In preparing this lecture I decided to follow Montaigne's advice and abstain from talking too seriously about serious matters, and it occurred to me that Swift's little allegory might serve as a convenient fiction for my purpose. For those who remember their Swift it provides a shroud of ambiguity which seriousness needs these days. It does not really matter how you interpret the players in the quarrel (Temple, Wotton, Bentley, Swift and Fontenelle) or even the implicit presence - off-stage as it were - of the Royal Society upon which so many hopes were pinned. Some of the deliberations and experiments proposed in the Philosophical Transactions were plainly ridiculous, but we can understand these a little better if we remember that the founding fathers were careful to arrange the inauguration of their Society in conformity with the predictions of the astrologer Flamsteed, a frequent contributor to its proceedings.
We do not know precisely the occasion for Swift's immortal mock-heroic pamphlet, though it may well have been the publication in 1697 of Richard Bentley's single-sheet proposal for the establishment of a properly managed Royal Library, a theme which has its origin in another proposal - by John Dee to Queen Mary. The allegory draws its strength from a theme as old as knowledge: the ordeal of ideas which evolve through all the stages whereby darkness becomes light; a re-enactment of the Greek story of the war between the gods and the giants. Reverence for the ancients has waxed and waned at various times in the history of Europe, and usually with quite different consequences. Thus, the rediscovery of the "Master" Aristotle in the thirteenth century led Aquinas to the conviction that Christianity and Aristotle were in perfect harmony, and the dogmatic mind found comfort in an intellectual apostle of the strictest sort. And so the great architect of logic, dialectic, metaphysics and natural science became the unquestioning hero of both Church and University. But, just as these two institutions began to feel secure, the ‘Doctor Mirabilis’ Roger Bacon was busily reminding a baffled Europe that there was more in the universe to discover than there ever was hinted at in Aristotle. "It is most wretched to be using what has been attained, and never look to that which is to be attained." Especially, he added, when our knowledge of the ancients is derived from corrupt and obscure translations. A rebellion against scholasticism of another sort found expression in his contemporary Dante's daring preference for Italian instead of Latin.
It is tempting to see in Georgius Gemistus (referred to in his time as Pletho) the source for the debate about the ancients and the battles which ensued between the followers of Aristotle and those of Plato in Florence at the court of the Medici in which the "moderns", Ficino and Pico, were to play such a crucial role. In spite of the passion for "truth" which characterised both men, a real understanding of Plato had still not been achieved when the sixteenth century dawned. Progress, as with the classicism of the thirteenth century, was still a backward-looking hope. In Northern Europe the "new age", which eventually dissipated itself in religious controversy, and a general optimism about the ways in which a knowledge of the past could sustain hopes for a progressive future found its most persuasive expression in Erasmus whose vision of the Republic of Letters and the exercise of intelligence was to be thwarted by the Protestant revolution in Germany led by Luther. The bloodbath which followed - and which Erasmus had predicted - engulfed Europe in civilian discord and frustrated the emancipation from uncritical dependence on the ancients which had been the dream of the humanists.
For a new voice, arbitrating between the ancients and the moderns, we must turn to Montaigne whose affection for the former is based on nothing more intellectually challenging than pure delight and a feeling of companionship with spirits as present as they were indubitably past:
I have been bred up from infancy with these dead. I had knowledge of the affairs of Rome long before I had any of those of my own house; I knew the Capitol and its plan before I knew the Louvre; and the Tiber before I knew the Seine. ... They are all dead; so is my father as absolutely dead as they, and is removed as far from me and life in eighteen years as they are in sixteen hundred; whose memory, nevertheless, friendship and society, I do not cease to hug and embrace with a perfect and lively union."
Montaigne's delight in, and admiration for the ancients is wholly without servitude. The end of all knowledge is quite simply to better understand man: "the common and human model, without miracle, without extravagance."
What would we give now for a voice like Montaigne's! As so many times in the past the opposing armies are set to do battle, and in the study and importance of books there are those who would persuade us that the moderns have won; that paper will give way to electronics; that librarianship as we have known it for a hundred years is as dead as Aristotelian science; that the library has become less a nursery of knowledge than a play-room in which those with antiquarian obsessions indulge their fantasies and must be transformed into electronic warehouses invisibly connected to all other warehouses; that there can be no real progress until every scrap of paper has been digitised and rendered tractable to electronic manipulation and distribution via the telecommunication networks being built in space. If this were so - and I seriously doubt that it is - then our intellectual future will be comprehensivly entrusted to engineers. That may be a fine prospect for faculties of engineering, and the makers of electronic devices on which the librarian is increasingly dependent, but it might have serious consequences for a balanced view of who we are, where we came from, and where we are going.
Montaigne dismissed the physician writing about war as an absurdity, just as he dismissed those who uncritically follow others: "Who follows another, follows nothing, finds nothing, nay is inquisitive after nothing." Without bothering to examine the basis for our contemporary obsession with computers and the interminable novelty of every new piece of software which promises undreamt-of opportunities to perform a variety of tasks simultaneously we have decided to reconstruct our libraries on a new model. That model presupposes that the information which libraries have traditionally supplied is somehow more meaningful in electronic form, and therefore capable of being stored, interrogated and transmitted to any part of the globe. Now, it has to be admitted that some kinds of information undoubtedly benefit from universal and near-instantaneous access: we would not be able to book an airplane ticket in London for a journey from Singapore to Djakarta if this were not so. But the half-life of such information is trivially small and the evidence for the transaction can be discarded after a period generally prescribed by law. But the world's research libraries, archives and record centres contain a vast amount of printed and manuscript information the half-life of which we are unable to predict. And while we hear a great deal today about multi-tasking and multi-functional devices, such as the digital copier, the research library remains the only available model enabling the simultaneous consultation of a wide variety of materials. It seems to me an irony that would not have escaped Swift that at precisely the point in time when scholarship has begun to accept the principle of the unity of knowledge and the value of interdisciplinary research we are bent upon its fragmentation. The battle facing the books today has nothing to do with arguments between Plato and Aristotle or Paganism and Christianity: it has to do with the survival of the books themselves.
Of course it is possible to digitise and index the contents of all the world's important libraries and archives. The question we must answer is, who would benefit from such a colossal enterprise? Commerce or knowledge? Are libraries in the control of visionaries or are they in the control of irresistible economic forces which we ignore at our peril? That is not an easy question to answer.
We have escaped from the tyrrany of the task-specific, and therefore dimension-specific devices associated with the Industrial Revolution. The manufactory, with its dependence upon labour to run the machines, has all but disappeared in the developed countries: we have no taste today for servility and the offensive consequences of having to do what machines controlled by computers do better. And, as we all know, it is possible to program computers to perform an amazing variety of tasks. It is, without doubt, an approximation of the `universal machine'. But there remain a host of socially necessary tasks which machines cannot yet perform. One of those socially necessary tasks is undoubtedly research: by which I mean a steady, discriminating and intelligent assessment of such evidence as we have about whatever it is that interests us. I have deliberately avoided the word `rational' because it is quite possible that there are `non-rational' explanations for some things, and while science has both its limits - and its limitations - there seems to be no limit to what the mind can propose or create. What it is that nourishes this astounding ability has troubled every thinker for thousands of years, and must have caused surprise even to primitive man when he first discovered he could draw and make weapons. But if we do not easily understand this phenomenon of mind still less do we understand what it is that drives curiosity. Truth, I suppose, is the answer generally given; but that presupposes that there is such a thing as truth. If it does exist, why have we failed to find it? Why is it that every time we propose an answer to a question the answer raises other questions we never even considered? Does truth lurk in the books and manuscripts our libraries are filled with? Or are we condemned to search forever for what does not exist? These are questions of some weight.
In his remarkable little book The Limits of Science Sir Peter Medawar tried to address what is essentially a metaphysical question. He did so with an intellectual generosity that is as rare today as anything I know. For Medawar, the universe consists in evidence which can be subjected to principled analysis, and evidence which can not be so subjected. He remained uncertain to the end about how to deal with the latter, but of one thing he was certain: that it is not possible to plan for either progress or discovery. The great discoverers have always been more embarassingly modest of their achievements than we would wish, and Newton, you may remember, said:
I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
Our contemporary love-affair with the `universal engine' sometimes seems to me a misplaced enthusiasm for its marvellous capabilities - witness the plethora of perfectly useless software which has been developed to feed its inexhaustible appetite. Musicians disagree on the number of truly `original' tunes which can be identified: I wonder how many `original' programs have been written for the microcomputer. Not more than a handful, I suppose, and after fifteen years of painstaking effort attempting to evaluate the intrinsic merits of hundreds of ingenious solutions to a very small number of `real' problems I am left with the depressing suspicion that my time might have been better spent reading all those books I promised myself twenty years ago I would one day read. Perhaps we can no more look at the computer with detachment today than early man could look at the wheel and the wonders it could be harnessed to perform. On more than one occason Swift reminded his readers of Aesop's fly, perched upon the hub of a chariot wheel, exclaiming "See what a dust I raise!"
From the vantage point of today the quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns must be judged absurd. Eighteenth-century thinkers might be understandably reluctant to adopt a belief in the permanent values of the classics, but we, emancipated from the past, can find comfort in the absolute power of science to improve our lot, prevent the despoliation of the planet, cure dread diseases and generally make our lives a little easier. In part, so it does. But the discoveries which have contributed to this have also had malign consequences: none more malign, I think, than the notion that knowledge is amenable to mechanical transference. Information without doubt, but knowledge decidedly not. That, of course, is heresy on a grand scale, but I would remind you that heresy is an ancient transgression in the history of universities. It may even be one of the principal reasons for having them.
It seems to me that the tireless computations which we have come to expect of the device which so governs our lives is part of the problem. The reduction of analogue information to digital form, and the transformations which are then possible, is without doubt a process as fascinating as anything in the history of technology. Every generation of microprocessors promises greater potential for handling prodigious quantities of data at ever- increasing speed. So rapidly is this technology advancing that not even the bravest dare predict what we shall have at the dawn of the new millenium. For institutions independent of the past and all its inconvenient clutter this may prove beneficial, but for institutions like libraries, which have evolved at the mere speed of man's curiosity, the instability of the technology poses problems of extraordinary magnitude and complexity. This is hardly helped by those who would propose that books and documents (whether manuscript and printed) are just so much `information'. Research libraries do, of course, possess items which have little more than `informational' importance - rainfall tables for India in the nineteenth century or membership lists of defunct societies. These tend to be the least used materials and common sense would dictate that they be left firmly in their analogue state. The more used materials, on the other hand, are precisely those which will benefit least from transformation, because readers nearly always wish to consult them in conjunction with other materials, which may well be of the lesser-used kind. It may be useful to provide those who still preach sermons with a compact and searchable electronic version of the Bible, but to convert all versions and editions of that venerable text would be a stupendous waste of resources. A close examination of the products currently available in electronic form might well suggest to an unprejudiced mind that we have a wonderful solution in search of problems.
This is also suggested, I believe, by the exaggerated manner in which those newly converted to automation can be found promoting its benefits. In his introduction to a book recently published on Archival Theory and Information Technologies by Charles Dollar Oddo Bucci, Professor of Archive Studies at the University of Macerata, writes:
This book pertains to the culture of the technological society. By now, social life has come to gravitate with ever greater intensity around the use of the new technologies now operating over a broad spectrum of sectors. The use of such technologies itself works to disseminate new mental patterns, to remould the structure of language, to modify the very organization of the social plexus, to promote the formation of new knowledge and, at the same time, the emergence of equally new goals. The economically advanced world is by now firmly yoked to the technological sector, to the point where it tends to identify itself with the latter and to assume its basic characteristics, which may be summarized as the overcoming of spatial limitations, the acceleration of time, and the increasingly widespread spirit of logic and rationality.
As a comment on a civilisation rapidly going bankrupt and insisting that the rest of the world go bankrupt with us I find that Dollar makes a great deal more sense than Bucci, for he has given us some timely warnings about the problems associated with electronic information.
One of these concerns the vulnerability of electronic information to electronic misuse and sabotage. Books and documents are also vulnerable, of course, which is why good conservation practice today includes disaster planning. But, as more libraries participate in projects like those at Seville to digitise the Archives of the Indies, the principle of `benign neglect' for the originals is likely to be an inevitable consequence, requiring libraries and archives to adopt security procedures for their electronic data no less rigorous than those in use by banks, insurance companies and airlines. I have yet to read a manual of librarianship or archive practice which addresses this matter.
We hear a great deal today about the necessity to improve organisational efficiency by means of networks. Networks can be static - like our roads and railways - or dynamic, like the international telecommunication systems which guarantee that panic in Tokyo is immediately followed by panic in London, New York and Paris. As agents for the instantaneous transmission of information, whether important or trivial, they can have consequences not necessarily beneficial, and their development has been so rapid in the past ten years that we do not have as yet a legal framework within which the validity of the information they carry can be verified. In a Local Area Network, for example, in which information flows downwards (from the managers), upwards (from the drones), or sidewards (between the managers or between the drones) the opportunities for deception are limitless. Files can be modified or deleted and unless every modification is logged and time-stamped in a tracing file there is no way of determining how decisions come to be made. The administrative paper which lands on my desk in an average week amounts to the storage capacity of a floppy disc, and while it is possible to tell at a glance from the notepaper or cover sheet what can be safely entrusted to that round file-store which is the only preservative of mental health in a modern institution such methods of appraisal are impossible in an electronic environment. Corporate networks are reporting symptoms of electronic fatigue with prodigious quantities of data needing to be purged to make room for future demands. Faced with the possibility that such purging might remove some scrap of vital information the units (reticulati so to speak) have no choice but to dump their files to a printing device which will produce documents, in no particular order, which must then be appraised and filed. What an essay Swift would have written on such absurdity!
It would seem to be perfectly obvious that the existence of electronic networks which enable us to discover the existence of books, articles and manuscripts important to our research is a positive benefit. These tend, with a few notable exceptions, to be the work of the `Moderns', since virtually no major research libraries have complete electronic records for their holdings of the `Ancients'. For anyone bent on tracing the bibliographical history of the Epistles of Phalaris - the occasion of Bentley's celebrated Dissertation and also of Swift's allegory - the task is as tiresome today as it would have been fifty years ago. We have the British Library Catalogue on CD-ROM as well as online, but the promised abundance of riches in Bodley's pre-1920 catalogue is still unfulfilled. We have ESTC, in due course to widen its scope to include all printing up yo 1700. And there are numerous other databases in the making which scholars will be able to consult in the future. But even with all the electronic records available through JANET, and the networks for which it is a gateway, the great mass of historical materials, printed and manuscript, remains inaccessible to the computer. From the viewpoint of someone who spends a great deal of time trying to assist scholars in their search for sources at the British Library the dream of Universal Bibliographical Control seems as remote now as it was when it first became a declared objective of all libraries twenty years ago. And that other grand objective - the Universal Availability of Publications - seems even more remote. It is not that we do not have the technology to achieve these admirable goals: it is rather that we do not have the resources demanded by such ambitious projects. Nor, I fear, are we likely to have them in the future. And the reason why this should be so is due to the fact that the Sciences and most of the Social Sciences - receiving the lion's share of research funding in cultures dedicated to material progress - have little interest in materials with a half-life of more than five years. For the Humanities, the situation is quite different.
This is not an occasion on which to re-open the quarrel between the Arts and the Sciences, but it has to be said that those concerned with history, whether it be of poetry or medicine, are poorly served by governments and universities. The trouble is that such people never seem to come up with socially `useful' conclusions. What useful purpose is served by disproving the existence of Phalaris? Or that Athens could not have been supplied with grain from the Black Sea because the Bosphorus flows at an average of 5 knots and their best sailing ships could only just manage that speed, and while they could come down they had no way of going up? Perhaps, the case that needs to be made is to establish how much that passes for scientific research produces socially `useful' conclusions. The great American philosopher of mind, Charles Peirce, wrote: "the conclusions of science make no pretense to being more than probable." That kind of modesty is hard to find these days. All research, it has to be said, represents a collective exploration of the probability that anything can be understood.
Knowledge has, since the fifteenth century, been largely enabled and expanded as a result of the invention of printing, and it is to bibliography that generations have turned for an understanding of what is known about any particular subject. That the fruits of bibliographical endeavour (whether enumerative or analytical) should be made available in electronic form as well as printed is obvious enough, and the modern research library generally provides readers with some sort of online access (not necessarily free, by the way) to remote databases as well as to the increasing number available on CD-ROM. For databases devoted to periodical literature and scientific abstracts it does not normally require great skill to find what one wants. Even so, the sheer number of such databases has given rise in America to a new type of information broker: the `surfer'. Surfers are specialists in knowing which databses to interrogate in order to find particular information, and surfing is a fast-growing industry. They charge, of course, but if you want to know how many English gardens have gnomes there is a surfer who can provide the answer. As Pam Leslie, a high-earning surfer, explains:
Tu use a database efficiently, you need to use it every day. The moment you plug into a database it starts costing you money, and you can sit there for hours just pressing buttons and still not have the answer unless you know what you are doing.
Really sophisticated surfing has existed for some time in the highly competitive patent business. Information regarding garden gnomes may have a certain commercial edge over that on Greeks and the navigation of the Bosphorus, but patent searching is very serious business. For one thing, it is obvious that patent agents go to considerable lengths to disguise the primary purpose of patents, while the large multinational companies are perpetually vigilant to detect ingenuity which they can put to good use. Thus, companies monitor the activities of competitors in order to discover the direction in which they are going, and this is done by far more refined search algorithms than are possible in the average bibliographical or citation database. On Orbit, for example, it is possible for an experienced searcher to circumvent semantic gobbledegook and find quickly patents relevant to a customer's interests.
The temptation to transform research libraries into commercially driven surfing is already in evidence and conforms politically to the Friedman doctrine which holds that the notion of public service is obsolete and that libraries and education must be paid for by users or they will have to do without. This principle, which has its origins in social Darwinism, may be all very well in resource-rich countries like America in the 1960s when Friedman published Capitalism and Freedom but as Jim Traue, a distinguished New Zealand librarian has observed, it is unworkable in resource-poor countries, and these constitute an ever-growing majority.
The battle of the books is now not one in which disputes can be arbitrated but a battle for survival. Their survival, and the survival of the institutions we call libraries, will depend, as always, on enlightened and imaginative librarians able to develop within a hostile political environment a model which can adapt to the evolving needs of research in all disciplines. Those needs will, within a decade, include access to information in a wide variety of databases, electronic archives of images and sounds, as well as the cultural inheritance in print and manuscript, most of which will, I am certain, remain in its present form for the foreseeable future. One consequence of this is the self-evident need for librarians in the future to develop both ancient and modern skills. The notion that knowledge can prosper by creating vast knowledge warehouses based on the hypermarket model - you can buy it if you can find it - is sheer fantasy as well as being intellectually suspect.
The problem with research - and this has persistently worried those who profess to be concerned with its importance - is that so much of what we now take for granted came about less through design than accident: Roentgen's discovery of X-rays, Dausset's discovery of HLA polymorphism in genetic tissue matching, to name two such. The fact that much scientific discovery has depended upon the rare combination of imagination and method is regularly attested. Could DNA have been discovered by a government plan? Crick and Watson thought not. Medawar certainly rejected the idea that there exists a calculus for discovery.
Whatever it is that we study it seems to me that we are all in search of some version of `truth', whether about the functioning of the universe we inhabit, our role in that universe, our understanding of what preceded us, or the purpose of existence. There can never be any profit in determining priorities in this search. As Karl Popper put it: “The fact that science cannot make any pronouncement about ethical principles has been misinterpreted as indicating that there are no such principles while in fact the search for truth presupposes ethics.”
We are perhaps too close to the fevered enthusiasm for all things electronic to be able as yet to judge their real value, and I suppose it would be churlish of me to observe that much of what passes for information exchange between some of my American colleagues is part of a new and elaborate game, indulged in with excitement only because, at the moment, it is free. I suspect that when navigating the electronic highways is subject to tolls their enthusiasm is likely to diminish. There are already a growing number of electronic archives being planned for major writers, and the Chadwyck-Healey database of English Poetry has recently been launched. Yet no-one seems to be addressing the formidable problems which the free exchange of information between networked institutions poses for copyright law, because access provides the opportunity to commit piracy, and while most libraries are willing to provide researchers with unique materials on a private and fair use basis, they are likely to take considerable interest in extension of that use to third parties. For printed matter librarians may well take a relaxed view, though publishers will not for the potential threat to their economic survival is very real. For manuscript, archive and non- book materials custodians are more than likely to adopt a strictly capitalist position. But, since policing the electronic highways is virtually impossible, we may well see them trying to join the game. That, I think, would be a great pity, for it runs counter to the social functions which libraries are presumed to fulfil. It may well be that refusing to participate in the cyberspace game is the only hope for the survival of libraries as we know them.
My own involvement with computers goes back to 1956 when I persuaded Jess Bessinger, the newly appointed Professor of Anglo Saxon at Toronto, that the university's Univac could be harnessed to produce a concordance to Anglo Saxon poetry. I imagine there are few here tonight who will understand the agony which that reckless endeavour involved. It may have taken a decade to get the job done, and it may not have been worth the effort, but I well remember the problems created by having to develop mark-up tagging for an inflected language like Anglo Saxon and the need to persuade the boffins at Yorktown Heights about the inadequacy of the ASCII character set for printing the concordance. The problem with computers is that it is quite impossible to constrain expectations. It is an axiom of good marketing that expectations must only be satisfied in carefully determined phases: by saving treats for the future you guarantee the obsolescence of today's product and a future for your company. Most of the current offerings in the microcomputer industry (including Object Oriented Programming and Graphic User Interfaces like Windows) were available at the Palo Alto Research Center (sponsored by the Xerox Corporation) in the 1960s. The community of librarians in the 1970s were `hijacked' in one of the most wonderful of conspiracies in the history of librarianship. What have been the proven benefits?
That is a question I do not propose to answer here. This is, after all, an occasion on which it is traditionally preferable to raise questions than suggest answers. Like all of us who find ourselves in administrative positions I am conscious that life today provides so little time to `sit and think'. I thought that just a hint of heresy, amiably put I hope, would not be amiss. I leave you with Macaulay's verdict on Dryden - it could provide an apt epitaph for many a librarian I know: “His imagination resembled the wings of an ostrich. It enabled him to run, though not to soar.”