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Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow!
MRS. DANTON's slender symposium entitled The Library of Tomorrow is a sacrifice to Cassandra, whose power of perspicacity, if not her personal charm, has ever been the envy of mankind. To the lure of prophecy, librarians have been far from immune; they have singed their wings on that flame before. But this volume, conceived in the grand manner, with an avowed objective to present patterns of library development for the next several decades, would make King Priam's daughter blush with shame. Admittedly, one picks up such a collection of essays with the expectation that it will be "spotty" and uneven in the quality of its several contributions. But this book achieves an astonishing degree of uniformity; its authors, punch-drunk from the impact of scientific achievement, attain a dead level of vacuity typical of library journalism at almost its worst. In view of librarians' frequent lament that too many books are being published, the appearance of this volume is difficult to understand. Surely it contributes little to the literature of the field. The volume is not a complete failure. Joeckel and Mishoff have presented the developments in federal library relationships in an essay that is sane, well-developed, and emphatically worth reading. Wriston, who writes on the future of the college library, is, as always, stimulating and provocative in the clarity of his thought. While R. Russell Munn, in "The Library's Part in Developing the Citizen," has at least stated sympathetically the "left-wing" point of view. But the success of these three all the more emphasizes the sterility of the remainder--ghosts of an invigorating spirit to remind us what an important contribution to library thought the book might have been, instead of the vapid conglomeration of insipidity that it is. The initial chapter has admirably set the tone of the volume. From that moment when "Rippina Van Winkle" goes reeling through a bibliographical phantasmagoria of pseudo technology run riot, the reader knows what lies ahead. Mechanization of techniques, glorification of unlimited scientific accomplishment, expansion of the library's physical plant--these are the golden threads that intertwine throughout the fabric of the compilation. Polarized light; sound-proof audition rooms; practice floors for students of the dance; books on film, phonograph records, or catalog cards; not to mention the "photo-bogey" or the "polytelephonic service," are bandied about until the reviewer grows thoroughly sick of a work in which, by Mr. Keppel's own admission, "librarianship would seem . . . to be largely a setting of dials." To control this Frankenstein's monster, Mr. Rush has given us a librarian "who will be an interesting composite, having many of the qualifications of a sociologist, psychologist, teacher, historian, and bibliographer." Doubtless all of the contributors would pay at least lip service to the concept of the library as a social institution; yet the thoughtful reader will search in vain for any serious consideration of the changes in our society that might mold the library's future. No voice is raised to question thc validity of the library's position today. Content with the easy assumption that to interpret the future one has but to project the tendencies of the present forward as an ever rising curve, these spinners of dreams with complete and unthinking abandon heap upon the library all manner of educational functions, without stopping to consider whether it is the agency best qualified to perform such tasks. We have no right to assume categorically that adult education is the province of the library, that the first-year library school curriculum is the proper answer to professional training, that the union catalog is anything more than an expensive and insubstantial house of cards that fails lamentably to justify its enormous costs. "In 1876," Mr. Downs reminds us, "Justin Winsor predicted the use of the telegraph and pneumatic tubes to facilitate delivery of books to branches of a public library." But Mr. Downs has failed to perceive the implicit irony of his own illustration and the utter futility of any attempt to view library horizons merely a. an expanding technology. For any presentation of the library profession fifty years hence, if it be not a happy union of objective appraisals of library function with a forthright and searching self-criticism, must inevitably degenerate, as Mr. Roden admits, to "desultory and insubstantial speculation." If the attitude of the reviewer appease cynical, bitter, and mayhap even a little unfair, he can seek defense only in the confession that such a reaction was born of disillusionment, disappointment, and dejection; intensified by the sudden realization, ere the book was half finished, that when library "big-wigs" tale about the future of their profession, they have nothing to say. Yet The Library of Tomorrow cannot be lightly brushed aside. It is an important book, the implications of which are almost terrifying. For, if this be a true picture of the future of American librarianship as its leaders perceive it, then surely the profession dare not risk the luxury of complacent assumption that its destiny rests in competent hands.
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