Out of thousands of libraries, Wired Magazine On Line listed only 15 as the libraries you would want to connect to from your computer. One was the University of Pennsylvania's. Along with Yale's library, Berkeley's, the University of Michigan's, even the Library of Congress, there's Penn's, named as a great place to do electronic research. Well, maybe not exactly a place. Maybe a cyberspace.
But the point is not electronics for electronics' sake here. It's electronics to make research easier, more effective, more efficient.
But switching library materials to electronics is no guarantee of efficiency.
"The computer revolution pretends to be immediate," said Paul H. Mosher, vice provost and director of libraries, the man overseeing the transformation of Penn's libraries to the computer age. "It takes culture a long time to adapt to it and make it fulfill its promise."
Effecting that adaptation is the modern librarian, whose role has changed in many ways with the advent of the electronic search.
Anyone who has typed a search term into a computer knows the frustration of receiving thousands of citations and trying to sort through them.
"Librarians have to be behavioral scientists," Mosher said. "They have to learn how people and information interact."
And then they have to design the library indexes and systems so even the technophobic can comfortably wade in and fish without fear of drowning in seas of data and technological miscues.
Penn's librarians help streamline electronic searches.
Remote access to the library occurs around the clock. "Today's librarian does more behind the scenes work, putting up on-line help so it's available when you need it -- at 1 a.m.," said Patricia E. Renfro, Associate Director of Library Public Services. "A lot of effort goes into doing very good guides, hypertext links so the network is easy to use."
It all goes back to the role of figuring out how people think, and then helping software developers design systems to fit that paradigm, or selecting electronic material that fits.
"Electronics moves librarians out of the role of keepers and mediators, and more into the role of consultants," Mosher said.
Research Librarian Patty Lynn said she thought her role hadn't changed all that much. "I'm still helping people use things and satisfying their needs."
Renfro agreed. "We've always done a lot of selection as librarians, and we're still selecting. The key role for a librarian is to sort and make available the useful material."
What has changed for Lynn, though, is the speed with which things change. Even the library's Web page looks totally different now from how it looked only three months ago, she said.
"It used to be easy to keep up with new reference books," Lynn said. "You'd pass by the new reference book shelves all day, every day." The same books would be there for several days. Now many of the traditional physical touchstones of library work have become disembodied data on line, requiring an active search.
Mosher also said that electronics have speeded up the changes in the library: "It used to be stable and static. Now it's adaptive and perpetually changing. My colleagues have caught on to it. A lot of the change is driven by the librarians themselves, driven by knowledge, people, technology. We want to give better access to information, better information, better organization of the network. We will produce better students, and that's really our goal.
"The reference rooms are moving into electronics at top speed," Mosher said. "The finding and requesting mechanisms we are moving as fast as we can. We have 32 million pieces of information on electronics. Documents, journal articles, all abstracts and indexes are moving on line."
The shift to on-line information has affected the card catalog, which continues to shrink at Penn. Only about 550,000 manual records remain to be converted to computer form -- a small amount in a system of 4 million volumes.
With the finding and requesting mechanisms going on line, librarians can now turn increased attention to learning what collections faculty and students need and want in any formats or media that apply to their academic work.
"Teams of librarians are intensifying their outreach to faculty and students and bringing back to the library what they learn to meet the goal of more responsive service," said Mosher.
To handle the explosion of data and to develop and make accessible specialized collections, Renfro said, librarians increasingly must specialize in different fields. Penn, because it has so many libraries that already cater to specific fields, has a leg up on the trend.
Librarians are also working outside the walls of the library, working with their patrons at their desk tops and their classrooms.
"We're doing more teaching," Lynn said. "We make appointments, do one-on-one teaching all the time. I've done a lot more classes. I'm working with the School of Education, for example, to take our instructional services to the point of need."
Renfro said it was important to reach patrons in their own environment, rather than waiting for them to come to the library. "We're doing far more work out in classrooms, in the Resnet computer labs. We're not waiting for them to come into the libraries. The challenge isn't for just librarians keeping up, but keeping the Penn community up to date on what we have."
All these electronics and remote library operations have not eliminated the need for the physical library.
"It's a myth that you don't have to come in," said Lynn.
For one thing, the 4 million volumes -- in print -- are heavily used.
"There are certain forms of information and content that do not automate well," said Mosher, as he described the inconvenience of reading and scrolling through a long book on a computer. "A 400-page book is a scroll on the computer screen. We gave up the scroll in the year 200 and went to the codex [a manuscript in book form]."
The building is also a retreat. "The library is still a center for study," Mosher said. "You can learn anything in the library, meet your friends, work with materials in the library." He notes that some students need to escape the activity in the dorms and retreat to the peace of the library to focus on their work.
But the building at Penn is not your father's library.
"All new carrels are wired for laptops," he said. Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center has computer stations and a computerized classroom within the building. Even the periodical reading lounges will be wired for laptop computers in the near future.
And the role of the librarian is no more obsolete than the need for a physical library. Contemplating the way that librarians are helping patrons negotiate the wired jungle, Lynn said, "We're needed more than ever."
Return to Compass Features for November 5, 1996