Page 6 RAIN Nov 1975 " ' ·Too Many Books and Too FeW "Everything is there: the ,minute history of the future, the aµtobiographies of the archangels, the faithful catalogue of the library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, a demonstration of the fallacy of the.true catalogue, the Gnostic, gospel of Basilides, the commentary on ~his gospel, 'the commentary on the commentary on this gospel, the veridical ac-:. count of your death, a version of each book in all languages, the interpolations of every book in all books. "When it was proclaimed that the library comprised all books, the first impression was one of extravagant joy. All men felt themselves lords of a secret intact treasure. There was no personal or universal.problem whose eloquent solution did not , exist-in s<;>me hexagon. The universe was justified, the universe suddenly expanded to the limitless dimensions of hope.... _ "But the searcher did not,remember that the calcul11-ble pos- 1 sibility of a_man's finding his .own book, or some perfidious variation of his own book, is close to zero. . . . - . "The1uncommon: hope was followed naturally enough by deep depression. The certainty that some shelf in some hexagon contained precious books and that these books werf inaccessible seemed almost intolerable.'.' . ' - I Library of ~abel, Jorge_Luis Borges . ' Sometimes after doing RAIN entries for several days, all the _parts of the world don't look like they have any reason.to be here rather than there; or there rather than here, which I hope explains the order of some of the following. , "There are neural cente,;s for generating, spontaneously; numberless hypotheses abo_ut the fact~ of life. We store up information _the way cells store energy. When we are lucky enough to find a direct match between a receptor and a fact, there is a deep explosion in-the mind; the idea suddenly enlarges, rounds up, bursts with, new energy,,and begins to replicate. At times there are chains of reverberating expl'osions, shaking everything: the imagination, as we say, is staggered." Lives of a Cell, Lewis Thomas , In one of the most complete surveys of information in production in the U.S. (now very outdated, 1958), Fritz Maclup found that the ·production of knowledge accounted for about 29% of the GNP and that it was growing at the rate of approximately 10% per year, twice the rate of the economy as a whole. . • , And somehow that feels very much like an understatement; I can't always find the line between information gatheringand dissemination processes and unrelated ones. It reminds me of how Marshall McLuhan pointed out to Xerox that they were really marReting information, not office equipment. Depends on where you are, but most people get their information in non-print ways-by word of mouth, their own as- , sumptions, touch, TV, radio-and then it seems this.search for the wired library of Babel is somehow an aside. "The keepers of the to~er ~f Babel may forever lament its passing, because their ambition to storm heaven and make a name for themselves has been crushed in rubble ... but their patrons never had any wish to storm heaven. All they wanted was certain tools-not an indiscriminate, overwhelming heap 1 of books . . . . " .... _; Library Journal cover, Sept. 15, '75 Daniel Fore, in the Journal article, describes the staggering problem of space keeping up with the information output. "In a yery few years the majority of academic libraries will •own more books than they can shelve~ yet half the time they are unable to deliver the books they already own to' a patron w~o wants them. Too many Qooks and too few." •The output outstrips dissemination and access as "depressed scholars tell puzzled administrators that the Harvard Library of today, with its'9 million volumes, is less adequate to its users now than a century ago, when it was a tiny fraction of , that size." • - How much we need and wh<rn it gets where (and to whom) is a critical environmental problem. /'Many old maxims point out that talk is cheaper than action. • A comparison of the entropy balance and the energy balance on the surface of the earth indicates that the maxims are indeed a reflection of our exp~rience. The amplification of information is .easier than the amplification of power." Scientific-American, Sept. :11 The assimilation and dissemination of information, such as in that there bits and pieces rag, RAIN, is often seen as a wheelspinning, getting nowhere process; endless talk w'ith no action. I have a sne~ky suspicion that it ain't so, but maybe 'cause_I'm on the hubcap looking out. We'd like to share in this-space some ideas and implications about the race going nowhere; be~een the library of Babel and the $1.25 all-you-need-to-know-about-everything paper- , back there's a steady"'state, appropriate warning, feeling, knowing, eventually invisible, information network. _ "Ambiguity seems'to be an essential, indispensible element for th~ transfer of information from one place to another by words. Where matters of real importance are concerned, it is often , n~cessary, for meaning to come through, that-there be an al- ~ost vague sense of strangeness and askewness. Lives of a Cell In,a study done b'y Stanley A. Elman, University of California, a comparison is shown between manual and computerized 'literature searches. The average cost of 48 manual searches at Lockheed's California company library was about $250.00- (22 hours of time) as compared with $47.00 and 45 minutes utilizing the Dialog on-line interactive information retrieval system. ' "You cannot get something for nothing, not even an observation."-Dennis Gabor • It costs $57 to process every purchase order in the Oregon --state government. Networks are systems allowing for,the movement of information from one part to another. They may be electronic delivery systems (broadbased _cable or microwave systems) or 'cardboard containers ~sed to interlibrary loan a book. . The National Committee on·Libraries and Information Science has released their third·and final draft, recommending continued federal aid in the form of categorical grants dis-• tributed through the state libraries, to coordinate public/private information services 3:nd to resolve the copyright dilemma . so further library networki'ng and sharing of resources through _, micro-publishing and copying' can continue. A White House
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