat-
ural science department at Princeton, UN
colleague tells me, all members, as soon
as they rise in the morning, make a point
of reading articles newly posted on the
Web. Later in the morning, informazione
about these, and evaluations of their re-
sults, circulate over coffee. Data and
theses move almost instantly from uni-
versity to university and continent to
continent. From physicists to computer
scientists, those who work in quantita-
tive ½elds have developed new routines
of daily work. They are utterly depen-
dent on computer access to their virtual
work space, and many–though not all
–declare themselves independent of
material collections of books or jour-
nals. In this new system, so it seems, li-
braries have lost their claim to be a uni-
versal good, either in academic or in so-
cial communities. Invece, they serve,

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Anthony
Grafton
on the
humanities

for the most part, a limited public, E
one with limited influence within the
university: practitioners of the humani-
ties and the softer social sciences. More
than one great university has recognized
this fact by renaming its main collection
a humanities library.

Journal subscriptions that library bud-
gets pay for remain vital for some sectors
of the science community, even if actu-
al reading usually takes place on screen.
Some social scientists continue to be
dedicated consumers and producers of
books: the best empirical work on the
current condition of the academic re-
search library has been done by the Chi-
cago sociologist Andrew Abbott. On the
whole, Anche se, humanists form the ma-
jority of those who still see the library
as vital in their day-to-day working lives,
especially the smaller group of human-
ists that librarians label, a little worry-
ingly, “heavy users,” most of whom are
either faculty members or students com-
pleting dissertations.

Even committed humanists, Tuttavia,

often use the library in very different
ways than their predecessors did–and
these changes, pure, have had a powerful
effect on the institution. Forty years ago,
a scholar who wanted to do intensive re-
search almost always spent part of his or
her day physically in the library. Copying
machines were few and expensive, E
the glossy pages they produced were ug-
ly and fragile. More important, the li-
brary held all the keys to the kingdom
of information, as well as the empire of
texts in its stacks. Bibliographies, refer-
ence books, critical editions, journal ar-
ticles: the library housed all of them.
One had to go there not only to carry
out a research project, but even in order
to plan it. Most graduate students re-
garded the library as their central work-
place and spent long days in its stacks
and reading rooms. But professors still

active in research also spent hours in
the library, reading and taking notes
on new periodicals and other essential
materials that they could not borrow.
When opportunity allowed, senior and
junior scholars also spent real time
working in non-circulating collections
like the New York Public Library, IL
Newberry in Chicago, and the Hunting-
ton in California–libraries whose poli-
cies made contact among readers at dif-
ferent stages in their careers unavoid-
able. In those days, the library was some-
thing like a craft workshop for human-
ist. Apprentices and masters carried
out some of the same tasks, side by side,
and learning to do research and write it
up had a personal element.

In the 1980s and after, the personal
computer gave its owners a newly pow-
erful tool, one that could be used, for
the ½rst time, to compile materials,
store them, and work them up into ½n-
ished articles and books. But the per-
sonal computer was an unwieldy beast,
and usually lived in an of½ce or home
study. Over time, more and more schol-
ars made the room in which their pc
glowed a permanent base camp for rela-
tively quick incursions into the library.
As the computer developed more and
more capabilities–as it became the cen-
tral device of scholarly communication
and a node in worldwide information
networks–scholars became less and
less likely to spend long periods in the
library. Why take notes by hand, only
to have to transcribe them on the key-
board? Books could be taken out; jour-
nal articles, more and more, could be
downloaded. Rare and unpublished
texts could be scanned. Professors–
even those who do the most intensive
humanistic research–became an un-
usual sight in library stacks.

Many other factors pushed or pulled
the professoriate, and almost all of them

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involved moving away from the library.
The floods of money for conferences and
workshops, humanities centers, and vis-
iting professorships that irrigated the
humanities academy in the late 1980s
and after cut into scholars’ time for
home library visits. The coffee shop
–usually, in the last few years, equip-
ped with WiFi–offered an alluring
alternate workplace for those who ac-
cepted the laptop’s promise of libera-
tion from the messy desk and ringing
phone. And the rise of electronic re-
sources completed the job. Nowadays,
humanists in many ½elds can do rigor-
ous, well-documented work without
needing to consult a single physical
journal–or, Infatti, a book. Even those
humanists who continue to use books
and print periodicals intensively–and
many do–generally carry them to their
workplace. Graduate students are more
likely than professors to camp in librar-
ies, each of them making his or her lap-
top the center of a mobile study. Ma
Essi, pure, now have previously incon-
ceivable resources at their disposal on
their own computers.

The results of all these developments
are paradoxical. Scholars and students
demand, and consume, books and oth-
er print materials in great quantities–
greater than ever at my university, E,
I am sure, at many others. The collec-
tive interest in scholarship and its results
is more intense than ever, and the big
non-circulating collections continue
to attract plenty of readers, particolarmente,
though not only, those to whom they
provide fellowship support. But the act
of scholarship, which used to be, A
some considerable extent, public and
collective, has been privatized. Librar-
ies cost more, their future provokes
more discussion, and their collections
receive more use than in the past. Phys-
ical libraries, Anche se, seem, particolarmente

at universities, to be turning from hon-
eycombs of cells, a busy reader work-
ing away in each one, into magni½cent
Flying Dutchmen of the mind, Quale
sail along, brightly lit and empty–or,
in other cases, into enormous Internet
cafés, which purchase users by offering
them fast connections, coffee, and heat-
ing or air conditioning as the season de-
mands.

The larger culture from which students

now come to college in the ½rst place,
and by which graduate students are also
formed, has also dramatically reshaped
readers’ habits. Few come as dedicated
readers. Per esempio, a graduate stu-
dent at Princeton, where I teach, asked
the students in the discussion sections
he ran last spring how many of them
had read four books for pleasure in the
last month:

Bewildered eyes stared at me, but no-
body raised a hand. “OK, so how about
three books?” I persisted, but silence
prevailed. When I got down to one, UN
student hesitantly admitted to have read
something. That was one student in a
class of 13 bright and promising under-
graduates. The other classes I taught
responded to this question similarly.

A number of other colleges and uni-
versities probably attract larger num-
bers of bookish students than Prince-
ton does, and a number of Princeton
students I know could have answered
immediately with a list of titles. Ma
the change in the general climate is
clear to most humanities professors.

The nature of of½cial reading–read-

ing done for academic purposes–has
also changed. Negli anni '60, many stu-
dents came to college already trained
in the ways of library research. A well-
educated freshman would already have
written term papers and learned how

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Anthony
Grafton
on the
humanities

to ½nd his or her way from bibliogra-
phy to sources, sources to interpreta-
tive studies, and interpretative studies
to reviews. In the course of doing fur-
ther research at the university level,
Inoltre, the student automatically
became acquainted with the editions,
journals, and other technical literature
standard in his or her ½eld. Writing it-
self depended on note-taking, and note-
taking on the close reading of whole
texts. It was a short step from looking
up an article in a new journal to brows-
ing in adjacent volumes, and another,
equally short step to browsing in relat-
ed journals; a short step from ½nding
the critical edition of a source and cit-
ing it to ½nding commentaries and
other directly relevant publications.

All this was made easier, though no
less time-consuming, by the fact that
the stacks could still accommodate the
bulk of library collections: browsing
in any good library amounted to a pret-
ty good literature search. Research,
in this old-fashioned, material form,
acquainted the student with multiple
styles of scholarly work and publica-
zione, automatically and without extra
effort. Most MAs and PhDs ended up
in possession not only of stacks of neat-
ly written ½le cards, but also of a solid,
if tacit, command of one or more disci-
plines.

Nowadays, as a recent study cospon-

sored by the British Library and a re-
search center at University College
London has shown, students arrive at
universities with a very different set
of skills and a very different orienta-
zione. Their primary source of informa-
tion on life, the universe, and every-
thing is the Web, and they normally
seek information not by making a re-
search plan but by entering words in
a search engine–usually a non-special-
ist one like Google or Yahoo, Piuttosto

than the more focused engines and
databases available on their university
library web pages. Once these students
arrive at the website they seek, more-
Sopra, they do not linger for intensive
study. The average amount of time
spent with an e-journal is four min-
utes; with an e-book, eight minutes.
This is reading, but reading of a par-
ticular kind: goal-oriented, focused
with laser-like intensity on particular
bits of information, rather than on the
larger nature of the text or problem
under consideration. One of the eu-
phemistic terms for this sort of read-
ing, “power skimming,” reveals the
nature of the enterprise.

At one extreme, this way of doing ac-
ademic research leads to simple plagia-
rism, to the composition and submis-
sion of papers that are nothing more
than mosaics of downloaded snippets.
More serious is the larger vision of hu-
manistic work embodied in this regime
of study: texts of any kind, primary or
secondary, are treated as agglomerations
of information rather than as coherent
wholes. Students using contempora-
ry tools can, and do, compile stunning
bibliographies of scholarly articles with-
out having any idea of what methods
or principles prevail in the journals in
which they ½rst appeared. They can de-
ploy impressive statistical and textual
informazione, obtained by search, con-
out ever reading the texts analyzed. IL
power of search, which increases prac-
tically by the day, exempts them from
learning how to pick a way through the
reefs and shoals of the library and en-
ables them to think they are making ef-
fective, critical use of materials of ev-
ery kind, which are in fact torn from
the context that is vital to critical judg-
ment. This is the regime from which
our future graduate students will emerge
–from which they are emerging–a re-

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gime in which the stacks will genuinely
resemble a labyrinth, at least in the eyes
of new users: an overwhelming maze
of materials for which they have no Ari-
adne string.

Libraries apparently face at least four

crises at once: a ½nancial crisis caused
by the proliferation of resources of all
kinds; a spatial crisis caused by the
continuing, massive production of
print (only one major research library
system, that of the University of Chi-
cago, is currently trying to house all
of its holdings, with a few exceptions,
under one roof on its main campus);
a use crisis caused by the transforma-
tion in scholars’ working habits; E
an accessibility crisis caused by the
same changes in the larger ecology of
texts and reading from which we be-
gan. It’s not quite apocalypse in the
stacks, but it’s certainly a time of
shaking, if not of breaking, what had
seemed permanent institutions of un-
questioned value.

No royal road leads to a solution for
any of them, much less a solution for
all four. But one simple recommenda-
tion may help a variety of institutions
½nd working solutions to at least some
of these problems. It’s time, as many
libraries on campuses and in cities have
realized, for planning to become a col-
lective activity, one in which all stake-
holders play a role, rather than a top-
down process. The fragmentation of
knowledge is already far advanced and
will become more acute with time. IL
dif½culty of predicting the future–of
knowing, Per esempio, what working
conditions might actually suit readers
and ½t their equipment ten years on–
grows greater by the day, and even the
hippest architect has no idea how re-
search or study conditions will change
over time. The only solution–a partial

one–is to bring the collective intelli-
gence of the swarm to bear on the hive
it used to inhabit, and still needs.

In doing so, we would be going–as
scholars and readers sometimes should
–back to the future. The great research
libraries that took shape in the late nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries were the
result of active discussion and collabora-
tion among administrators, scholars,
and librarians. Presidents tempted bril-
liant professors to leave one universi-
ty for another by the promise of excel-
lent collections and large budgets with
which to make them even better. Often
no threats were necessary since all par-
ties agreed on the vital importance of
the enterprise. Widener, the greatest
of academic libraries, was planned and
shaped by a historian, Archibald Cary
Coolidge, who collected materials not
only for scholars in existing ½elds, Ma
also for new areas where he hoped that
Americans would develop interest and
competence.

Similar stories can be told about the
smaller, but still extraordinary, collec-
tions that dot the American landscape.
If we hope to recon½gure the ways we
do research and the resources we use,
we need to convince university admin-
istrators that this enterprise still mat-
ters, and we need to recreate the kinds
of discussion and decision-making that
went on a century or half a century ago.
Whether your library is marble or
bicchiere, overweeningly classical or preen-
ingly contemporary, it’s time to bring li-
brarians and scholars, planners and us-
ers together; to provide data so that all
parties understand what resources exist
and what problems threaten them, COME
they try to strike the elusive balance be-
tween needs and possibilities. Only by
doing this can we hope to fashion what
we now need: libraries that can manage
the tsunamis of new books and data-

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land of the great democratic library
for generations to come. Fail to make
them and we really may ½nd ourselves
confronted by what are now only spec-
tral possibilities: Scylla and Charybdis,
Starbucks and Gormenghast.

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Anthony
Grafton
on the
humanities

bases in ways that serve their readers;
libraries that can continue to lead the
world in range and depth; libraries that
can regain their place as craft ateliers of
scholarship and that can allure a larger
number of students into discovering the
seedy glamour of the printed book. Stan-
ford faced up to the dissent provoked by
the decision to demolish the East Asian
library in the classic way, by impanel-
ing a task force. Its report, now circu-
lating on the Web, contains some sur-
prises. Professors in many ½elds, Esso
turns out–including the natural sci-
ences–believe that browsing remains
a vital, irreplaceable form of research.

A research library, the Stanford report
suggests, should provide not only phys-
ical space where scholars can pursue re-
search in books, but also virtual space
where they can collect, store, and exploit
electronic resources–an ingenious way
to pull humanists, teachers, and students
alike back into public workspace, in an
environment that has the open, collec-
tive quality of a laboratory, but meets
the needs of researchers who work with
texts, images, and sounds. Over time,
½nally, scholars and scientists should
collaborate to devise a form of virtual
browsing that combines the qualities of
the traditional experience with access to
the full range of electronic sources.

These suggestions may or may not all
½nd con½rmation elsewhere, and even
if they all do, they will not solve all the
technical problems–much less restore
the shaky foundations of a culture of
books and reading. But all of them rep-
resent welcome additions to what has
become a shadow duel between stereo-
types. More collective efforts of this
kind, efforts that draw on the experi-
ence and intelligence of library profes-
sionals, and that spring from the actu-
al experience of scholars and students,
might enable America to remain the

Dedalo Inverno 2009
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