During a recent meeting in my boss’s office, I noticed a shiny black baseball bat leaning against a bookshelf. Turns out it belonged to my boss’s son-in-law, Chris Heisey, an outfielder for the Cincinnati Reds (and a graduate of Messiah College, where I serve as library director).
I picked it up, tested its heft and feel, and checked out the stamped length and weight markers on the base of the handle’s knob. It was a thing of beauty. For a moment I forgot about library-budget issues and campus-planning initiatives. I couldn’t help but notice how similar this bat was to the 32-inch Ernie Banks model I had used on my suburban Chicago high-school team decades ago, except my bat had not been black, but a natural wood tone. I could almost hear the crack of a solid base hit and experience the shivers at a gloomy early-April away game. I could almost feel the anguish of the colossal collapse of the 1969 Chicago Cubs my junior year all over again. I admitted to my boss that the sport’s move to the aluminum bat was a sad transition for me. My consolation has long been that the highest, most accomplished levels of the game still recognize the value, yea, superiority, of a finely crafted wooden bat.
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I began thinking about tangible, physical library resources—books, art works, manuscripts, maps—as the wooden bats of study and research. All indicators suggest that technophiles—our purveyors of aluminum bats, if you will—have near-complete hegemony in the library enterprise now. Although I attended library school more than 30 years ago, even then something called the Ohio College Library Center was emerging as a national force, computer-programming courses were required elements of most library-school curricula, and retrospective conversion—the arduous process of moving card catalog records online—would soon became common parlance in our profession. F.W. Lancaster, a British-American information scientist, predicted the paperless society. When I learned the wonders of online database searching in 1981, I shared the amazement and glee of our instructor when he exclaimed, “Ain’t science wonderful!?”
Our aluminum bat was being perfected, and we’ve been refining it ever since. CD-ROM’s have come and gone. Computer screens that once contained only words soon sported icons, then photographs, and finally motion pictures and sound. Personal computers and servers replaced the mainframe and dumb terminal. Now something that resembles the older configuration is reappearing in a new back-to-the-future incarnation we call cloud computing. Amazon sells more Kindle e-books than print books. Even our library buildings are rediscovering their inner heart-of-the-campus, lost when they became perceived as peripheral storage warehouses. Now reinvented as learning commons, libraries offer one-stop shopping for student services, sharing space with writing centers, learning-assistance centers, and advisement offices. Who needs wooden bats? That dull ping from the ball’s contact on aluminum improves a batter’s power (as do steroids and human growth hormones). And aren’t speed, distance, and instant gratification all that matter? Well, maybe not.
I find much to commend in the words of Denman Ross, an early 20th-century design scholar, who said, “There is no intrinsic value in what is new or what is old because of its age, but all things are valuable from what quality is in them.” Some things are made for speed and to defy distance; others are designed to promote reflection and scholarship, and enhance creativity through their very tactility. The shock and allure of the new need not squeeze out the objects we already know. It need not be blasphemy to keep the wood alongside the aluminum, but you rarely hear that case being made at conference sessions sponsored by Educause, Computers in Libraries, and other groups that promote educational uses of mobile technology.
The big leagues and their farm-system affiliates never abandoned the wooden bat. Similarly, leading libraries still highly value print resources in conjunction with their many digital initiatives. Consider how Princeton University describes its library collections in a December 2011 job notice: “To support the diverse needs of its users, the Library holds some seven million printed volumes, ranging from incunabula to current imprints, and provides access to many other records of human knowledge, such as ancient papyri and cylinder seals, modern literary manuscripts, and recently produced electronic databases and journals.”
Or note the University of Chicago’s decision not to move books off campus when it recently opened its innovative Joe and Rika Mansueto Library. Faculty members there had objected strongly to moving monographs and other resources off campus. Thanks to Helmut Jahn’s design, this new campus showplace boasts underground storage capacity for 3.5 million volumes and a robotic-retrieval system that delivers desired items within minutes.
In the big leagues, wooden bats still matter. Keeping print materials on campus and accessible remains important for other reasons as well. Witness Andrew M. Stauffer’s recent Chronicle article, “The Troubled Future of the 19th-Century Book.” Stauffer, the director of the Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship, cites several examples of what we all know intuitively. “The books on the shelves carry plenty of information lost in the process of digitization, no matter how lovingly a particular copy is rendered on the screen,” he writes. “There are vitally significant variations in the stacks: editions, printings, issues, bindings, illustrations, paper type, size, marginalia, advertisements, and other customizations in apparently identical copies.” Without these details, discernible only in physical copies, we are unable to understand a book’s total impact. Are we so easily seduced by the aluminum bat that we toss all wooden ones from the bat bag?
Let’s also acknowledge that our gadgets eventually program us. History teaches us that technologies often numb the very human capacities they amplify; in its most advanced forms, this is tantamount to auto-amputation. As weavers lost manual dexterity with their use of increasingly mechanized looms during the Industrial Revolution, so we can only imagine what effect GPS will have on the innate and learned ability of New York City cabbies to find their way around the five boroughs. Yet we practice auto-amputation at our own peril. We dare not abandon wooden bats for aluminum for those endeavors that demand prolonged attention, reflection, and the analysis and synthesis that sometimes lead to wisdom, the best result of those decidedly human endeavors that no gadget can exercise.
Some time back, when I was still closer to 50 than 60, I gave church-league softball one more go. With some trepidation I showed up at the high-school softball field where we began pre-season practice. I soon discovered that my judgment about where fly balls would land was not what it once was, nor would my aching knees and stiff lower back allow the dexterity that would make me a clear asset at shortstop or second base.
Things improved once I stepped into the batter’s box. When I finally adjusted to the high arc and sharp angle of the slowly pitched ball crossing the plate, I made solid enough contact with my, yes, wooden bat that poke after poke landed in the shallow outfield. Some of my teammates couldn’t imagine why I didn’t use one of the many aluminum bats in the equipment bag. Nor could I assume, without observing them, that all the younger players would use only aluminum bats.
Similarly, it is unwise to assume that all those digital natives in our classrooms want to do all their research and study on laptops and mobile devices. A recent survey by the University of California Libraries found that a majority of students preferred print text books to e-textbooks—in part because the computer presented too many distractions.
An umpire friend of mine tells me that for college and high-school baseball players, all bats must meet a new certification standard aimed at ensuring that aluminum and composite bats perform in a similar way to wooden bats. Deader metal bats mean a truer game, and more bat options for amateur players.
It is past time to stop marginalizing defenders of the printed word with whispered sneers of “Luddite!” Some needs are best met digitally; we all have our favorite examples that confirm Paul Simon’s contention that “These are the days of miracle and wonder.” Nevertheless, a few moments of critical, open-minded, and clear-eyed consideration yields multiple instances where the codex book is not only better than an iPad, smart phone, or e-book, but the only satisfactory choice.
Even those of us serving libraries that are the equivalent of church-league softball teams can afford to leave a few wooden bats in our equipment bag.
