COLUMN: On-line access najes tge fytyre of libraries uncertain

From Miachel Brus', "Narcissist Holiday," Fall '99 From Miachel Brus', "Narcissist Holiday," Fall '99When I was a kid, I used to spend hours browsing in my local public library, lazing in its luxuriant easy chairs with the most recent issues of Time, The Atlantic Monthly, and The New York Times. I would search the bookshelves for new additions, participate in the summer reading programs and chat with my friends. Like many of my Web-savvy contemporaries, I have little use for the public library of yore. Once a communal, tactile activity, browsing is now virtual, private one. Governor Ridge has just accelerated this trend. Last month, he announced a program called Library POWER -- Pennsylvania Online World of Electronic Resources. It promises unlimited downloads from a database of 1,762 full-text periodicals, plus historical documents, almanacs, health and science materials for students, 850 additional business sources, indexed and abstracted articles from major newspaper and selected full-text coverage from some papers, including The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Philadelphia Daily News. About a half-dozen other states offer similar databases free to the public. Pennsylvania will be the first to offer these resources to library card holders dialing in from home. Now any computer-owning couch potato who can't find what he's looking for on the Web can log into one of these taxpayer-funded treats. What this means is that small branch libraries, like University City's Walnut West, may soon be a thing of the past. In the future, the local free library may be a less a warehouse of books than a Web site on the Internet offering free access to information. What this also means is that many functions of big research libraries may soon be redundant. Why, for example, does Van Pelt need an extensive collection of periodicals, both print and electronic, if Pennsylvania taxpayers will provide students with free access? Classical Studies Professor Jim O'Donnell, for one, thinks the new periodicals section on the first floor of Van Pelt Library may indeed be short-lived. "I think they already have on the back of an envelope an idea of what they will do with that space" when it becomes redundant, he said. O'Donnell, who is also vice provost for Information Systems and Computing, recently wrote a book on the transformation of research libraries. Called Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace, it details how, in an age of information-glut, libraries will be prized not so much for what information they include as for what they exclude. "In a world in which the library will cease to be a warehouse and become instead a software system," he writes, "the value of the institution will lie in the sophistication, versatility and power of its indexing and searching capabilities." In other words, libraries will abandon their pretensions to universal knowledge and become instead experts in specialized knowledge. And, as non-specialized knowledge becomes increasingly cheap and convenient for the average citizen, these libraries may no longer bother stocking things like encyclopedias and periodicals. "Physical collections of books are vital and will continue to be vital," O'Donnell told me, "but they will increasingly be the place of second resort, when you actually need the book, when you've got a serious information need." Just as the explosion of knowledge in the 20th century has eliminated the non-specialized scholar, so the explosion of electronic access to information may soon eliminate the non-specialized library. This saddens me, but only for a moment. After all, the prospect of losing the library of my childhood makes me nostalgic, but having more access to information is a tangible gain.