Reading Mark Bernstein’s discussion of the future of books reminded me of my research methods in my academic days and a shocking recent discovery about the future of a library.
I never learned the classic index card source method. I would grab a new legal pad and scribble some information at the top of a page to link the notes to some source, generally a book. I’d then just write and write and write on the page, flipping to a fresh page as needed. It was a crazy mix of my my own thoughts and information directly from the source. The raw material. Since I never had the patience to actually copy quotes or information, I only wrote enough to recapture and document the dissuasion going on between the source and myself in that notes page.
I remember now that I’d often read a book cover to cover with excitement and then take a second, leisurely stroll through it to have that conversation with the author. Other times it was a page flipping attack on a book to see whether a particular subject was to be found in its pages. Researching obscure topics lead to a lot of attacks on a lot of books. Often I’d go from one end of the shelf of the library to the other, flipping systematically through every plausible source.
When it was time to write, I’d outline a section and decide what sources were relevant. Then I’d have the sources physically piled up in front of me, my notes to my left and a new pad for writing on the right. The process was to write, reference material by pulling the source and my notes and write some more. Of course revisions included pulling all of the physical sources together again.
This method was perfectly suited both to my poor memory, distractibility and the library environment. I didn’t work in my dorm room or, later, my office. The library was where I read, researched and wrote. As a faculty member at Johns Hopkins, I loved setting aside the time to begin the preparation of a manuscript or grant so that I could spend those hours lost in the stacks of Welch Medical Library.
Once out of college and focused on neuroscience, the system worked just as well as long as the Xerox machines were working. I probably spent more time dragging bound journals down to the basement and flipping pages to copy than I did reading or writing. I developed a commitment to never cite research that I hadn’t read and, generally, didn’t have a physical copy of to refer to. In fact, hidden in a couple of the book chapters I wrote are indirect references to sources, such “Jones (1936) as summarized in Smith (1994)”" when I couldn’t get a copy of Jones to read directly or it was written in another language. Sadly, as abstract services became electronic, it became a very, very common practice for papers to cite research that the author had clearly never read critically based solely on the research as inaccurately described in the paper’s abstract.
Imagine my surprise when I learned last month that Welch Medical Library at Johns Hopkins was going to close the doors of its historic building. Of course library services were not going away, it was decided that a better use of resources would be to enhance electronic services and campus delivery of books rather than keep a building open for the 106 visitors a day who circulated around the stacks of journals which were almost all available on line anyway.
Checking the Welch Medical Library website today, I see that the plan has been scuttled and instead there will be a larger discussion about the library. Despite such rearguard actions, the future of the library is clear. Libraries will be a service, not a place.
Mark closed his discussion about the future of books this way, “If our books are not as good as they can be, we can make them better. If we know how to make them better, and we want to make them better, why would we not?”
I submit that the books (and journal articles) are only one part of this transition. The real change is in the environment of these books, migrating from physical form to distributed digital information. It’s chaotic now, with way too many devices and contexts for retrieving and collecting information. I find myself redeveloping my stack of of sources, my legal pads of notes and my writing pad over and over again every six months, but where the sources are in a dozen forms that partially overlap, notes in half a dozen systems (text files, Findings, Tinderbox), and writing in yet another half dozen programs.
We call it “workflow”, but that’s a symptom of the world in transition. If we’re smart, we’ll be choosing and developing tools that together create a more powerful version of the library carrel. And valuing scholarship, not just the ability to weave a few sources into an entertaining yarn.
