Domsa Károlyné, Fekete Gézáné, Kovács Mária (szerk.): Gondolatok a könyvtárban / Thoughts in the Library (A MTAK közleményei 30. Budapest, 1992)

KÖNYVTÁR ÉS HAGYOMÁNY – LIBRARY AND TRADITION

The Library of Libraries Thomas Kabdebo St. Patrick's College, Library, Maynooth, Co. Kildare, Ireland "The gods placed our own happiness in the wellbeing of one another." György Bessenyei At the dawn of the microformat era the death of the book was prophesied. (Not unlike the demise of capitalism at the birth of the Bolshevik Revolution.) With the appearance of the screen the obsolescence of print and the sluggishness of libraries was emphasized, and no library or information journal is without the neophyte, who would solve all the world's bibliographic and information problems with the help of a top notch p.c. and busloadful of CD-ROMs. Indeed, you may have all the databanks and on-line facilities at your fingertips, and your reference books supplanted by an arsenal of CD-ROMs. If this was your scenario, and you had plenty of dough, all you needed was a glorified telephone exchange, instead of a library. Such a "library" is but the branch of that electronically existing super information network, that criss-crosses the globe. Bibliographic data transfer is old hat, text transfer is budding, and given sufficient printers in quality and quantity, you would soon be able to get some texts from certain places, and somewhat after that, more texts from more places. Saving cataclysms any texts from representative places will also be a reality one day. Are libraries already becoming museums, large cathedrals with few worshippers, which will slowly cmmble away? Technically, the fax makes almost all texts almost universally available already. The printed book is 450, the book format is 1700, libraries are several thousand „ Gondolatok a könyvtárban " 73