Suzanne de Castell, professor in the Faculty of Education, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada V5A 1S6, is interested in the epistemological implications of new information technologies. Her latest book (co-edited with Mary Bryson) is Radical In<ter>ventions: Identity, Politics and Difference/s in Educational Praxis (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1997).

 JCS invites comments responding to the views in this paper. Such comments should be addressed via e-mail to westbury@uiuc.edu.

Copyright © 2000 Taylor & Francis Ltd. ISSN 0022-0272. Copies may be made under the normal terms of copyright law.

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge;
where is the knowledge we have lost in information.

T. S. Eliot 1934

 The three fingers

In De Laude Scriptorium (‘in praise of the scriptorium’), the learned Benedictine abbot, Johannes Trithemius, ‘patron saint of critics of print’, writes an extensive defence of the monastic spiritual practice of hand-copying, a spiritual practice and indeed a whole way of life whose survival was threatened and ultimately destroyed by print. In that treatise, Trithemius tells ‘the story of a dead Benedictine who was such a passionate copyist that after they buried him, post multos annos it was found that his three writing fingers were miraculously preserved while the rest of his body had rotted away’ (O’Donnell 1996: 45).1

For me this story connects two quite distant events: the fate of the scriptorium in wake of print literacy, and the destiny of the library in the digital age. The story form itself is significant, because that is the way many of us as children had our first introductions to the library and the figure of the librarian. We shuffled in for ‘storytime’, perhaps it was a Saturday morning, likely we came with our mothers, into what may have been an immense, old, grey-stone building, to the children’s section, settled ourselves down on cushions or couches, to be read to by the otherwise all too imposing figure of the authority of this place, the librarian. A book was selected, normally one with a golden medal prominent on its front cover, and the story duly read to us. Then, storytime over, we were invited to go to the shelves and select a book for ourselves, to carry back under our arms for reading at home.

The story is a very special literary form. In its bedtime version (Heath 1982), it may be our first exposure to books. Library ‘storytime’ is our first institutionally-structured exposure to a public culture of literacy, a textual community, a community organized around books as forms of representation and reading as a private but disciplined practice of self-formation.

The story form engages both cognitive structures and structures of feeling. The story, as Egan (1986: 247-248) reminds us, tell us how to feel about the events it recounts. So storytime in the children’s section equally may tell us how to feel about the library and its purposes. Arranged in cozy and comfortably safe places, graced with smiles and encouragement along with the written word, what we are being encouraged to feel in this reading practice for children is love, love of books, love of reading, love, indeed, of the library itself, and of the literate community within its walls. I want to use some stories to help us not just think about but also to feel our way to answering the question posed by the ‘the three fingers’, the question framed for me in a discussion with Joanne Naslund (1997), education librarian at the University of British Columbia: ‘What is the essence of the library’s work?’. What is it that libraries cannot survive without, and how do we sustain these practices, while learning about and implementing such new information technologies as will advance that work? What are the purposes, what is the ‘mission’, what, indeed, are ‘the three fingers’ of the library, that literate culture has cultivated so powerfully and so well that these can survive even as everything else might crumble away?

They are, I suggest, these: conservation, circulation and community.

Even as these three purposes remain, however, the technological means with which and the economic conditions under which they are realized are certainly being changed, and to forge both continuity and change is the present challenge for libraries and their publics.

Manuscripts, scriptoria, and the ghost of libraries past

It is in that most ancient place of libraries&emdash;the scriptorium&emdash;that I begin with the story of the three fingers, a story which is, in many ways, a ghost story. And, like all ghost stories, it depends upon and cultivates a sense of foreboding, a fear of the terrors we know must unfold because now we are in the domain of the supernatural, and the events of which we will be told are events which arise only from the grave, events which are linked inseparably to the occasion of death, events over which the normal, safe, predictable order of things can have no control.

 Umberto Eco’s (1980) magnificent detective story, The Name of the Rose, about Benedictines and scriptoria, about censorship and the burning of libraries and about the vain attempt to preserve manuscript culture by preserving its material artifact, the book, provides us with one version of the ghost of libraries past.

The Name of the Rose tells a tale of the book becoming a ritual object, less a text to be read and understood than a priceless relic to be religiously and faithfully copied. Rare and precious, the loss of a single manuscript might mean final and permanent extinction of its contents. The property only of the wealthy and powerful, whether individuals or institutions, the book as an artifact could become, as Eco reminds us, prohibited to all but its possessor. As property, the book becomes an object of private consumption, a forbidden fruit of which Eco’s mad monk, Jorge, declares the ‘common’ man must never taste, on pain of death. Knowledge, understanding and feeling, spirituality, are here inseparable from the existence and indeed the ownership or control of the book as a material artifact; they are seen to be contained within its covers. For cultural conservatives like Trithemius, defence of the monastic life meant defending the manuscript book itself; accordingly, the image of greatest terror for such as Trithemius is the one given to us by Eco&emdash;the great conflagration in which all the library’s volumes are consumed by fire.

If it is conservation that best describes the central mission, the ‘essence’, if you will, of the library as it operated within a manuscript culture, this ‘essence’ came to be circulation as libraries were transformed in the wake of the printing press and its consequences for a new paradigm of literacy, a new understanding of the literate individual, still, in those days, the ‘man of letters’.

With the rise and spread of printing and print literacy, the book was transformed from a private to a public object, and from a protected sacred mystery to an accessible source of knowledge, art, culture and information. Mass literacy comes to be everywhere promoted, and the library becomes a public institution whose principal function is to acquire and to make accessible to an ever-enlarged populace the vast breadth and depth of human understanding. Manuscript volumes, and precious few of them at that, had been the acknowledged repositories for the sum of the cultural heritage; to preserve these volumes was to conserve all recorded human knowledge and experience. Now print literacy made the fate of any particular volume a matter of little epistemological or cultural significance for all but the collector. So far as the preservation of knowledge was concerned, copies were as good as or even better than originals, and copies were multiple, not singular. So now it was not the covers of the book but the edifice of the library itself which came to be seen as the repository of the accumulated corpus of human knowledge and understanding, and the goal of each library was to obtain its own copy of as many valued works as possible, and to make this body of texts available as widely as possible. Libraries were attached to particular communities, and one of the first things you might do on moving to a new place was to join the local library. Not merely readers and writers, people became in these communities ‘members’, and membership was everywhere encouraged&emdash;and, as would become the rule, absolutely free. This historically specific kind of library encouraged an historically specific way of thinking about knowledge&emdash;knowledge was encompassed in a finite body of texts&emdash;and educated persons could be expected to read over their lifetime a sizable part of this finite cultural heritage, bounded as it then could be by the four walls of the library.

Both in numbers and in social position, the literate élite was progressively enlarged as print culture democratized both access to knowledge and entitlement to be counted as a literate individual&emdash;the guiding conception of literate culture. The ‘man of letters’ came in this way to be gradually transformed into the man&emdash;or, indeed, the woman&emdash;of knowledge. Mass literacy brought with it mass-scale standardization. It is one of the principal effects of the written code to standardize expression&emdash;grammar, spelling, orthography&emdash;as well as the content expressed&emdash;ideologies, conceptions, practices. In this way, mothers, for instance, began to question their abilities to raise their children properly and felt a need to learn&emdash;from books, mostly written by men, about child-rearing. Traditional knowledges in fields such as agriculture became ‘scientific’, and manual workers re-learned their jobs at the hands of ‘efficiency experts’ whose ‘time and motion’ studies heralded the organizational movement of ‘modern management’. In this way, print literacy ushered in an era of ‘methods’, standardized procedures for accomplishing personal, social and occupational goals. And the rise of methods was accompanied everywhere by a new attention to and enthusiasm for assessment&emdash;the measurement of the degree to which standards were being achieved. The spectre of ‘standards’ haunts us even to the present day.

The question of literacy standards is one I have worked on for some years now, and over that time I have been puzzled by the inability of scholarly research even to counterbalance, let alone to outweigh, the widespread audience appeal of the sorts of crisis rhetoric surrounding the idea that there are, or there should be, measurable ‘standards’ of literacy, and that these standards are not being attained. About every 10 years the popular press loudly proclaims a ‘literacy crisis’, and sure enough, not so long ago, it happened again, as it did in the Southam survey in 1987 (Calamai 1987), which found that 26% of Canadians were ‘functionally illiterate’. This time, just a decade later, we learn that 43% of Canadians do not have, in the words of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, ‘Literacy Skills for the Knowledge Society’, ‘the minimum level of competence needed to cope adequately with the complex demands of everyday life and work’ (Little 1996: A6). Now this was reported in the [Toronto] Globe and Mail ‘Amazing Facts’ section, and an amazing fact it is. Just think about it&emdash;at this very moment, 43% of the population are muddling about unable to cope with their own lives. To be sure, many of us feel unable to cope a good deal of the time, but here is an amazing fact that tests this ability and gives a passing, or, increasingly, a failing grade. It just so happens that on the same Monday morning as this breaking news appeared on page A6, the Globe and Mail (1996: A4) reported another amazing fact, this one by the Angus Reid group, and commissioned by an advocacy group, the Dominion Institute, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Citizenship Act in Canada. The figures are remarkably similar: in this poll ‘45% failed to answer correctly . . . 12 out of 20 questions . . . on Canadian history, culture, government institutions and laws’. Twelve out of 20 is the minimum score required of immigrants to pass their citizenship test. So what does this finding of 45% failure rate signify? For Dominion Institute Director, Rudyard Griffiths, whose ‘dismay’ at this finding is a matter of note, ‘the survey results indicate that a large number of Canadians lack the civic knowledge required to understand and to participate in the country’s public life (p. A4). But wait . . . . let’s just step back a little: if participation in public life were a matter of identifying Canada’s head of state (only 8% got that right), and knowing which four provinces joined to form Canada in 1867 (only 22% got that right), then teaching these facts could hope to increase participation in public life. If being hired into a job and doing well at it were a matter of literacy skills, then teaching literacy skills would increase people’s success in the workforce. But precise percentage points of numerical accuracy aside, we all know that the situation is far more complex than that. So why do these kinds of measures, and these kinds of crisis narratives, continue to flood the education market at regular intervals, why are they sought and published, and why do we believe in them?

It was with just this set of questions in mind that Alan Luke and I in 1978 started to study the history of literacy in Canadian schools, in particular whether standards of literacy were falling, and after our first three years of study we determined that markedly different skills, abilities and attitudes defined ‘literacy’ at different times throughout the history of Canadian schooling (de Castell and Luke 1986). Because what students were taught was so different across these different time-spans, what they learned was likewise markedly different. Now the schools, to be sure, may not always&emdash;or ever&emdash;have taught students what particular groups in Canadian society believed students ought to be learning, and here industrialists and professors, and unionists and theologians and indeed librarians certainly held very different views, but students did learn what they were taught (the sole reliable finding of every educational research study ever done!), which made comparisons across space and time completely uninformative with respect to the question of rising levels of illiteracy and falling literacy standards.

However, despite the impossibility of capturing the complexity and diversity of literacy in a set of ‘standards’, that ghostly (and ghastly) invention of the printing press, that dry and dusty conceptual relic of a bygone age, defining ‘standards’ for literacy2 remains an approach to the problem which enjoys enormous popularity. But if these standards define only the minimum, why do so many people fail to attain them? Well, because literacy is what it is at any given time because of the kind of community in which it is operative, whether that be the classroom or the marketplace or the workplace, whether in a rural or urban setting, for working with computers or with bus schedules or with poetry, whether among children or senior citizens or doctors or tribal councils. Literacy is not something that has ever been situated inside the heads and between the ears of individuals&emdash;it is something that has always been accomplished by people working together. We are literate in communities&emdash;we read and write and think and ‘cope’ with our lives, in communities. For example, if you purchase an unassembled bedside table, you may be given pictures in place of written instructions for putting it together. But even where the instructions are written rather than graphic, usually you put the table together with someone (the source of so many happy times on a Saturday afternoon). You read the bus schedule, perhaps on your own, but sure enough you also go to the counter, if it’s long distance, or get to the bus stop, if it’s local, and you check that reading with someone else&emdash;and this isn’t because you can’t read a bus schedule, it’s because in real life there are a lot of ways of being mistaken, like missing a line on the schedule, or not realizing it’s running on a holiday schedule today, or that it’s running late. You read an essay on information literacy, and you talk about what it means with other teachers, not because you can’t read the words, but because what the essay means in the everyday life of your own community is not something which can ever be completely given in and by the words alone. Literacy is a social practice, and it varies as social communities vary. To return to the citizenship example, the capacity of people in Canada to participate in public life depends upon a relationship between ordinary folks and their government; it depends upon the kind of political community which such a relationship is capable of building. And no amount of learning words and getting answers right will make it possible to participate in a community that, whether actively or passively, impedes and discourages participation. The same is true of literacy for the workplace&emdash;no amount of correct answers on a literacy test will get a person of colour a job in a racist workplace, or get a women promoted in a sexist one. These are matters of how communities operate, what it is communities seek to develop and make possible for their members, and the same is true of literacy (and citizenship) in the context of the Canadian public schools. The so-called problem of literacy standards is a problem of failing to understand that literacy is always and everywhere a social relation within a community of practice, and not an individual accomplishment in the heads of distinct and separate people. What does this view of the matter mean for educators and specifically for librarians and teacher librarians? It means, I think, that the role we play in promoting and advancing literacy is a function of the roles we play in promoting and advancing particular kinds of communities, not the role we play in distributing ‘information’ or teaching particular skills to individuals.

That any community member has the right to access the resources of the public library is a foundational premise of modern social and political organization, an organization which itself was founded upon literacy and could not have developed as it has without the specific technology of writing (Goody 1986). Entry to the worlds within books is open to anyone. And unlike in the classroom, the various meanings readers make from texts are not policed by the librarian. Interpretations are not monitored or regulated; they are not assigned or tested. This is the promise of freedom a library holds out to readers (and writers) which a classroom cannot. There are other freedoms worthy of note: freedom from censorship, the freedom to access whatever there may be of human knowledge, imagination, expression, speculation, confession, agitation, and dissipation no less than spirituality&emdash;because these and more are the shapes human lives have taken, and our own humanity depends on connection and continuity with these lives&emdash;and in this sense the library is the cultural memory of a society. A third promise libraries make is freedom of access, which is the central purpose of the public library in a democracy.

 Literacy/library

Whether any given library or librarian succeeds in advancing literacy, then, will depend on whether and how that library or librarian manages to encourage and nurture literate communities, and how inclusive and participatory these communities are helped to become. If literacy is what we want, then participation is what we must enable&emdash;we do not achieve participation through consumption, even consumption of the classics, high culture, or, for that matter, critical literacy curricula. Literacy has its value as it is lived and shared and used, not as it is held inside the head of its possessor, like a store. Whether and to what extent a public library actively invites street people, children, mothers and workers along with university students, researchers, managers and professionals, whether and to what extent it acquires current materials on community development, new building codes and legislation, granting agencies which support local housing initiatives, information on forming cooperatives and up-to-date lists of city councillors’ names and addresses alongside its acquisition of copies of manuscripts from the trials of the Knights Templar in the 13th century, new commentaries on Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), and Merck’s Veterinary Manual (Aiello and Mays 1998), whether and to what extent a school library actively promotes the circulation of First Nations resources like the Sm’algyax Dictionary on CD-ROM (The Tsimshian Chiefs 1994) as well as Encarta (Soukhanov 1999) and the Microsoft Bookshelf (Microsoft 1999) will determine whether and to what extent&emdash;and for whose communities&emdash;that library is playing a useful part in the promotion of literacy. And no amount of definition, statistical analysis, curriculum development, teaching or testing will make the slightest bit of difference to the achievement of that goal.

The library has, I want to argue strongly, a distinctive role to play, one which the public school system has as yet never managed to play very well&emdash;that of addressing itself to communities rather than to individuals. This is why it is people from the same sectors of society throughout the long history of public schooling who have failed in (or, I contend, been failed by) the educational system in Canada. Because the school has insisted and insists today on addressing its work to individuals and not communities, it is children from poor families, children of the First Nations, children from culturally marginalized communities who have always been and who continue to be over-represented among Canada’s so-called ‘illiterates’. But the solution is not a remedial course for these children&emdash;it is a remedial course for our institutions, and the library can play a leading role in its design and delivery.

So here we are, then, in the remedial class.

And the remedial class project is to ‘re-tool’ education for the so-called ‘information age’. Schools and libraries are to be re-designed and work practices re-configured. This is presented as imperative, not optional, and it is accompanied by cuts to librarian and teacher-librarian positions, as well, of course, to the resources necessary to continue the working of the library. The library has often been thought of as the intellectual ‘nerve centre’ of the school. You might better liken libraries to the ‘brain’ of the school&emdash;so how did the school brain ever get stuck in the remedial class? And does re-mediating education mean ‘technologizing’ literacy? To answer this, a look at what the future may bring . . . .

 Technologizing literacy: education for the ‘information age’ and beyond

It’s often said that the book was the mental space of modernism, and that the mental space of postmodernism is the computer. But we need to remember that the capacities and characteristics of ‘the book’, like the qualities and capacities of ‘the computer’ are matters more of speculation than of fact, And this is mostly because The Book, like The Computer, refers to a myriad of kinds of social and cultural practices, which makes it very unlikely that the same thing can be true of all of them. So we have to pluralize both book literacy and computer literacy; we have to talk and think in both cases about literacies.

And once we pluralize literacy into literacies, something very important comes clearly into focus: the fact that we cannot develop every kind of literacy using the same tools; quite the contrary. A variety of tools is required to support the learning of the variety of literacies people are nowadays expected to master. One is not, therefore, a substitute for the other: different tools work in different ways to support different kinds of learnings. Whether the book, for instance, is sanctuary, or whether it is an objective summary of known facts, or whether it is an ‘incitement’, whether the computer is an escape, or a rich data source, or a virtual world, depends certainly upon the kind of medium it is, but it depends as much on the kind of ‘reading’, the particular form of ‘literacy’, with which we approach it. So if we had imagined we could extract from an analysis of technologies, of ‘the book’ or ‘the computer’, any significant prescriptions about what a ‘new’ or ‘technological’ literacy is about, we are misled. 

We must look elsewhere, and where I want to go now is back to the stories we tell. What, then, of the terrors revealed to us by the Ghost of Libraries Future? What do these visions tell us of the place of literacy in a post-literate culture? And what is the fate of the library within such a culture? First, of course, our ghost takes us on a library tour, a tour of the crumbling, now derelict bricks-and-mortar building, the bustling community of the books-and-paper library of old now become ‘Necropolis’, a city of the dead in which the desiccated corpus of textually preserved knowledge is still&emdash;though barely&emdash;readable, threatening to disintegrate to dust like those mummified remains of Pharaohs. Whatever spirit remains in the bodies of these texts no longer addresses many of us. A hand gestures us on&emdash;but where? The library of the future has become ‘virtual’&emdash;we rent a kiosk, and log on. The collection, no longer bounded by the library walls, is now dispersed across the globe. This is the so-called ‘information age’, an era of dispersal and fragmentation. The librarian is not ‘in’. Fragmented herself, part webcrawler, part technician, part entrepreneur, she, too, is only virtually present. ‘One of the most important questions to be asked in rethinking how library business is done’, writes Jordon Scepanski (1996: 44), senior advisor for library affairs at California State University, ‘is why it is done in the library’. ‘Librarians should abandon their buildings’, he exhorts, and ‘go where the customers are. Why not function in a classroom building unconnected with the library, in a shopping centre, or at home, electronically connected to customers’. Why not, indeed, he asks. He continues:

Might it not be more cost-efficient [to have] have expensive library talent . . . devote their time to developing effective finding tools and self-teaching aids that could be used on-line, thereby creating a more information-literate populace and empowering a much larger percentage of our potential clientele? (p. 43).

We’re talking market share here, and in case anyone overlooked the idiom of the Ghost of Libraries Future, it is the discourse of the marketplace, the customer and the commodity. As Howard Harris (1996: 49), Vice President of RMG Consultants Inc., reminds us, ‘Library vendors of information technology have already entered an era of mergers and acquisitions’, and it is this rapid pace of change in commodities, but not, I want to stress, a rapid pace of change in human knowledge, with which we are urged to keep up. Knowledge, remember, is not a commodity, although information certainly can be. As Lyotard (1984) puts it in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, ‘technologizing’ knowledge turns knowledge into information, a commodity. ‘You must remember’, our Ghostly host whispers, ex cathedra, ‘that the successor to the library after the era of standards was not the virtual library, but the advertising system. Individuals once individuated in laws with the likes of the Magna Carta, then standardized and disciplined with the widespread circulation of influential and authoritative printed texts, were recreated by a commercialized mass media system of marketing which specialized in the selling, not principally of goods, but the selling of goods through the selling of 'lifestyles' to 'consumers'. This was the successor to the public school and the library. This is what defined and formed individual and cultural identity, not the school, not the library.’

 Marketing ‘information’ to the post-modern ‘consumer’

In a marvellous essay, Nunberg (1996) invites readers to consider two different senses of information which, he explains, are typically confused in a way that threatens extremely dangerous consequences, consequences not dissimilar from those of which the apparition of Libraries Future has given a glimpse. One way of construing ‘information’ has educational significance; the other, however, does not: its primary significance is commercial, not cultural or educational. This becomes a critical distinction when ‘information management’ is acclaimed as the new role of the librarian. Information in its particularistic sense has a necessary relation to persons, to the human subjects being informed. Information in its abstract sense, however, has no necessary associations with either significance or quality&emdash;disconnected from people and from the situations it is about, information in the abstract is better understood by analogy to storage space, more specifically, disk space. It is part of the definition of information arising out of cybernetics and information theory that it has no necessary relation to human beings. This is the sense in which, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, information ‘can be stored in, transferred by and communicated to, inanimate things’ (cited in Nunberg 1996: 108). Information, in this view explicitly dehumanized, is a purely quantitative conception like ‘bandwidth’, of which nonsense takes up exactly as much as sense&emdash;the sense in which ‘information’ has ‘exploded’ is precisely the sense in which information has little educational significance, for what has ‘exploded’ and continues to ‘explode’ is the number, kind and availability of documents, most of dubious worth. Still, the rhetorical effect of calling something ‘information’ is to give it an air of certainty&emdash;although we can be skeptical about knowledge or belief or opinion, we cannot be skeptical about ‘information’ (Agre, in Nunberg 1996: 107). But characterizing information as ‘factual’ and ‘objective’ in this way mistakenly attributes to ‘content’ or ‘subject matter’ what are actually properties of a particular kind of literate practice (Smith 1990). Literacy of this kind is citational, not rational, it is evidentiary, not explanatory (de Castell 1990). It is about giving and requiring warrants&emdash;it’s really just misleading to suggest that we build up ‘information’ out of ‘data’, knowledge out of information, and so on. There is no such thing, for instance, as ‘raw’ data at all: the ‘rawness’ of ‘data’ is what we create when we look at phenomena in a way that separates data from people and situations. In fact, all data are worked up in this way, processed, produced as such, and it makes as much sense to say we begin with understanding and work up to data as it does to say we begin with data and work up to understanding. ‘Information literacy’, if it is to means anything of educational value at all, will mean learning that there is no ‘information’ not already constructed as such, through particular, historically evolved practices of representation and interpretation. This seems to some people, I recognize, like a kind of postmodern epistemic meltdown, a radical fragmentation of human knowledge and its material apparatuses.

Where does that leave the librarian, whose job it is to determine which acquisitions are the most valuable, which are the most important to have, who has to figure out how to index and catalogue, how, in other words, to impose an order and an organization on things which take diverse forms not just externally, but internally as well? To return to our ghost story, as the body of the text-centred library desiccates and decays, what can be preserved of that body into the future? What I suggest is that the purposes I enumerated at the outset remain, but their emphasis is changing as we re-tool our literate practices, and the shift we confront now and in the future is a shift in the core emphases of the library from conservation and circulation to connection and community.

 Digitizing 3 ‘literacy’

To be sure, new technologies, principally the computer, make new demands on learning, and they provide new supports to learning, even as they also dismantle some of the supports for learning upon which education has depended in the past. If we agree that there are in any meaningful sense ‘new literacies’ required to use emerging technologies, then some care should be taken to think about the impacts of digital technologies on the processes and practices of literacy, and to ask how literacy is transformed by new information technologies, and what role libraries and librarians might play in supporting education in these ‘new literacies’.

What does it really mean to say that the electronic environment makes possible revolutionary ways of reading and writing, and with that, radically new forms of literacy? First of all, we mean to speak of the ways that reading becomes writing, to speak of reading as writing, in at least two senses. In the first sense, in the electronic environment reading is writing, because only as it is read does writing appear. There is no underlying, pre-existing or enduring ‘book’ or ‘text’ which the reader moves through; rather, it is only as the cursor is driven by the reader’s hands that the written text comes into existence. There is nothing textual here, no text at all, beyond what is instantaneously brought into alphabetic form on the screen; there is only the binary code, a vast and incomprehensible store of zeros and ones&emdash;out of which the computer builds words as they are called for by the active reader. In the electronic environment, if there is no reading there is no text. We cannot ‘turn to our texts’, there are no texts to turn to; we must instead write whatever texts there will be, by our reading. Second, we mean to point to the way electronic texts break out of linearity, fixity, stability and a predetermined centre, creating in its place a multicentred system allowing material to be completely reordered according to the individual reader’s point of view, which is to say also the purposes, the particular associations forged by the reader for that specific reading event. Where handwritten and printed texts give every word a permanently preserved physical position, the electronic text permits every word to appear in any number of different positions, depending upon the relationships which the reader seeks to explore.

We also mean to recognize an unprecedented hybridity: for the first time in the history of human practices of inscription, all forms of representation, reflection, invention and expression can be captured and preserved in a single, enormously powerful, code. We need to comprehend this master-code, this revolutionary logic system, just as we have endeavoured to comprehend the linguistic codes prior to it. We have to do this in order to grasp how it is that our minds operate with/in this code, and how digital re-tooling will alter the ways we have traditionally worked, how these new tools have re-configured and may yet further re-configure our own inherited and culturally shaped and re-shaped ‘operating systems’. This kind of historically and culturally informed and ‘rhetorically responsible’ critical consciousness is necessary in order to take any intelligent part in forging new directions with the revolutionary digital systems with which we are today being asked to deal, and more particularly, to work.

Nevertheless, far too much of the visionary discourse about the future suffers from a failure to imagine just how complex societies really are and how slowly they change. Much of this futurist rhetoric rehearses a ‘doctrine of supercession’&emdash;the idea that new media usurp and replace their predecessors, that technologizing literacy means the abandonment of print-based literacies, and their replacement with a form of literacy entirely new. Whatever else may be in question about the future of literacy, this much is not: neither the publishing industry nor the printed book will soon disappear. Although some traditional uses of printed books, notably reference texts like encyclopedias, dictionaries and journals are being and will increasingly be eclipsed by other forms (like CD-ROMs and on-line data bases), other uses remain relatively unscathed by the digital revolution. Novels will mostly continue to be read primarily in book form, and so will scholarly works, like the marked up and dog-eared texts I poured over in preparing this paper, texts designed for contemplation&emdash;it’s nearly impossible to do on a computer screen the kinds of intensively reflective, recursive, interrogative and contemplative reading and writing that intellectual work demands without at some point reverting to printed pages. So recreation, pleasure, erudition, spirituality, as well as many kinds of critical-analytic reading, many kinds of text-writing, editing, manuscript preparation, still, especially as they approach completion, are more easily done on ‘hard copy’. At the school level, although textbooks can be very well replaced by and even improved upon by computer-based software, limited access in classrooms and limited access for many students at home, as well as ingrained instructional practices predicated on the school textbook guarantee that this admittedly rather noxious form of text will survive far longer than any of us would likely wish it to. And for the same reason&emdash;the continuity and persistence of institutional practices&emdash;we will continue to rely on cheaply made single-use paperbacks and xeroxed articles for much of our university teaching.

Although there will undoubtedly be some migration in social uses of literacy from printed text to computer screen, print literacy survives as an essential requirement of post-literate personal, social, cultural and vocational life. And let’s not forget that most of what appears on the computer screen requires old-fashioned alphabetic literacy.

Having dispensed with the doctrine of supercession&emdash;that ‘The Book’ must inevitably fade away as the computer rises to primacy in its place&emdash;does not absolve us from the need to give serious consideration to claims that a new kind of literacy, or, more precisely, a new body of literate practices, is being made not only possible but, correspondingly, necessary with the development and use of new ‘cognitive prostheses’, new technologies of representation and communication. There is no doubt that new tools call for new techniques, as well as for the preservation of old ones. What are these new demands, and what is this new literacy?

Patrick Bazin (1996), director of the Bibliothèque de Lyon, a public research library second in importance only to the Bibliothèque Nationale, suggests that the centre of contemporary culture’s textual practices is no longer occupied by its long-time resident, the book; its new occupant has today become the very process of reading itself. But this is a process of reading transformed by new tools, a kind of reading Bazin calls ‘metareading’. Metareading changes the role of the reader, the relations between reading and writing, and, accordingly, the role of the librarian, who must become, Bazin contends, a navigator in a hybrid space of documents, a mediator of knowledge, and an educator. And what becomes, in the age of metareading, of classification, once the heart and soul of librarianship? Librarians themselves, says Bazin (1996: 157), ‘will have to bring about their own Copernican revolution . . . ’ and . . . ‘the library economy that was traditionally an art of classification must become an art of passage’. Relinquished here is the very idea of a centre, a fixed position from which to find our directions through space, as navigation over a limitless and continually shifting topography requires new positions without location, calling for a skilful nomadic roaming capable of pursuing human purposes across an unstable terrain, forging infinitely revisable directions without either a stable starting point or a fixed destination. Bazin suggests that the librarian’s job in an increasingly privatized and privatizing culture of consumption, is to make available to all citizens the tools and the techniques for mastering this new species of reading, this new literacy for making meaning from a hybridized, digitized information stream.

Accordingly, the role of the library today far surpasses, Bazin (1996: 166) contends, the mere conservation of cultural heritage. Libraries, he writes:

will have to become sites of education and training, so as to avoid a widening of the gap between those who master the refinements of metareading and the others. They will above all offer citizens the chance to reinvent together . . . the public space of knowledge, without which acquired knowledge is not culture.

Why should libraries and librarians have that responsibility, and not schools and teachers, one might ask? Both are public institutions of education, after all. But such a question betrays a misapprehension about what schools are and have always been about&emdash;more than the conservation and transmission of knowledge, schools are charged with the formation of character, an always and inevitably ideological mission that cannot help but be culturally specific and indeed culturally conservative, that is always and necessarily shot though with values, that is accompanied always by a the spectre of censorship, of discipline and standardization and of the project of ‘normalization’ of the young. Compare for a moment your own experiences of reading in these two locations: the library and the classroom. In the second but not the first, there is invariably a ‘right’ (and a wrong) answer. In the classroom, the demand for interpretive accountability is always legitimate: ‘tell us your interpretation of this text, and explain how you arrived at it’. This space of public interrogation has no room for concepts like invasion of the privacy of the reader, of trespass into the personal relationship between reader, author and text. Such intrusions are seen, rather, as authorized and legitimate, the entitlement, indeed the responsibility, of the conscientious teacher, who invites (or, if resistance is given, drags) the private reader into the space of the public classroom to have his or her interpretations scrutinized and disciplined (de Castell 1996). In the space of the library, such surveillance and interrogation would constitute a species of illegal entry, and because of this, readers in a library are free to discover or to invent selves and knowledges and forms of expression prohibited in the classroom. It is in this sense that libraries give life to the margins, nurture inhabitants of the borderlands, a kind of ecological practice that sustains a cultural ‘biodiversity’ which guarantees the health and survival of us all, mainstream and margins alike. And last, in considering the very different cultural roles of the library and the classroom, we would be remiss if we did not mention the test, that relentless and inevitable engine of failure whose educational purpose has never been established but whose sociological effects we can trace with certainty. Librarians don’t administer tests, and they don’t pronounce on adequacy or failure: they simply assist whosoever wishes, to read, think, discover, interpret&emdash;all without penalty, all without scrutiny. And in this sense, the library is a sanctuary the classroom can never be, and this is true particularly for those whose differences stretch the tolerances of the public school beyond its breaking point. More than this, the library, in all its privacy, offers to readers possibilities of community that the public space of the classroom, paradoxically, can never open up. So the educational function of schools and libraries is very different indeed, neither more important than the other but, like the forms of text considered earlier, neither able to replace the other. They are different institutions and they do different work.

 The morning/mourning after, and the question of remorse

If this is indeed the future of the library, what can we do in the present to help forge a future we will not regret? One thing I have tried to suggest is that we can re-member the library, past, present and future. We can, that is to say, refuse to replace membership in the library with consumption of its products, refuse to replace the library members with library customers, refuse to abandon traditional educational goals of forming human beings in favour of commercial purposes of in-forming customers and consumers. It is the subordination of educational goals to marketing purposes which is dis-membering the library, not new technologies.

 Conclusion

To be sure, an institution’s ability to survive depends on its ability to adapt itself to this new technological environment, but there is a world of difference between adapting to new conditions, and being driven by them. It can be very difficult to tell the difference between ‘forging’ ahead, and a kind of witless ‘forging behind’, being driven by an agenda which is not even about human well-being, cultural or individual. I am trying to suggest, against the grain of much of what is currently being argued on this question of the future of the library, that to take up as ‘standards’ the pursuit of ‘literacy’ and ‘information’ is to stake one’s claim in enemy territory. I’ve told an old story about the three fingers in order to tell a new story about what might be preserved as digital ‘standards’ for libraries today, the enduring goals of conservation, circulation and community.

But ‘forging ahead’, we do well to remember, conveys not only a direction, a trajectory. It conveys a noteworthy ambiguity: an ambiguity between ‘making’ and ‘making up’. There is in reality no ‘essence’ we can derive whether by argument, by story, or by example: today in education and in culture more generally we are in struggle over precisely this question of what the library ‘is’, which is always more correctly seen as a struggle over what libraries can or should or must become. The terms of this engagement are not ‘academic’, nor are they ours to set: these terms are ideological, they are political, and above all they are economic, and none of these conditions is much altered by theorizing. So even as we think through this critical question of what I’ve called ‘the librarian’s three fingers’, we would be naïve if we did not insist on recognizing that the battle that is being waged today over the future of libraries is far more a resource grab than a contest of epistemologies. Having to confront the loss of so much&emdash;acquisition budgets chopped, facilities abandoned, positions cut&emdash;is this even a battle that reason can hope to win? Culturally enormous losses are not justified by proclaiming technologically driven ‘alternatives’ that do not yet exist, 4 conjured up as they are in visions drawn far more from futuristic novels and movies and television than from any actual computer console or even any actual research and development laboratory, and situated not in the actual conditions of social and material inequality within which our public educational institutions work and have always worked, but in some imaginary utopia of freedom, equality and democracy whose invocation by policy-makers does nothing to bring it into being in practice.

In the rush to set new standards, design new systems, establish new priorities and, in Scepanski’s (1996: 41) terms, ‘re-engineer’ the organization, who is setting the agenda? I have argued that it is neither librarians, nor educators, nor communities nor students: the agenda for libraries, as indeed for schools, is being set today by the advertising system, which has sold us a bill of goods that scarcely exist even in the best equipped facilities, and certainly do not exist in most schools or libraries in Canada. Some indication of the distance between the dreamwork of advertising and the daily work of librarians is given by the results of a recent survey of school librarians (Galler 1996). Asked about the critical issues facing school libraries, 68.6% of respondents answered ‘budgets’; the last item in order of priority was ‘access to information’, seen as a ‘critical issue’ by only 4.2%. Literacy fared not much better, at third to last, with 5.9% seeing it as a critical issue. Asked about the type of information school librarians looked for outside their school libraries, book selection was first at 73.7%, and of the kinds of information sought by more than 50%, all concerned literature and author information, plus professional development and library programme planning. Information on standards, policy, literacy, collection development, management and administration was sought by between 10% and 40% of teacher-librarians. What are these teacher-librarians telling us about their priorities, and who is listening? Notice, too, that 69.5% of teacher librarians did not use school net, although they expressed a salutary willingness to do so. This is no surprise to those of us doing research on the uses of new technologies in schools (Bryson and de Castell 1998)&emdash;people don’t use these resources because they already have an enormously demanding and enormously important job to do, and technology access in schools is completely inadequate&emdash;there are not enough machines, few with Internet capacity, and even fewer schools which actually permit students access to the Internet. Then there are issues of training, which is not provided, release-time to learn and develop computer-based resources, which is not provided, and troubleshooting and maintenance assistance, which is not provided. So who is it who is clamouring for new technologies, whether in the classroom or on the library? Many parents, to be sure, who want for their children the impossible dream of a utopian future that is being sold to them on television. And educational administrators, spurred on by directives and policies out of touch with the realities of most classrooms, and sold on the rhetoric that promoting technology in education will sanctify them as ‘educational leaders’. And, of course, students. Well, some of them. Mostly boys . . . . But the folks who actually have to do the work on the front lines of an ill-equipped school? The folks who know what the day-to-day conditions of work are? Whose attention as educators is drawn to the present, to the children right in front of them here and now, and to their educational needs and resources here and now? For these people neither the school nor the library is about information or technological literacy or designing new ‘standards’&emdash;because the job of work is to forge an education with the resources available to them&emdash;so mostly, as in the past, school is about books, not computers, and about reading and writing, not hypermedia, and about knowledge and understanding, not data and information.

 The moral of the story

As stories are used so often with a ‘moral’, and having followed a fairly predictable path so far, I conclude by returning to our Benedictine corpse of whose decayed body his three writing fingers miraculously survived. About the position in which they discovered his stiffened digits, you will not need to be told, if you only turn your attention to your own hand in writing: observe that the middle finger points backwards, towards the writer, the thumb stabilizes the pen, but it is the index finger which points forward. This seems a very good sign for the future of the library.

1. This paper is a revised and extended version of de Castell (1998).

2. Including, more recently, ‘standards’ for ‘technological literacy’, ‘computer literacy’ and ‘information literacy’, all readily available on the www.

3. Without wishing to make too much of this, what I am suggesting is a distinction between ‘technologizing’ literacy, and ‘digitizing’ literacy, as a means of proposing that what we can best do with new tools, new technologies, is to understand and use them as McLuhan (1964) suggested, as ‘extensions’ of our bodies, and, in particular, as extensions of our very best ‘manual’ tools&emdash;our hands, our very own ‘digits’. It is also a pedagogical reminder that if we want students to learn to use these new tools, we have to allow and encourage them to get their own hands on the machines, rather than, as is most common at present, restricting and regulating and diminishing students’ free access to new technologies.

4. And here there belongs a footnote already written:

It’s unwise to be too complacent about the resilience of the book. It may well be, but librarians who have had their acquisitions budget cut and colleges that have had whole libraries cut in the name of alternatives that still don’t exist are unlikely to have those funds restored. The proclamation that the ‘library without walls’ exists strikes me as an opportunistic move by budget cutters rather than a reasonable, if mistaken, prediction. (Duguid 1996: 91fn6)

AIELLO, S. and MAYS, A. (eds) (1998) The Merck Veterinary Manual, 8th edn (Whitehouse Station, NJ: Merck & Co.).

BAZIN, P. (1996) Toward metareading. In G. Nunberg (ed.), The Future of the Book (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press), 153-168.

BRYSON, M. and DE CASTELL, S. (1998) New technologies, gender and the cultural ecology of primary schooling: imagining teachers as luddites, in/deed. Educational Policy, 12 (5), 542-567.

CALAMAI, P. (1987) Broken Words: Why Five Million Canadians are Illiterate (Toronto: Southam Press).

DE CASTELL, S. (1990) Playing by the book: the problem of textbook knowledge. Journal of Educational Thought, 24 (3A), 110-113.

DE CASTELL, S. (1996) On finding one’s place in the text: literacy as a technology of self-formation. JCT: Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 12 (4), 27-31.

DE CASTELL (1998) From data and information to knowledge and understanding. Education Canada, 38 (1), 9-19.

DE CASTELL, S. and LUKE, A. (1986) Models of literacy in North American schools: social and historical conditions and consequences. In S. de Castell, A. Luke and K. Egan (eds), Literacy, Society and Schooling: A Reader (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 87-109.

DUGUID, P. (1996) Material matters: the past and futurology of the book. In G. Nunberg (ed.), The Future of the Book (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press), 63-102.

ECO, U. (1980) The Name of the Rose, trans. W. Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich).

EGAN, K. (1986) Individual development in literacy. In S. de Castell, A. Luke and K. Egan (eds), Literacy, Society and Schooling: A Reader (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 243-255.

ELIOT, T. S. (1934) The Rock: A Pageant Play written for a Performance at Sadler’s Wells Theatre, 28 May-9 June, 1934 on Behalf of the Forty-five Churches Fund of the Diocese of London: Book of Words (London: Faber and Faber).

GALLER, A. (1996) A survey of what Canadian teacher-librarians need now. School Libraries in Canada, 16 (2), 10-12.

GLOBE AND MAIL (1996) The [Toronto] Globe and Mail, 10 November, A4.

GOODY, J. (1986) The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

HARRIS, H. (1996) Retraining librarians to meet the needs of the virtual library patron. Information Technology and Libraries, 15 (1), 48-52.

HEATH, S. B. (1982) What no bedtime story means: narrative skills at home and school. Language in Society, 11 (1), 49-76

LITTLE, B. (1996) 43% of Canadians unable to cope. The [Toronto] Globe and Mail, 10 November, A6.

LYOTARD, J.-F. (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. G. Bennington and B. Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press).

McLUHAN, M. (1964) Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill).

MICROSOFT (1999) Microsoft Bookshelf 2000 [CD-ROM] (Redmond, WA: Microsoft).

NASLUND, J. (1997) Personal communication.

NUNBERG, G. (1996) Farewell to the information age. In G. Nunberg (ed.), The Future of the Book (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press), 103-138.

O’DONNELL, J. (1996) The pragmatics of the new: Trithemius, McLuhan, Cassiodorus. In G. Nunberg (ed.), The Future of the Book (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press), 37-62.

SCEPANSKI, J. (1996) Public services in a telecommuting world: VTLS Proceedings. Information Technology and Libraries, 15 (1), 41-44.

SOUKHANOV, A. H. (ed.) (1999) Encarta World Dictionary (New York: St Martin’s Press).

SMITH, D. (1990) The Conceptual Practices of Power: A Feminist Sociology of Knowledge (Boston: Northeastern University Press).

THE TSIMSHIAN CHIEFS (1994) Saaban: Sm’algyax Dictionary: Suwilaay’msga Na Ga’niiyatgm: Teachings of Our Grandfathers [CD ROM] (Prince Rupert, BC: Tsimshian Nation and School District 52).

---

Publisher's information |  | Other Op-eds and Commentary

---