Contributed by: Rob Shields, Henry Marshall Tory Chair, University of Alberta
The year 2020 witnessed the withdrawal of millions of copies of books from library circulation. Universities that had agreed to allow Google to scan books released searchable copies of those books in lieu of loaning printed editions. The claim is that copyright law forced this Damocles choice between print and digital. While the pandemic has seen the closure of libraries, digital copies held collectively as Hathi Trust won out as a way of providing access to millions of students since last March. Not only were stacks closed but reading rooms and facilities were shuttered or available on a strictly limited basis.
However, there is no clear plan on how to return to the previous status quo, which would involve withdrawing that digital access. Reading on screens seems to have won out over paper, even if expert opinion suggests that paper allows better retention and deeper reading. For students skimming texts and those who are required to read specific sections, the digital solution may work well. However, for those actually studying the texts, reading multiple volumes or comparing editions, it is difficult to read at such length with thoroughness on limited acreage of even multiple computer screens. E-readers remain cumbersome and formats are obsessively engineered to prevent copying locked images of pages rather than note-taking or prioritizing a fluid reader experience.
My librarian suggested printing out pages or buying personal copies but this transfers a significant expense to the student. Students pay significant tuition and fees that they expect to include library access. To be fair, digital formats provide some shortcuts: it is possible to search the texts for just the keywords one is interested in. Any digital text can data mine for a term such as “race”, extracting relevant sentences long overlooked by previous generations of scholars. Yet, the coordination of the eye with the hand on the page; the sense of where “halfway” is in a book or that one is getting to the end; the ease of underlining, or the delight of finding previous readers’ insights in the margins are lost to us. Indeed, students do not curl up with an e-book. Rather one is too often fixed at a computer screen in a fatiguing position.
As part of the elimination of the “campus experience”, the withdrawal from circulation of a significant proportion of library books throughout North America changes the nature of the University and of scholarship in the humanities. Anyone dealing with texts, such as historical books or the works of a major writer, faces new challenges in getting to understand the author’s output in the original format it was intended. It is hard to imagine reading Sartre’s Being and Nothingness or nineteenth century classics thoroughly, critically and comparatively without having access to bound versions. Many of these texts are miserable digital experiences. Compare reading Little House on the Prairie online and as a book.
“Digital reading” requires much more effort and concentration. The distraction of memes and short text alternatives such as Facebook just a window away is always tempting. This also suggests that what we pass on in our culture has just shifted as some works will fare better on a laptop than others. As a culture, we are losing the book, in the same way perhaps that the Chinese lost the ink scroll that unrolls to display text and images in an order that was carefully choreographed. Scholars may mourn now. The experience of reading and of studying has changed in ways that we will be examining for years.
As the bricks and mortar college shifts online, the social elements of academia are forced to move elsewhere. Bars, clubs, fraternities and student societies perhaps? There are new challenges to “meeting at the library” that dwarf the shushing of librarians of old. That is, the library and books were never just intellectual or about ideas. They were social environments and objects that could be shared and whose pleasures bound people of like mind together. Because humans are intrinsically social, students and research will find other venues and opportunities for exchange.
As a result, universities and their libraries are ceding place to other sites and institutions. This will diminish their relevance for their hold on the development of ideas and attitudes. Much as we have witnessed many churches closed and sold, so we might anticipate the same for institutions of higher learning. Do we dare imagine the changes that such a shift to the digital entails? No matter what happens, our libraries and universities have adapted to pandemic policies in ways that will change us for ever.
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