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

KÖNYVTÁR ÉS KORSZERŰSÉG – LIBRARY AND MODERNITY

S. Fine in sophisticated technology available for product development and design, and with the vast amounts of information available for markét analysis, 90 to 95 percent of new products introduced still fail. It means, perhaps, that there are somé humán problems that better technology and more information cannot solve. It is not hard to relate the point to libraries. We do not really know how to measure productivity in a service profession like librarianship. But the evidence seems clear that whatever it is we are doing has not appreciably benefited from the massive influx of technology for library service. We are not seeing stories and articles in newspapers on the great value of libraries in serving society, and our lawmakers have not seen clear to support libraries to the level we require. Apparently technology has not made a real difference in the degree to which our services are valued. The growing store of available information and the technology to access it has not changed the way libraries operate or are perceived in the broader community. More volume has not improved our position. On the contrary. In fact, increased volume is perhaps the second greatest threat to our collective psychological health in the füture. The growing amount of information available is staggering. For example, current statistics conceming the growth of information available in the United States show the following: — Over one millión books are published annually in the United States. — Americans bought 13.2 millión tons of newspapers last year. — One weekend edition of the New York Times contains more information than the average person anywhere was likely to come across in a whole lifetime in the 17th century. — The New York Times 346,000 tons of newsprint in a year. If ink used in the Times were milk, the printing of the paper would consume enough to provide two gallons of milk every week for a year for the entire population of a city of 300,000 people. — The English language now contains 500,000 words, five times more than in Shakespeare's time. — We are throwing out more print with our weekly garbage than past generations dreamed it was possible to produce in a lifetime. — If predictions come true, the amount of new information available to engineers will become so large that it will be humanly impossible to keep current. — In fact, somé scientists now claim that it takes less time to do an experiment than to do the research to find out whether or not it has been done before. — The quantity of printed materials is doubling every five years. The number of books that the major U.S. libraries will hold is doubling every 14 years. 138 Thoughts in the library"