Opinion A library in each pocket

Second,the project of making material digitally accessible requires renewed urgency. Searches of material at least in the social sciences and humanities will tell you that India is lagging behind in several respects. There are several big digitisation projects ranging from Digital Library of Indian Heritage to Million Books to the Web. But most of the digitisation happening in India is extremely clunky. One of the exciting possibilities of the new technology is that it is making the reading experience wonderful — everything from the format to the “electronic ink” is at least trying to recreate the experience of reading a book,not a computer. Kindle,for example,can allow you the pleasures of traditional books like highlighting,making notes,writing marginalia,in addition to allowing searches. Our digitisation protocols are not aiming at the supple readability that new technology offers,they still aim at providing merely a computer accessible record. Like so much of our investment in new technology,the interventions seem haphazard. It is not matching the potential range of devices that are likely to disseminate in the near future.

One of the downsides of the very slow dissemination of devices in India is that the amount of Indian material that is available in the new formats is still relatively meagre compared to the potential. So there is a danger that the new technologies,rather than making access to different kinds of material more equal,may actually end up making some material even more invisible.

Thursday was Librarians Day,and it was hard not to think what some of the pioneer librarians would have made of this revolution. One such astonishing figure was S.R. Ranganathan,a mathematician who redefined library classification. Ranganathan is a figure of some interest for several reasons. He is of that astonishing generation of Indians who,in the ’20s and ’30s,with very few resources,did truly world-class work and dominated their fields. He is considered one of the great librarians of the 20th century. He is a character out of Borges’s imagination: someone obsessed with the basic principles that would allow for a rational,usable,coherent and ordered classification of books. The thinking behind his colon classification scheme was considered amongst the most influential in the history of library science.

This may all seem archaic to those who have never experienced the pleasures of memorising the Dewey Decimal or the Library of Congress classifications to search for books. But behind all this were two serious questions. What is a rational basis for the classification? And how might this classification serve the ends of readers? Two of Ranganathan’s laws of library practice were: every reader should find his or her book,and every book should find its reader,doing justice to both sides of the relationship between self and knowledge. These precepts seem simple,but try imagining what it is like to organise books in a pre-digital age so that this becomes possible. The experience of being in a great open stacks library was not that you found what you went looking for; it was that often books found you.

In a way the advent of new technology has rendered the whole issue of classification moot. Some might argue that this indeed is the liberatory power of the new technology: a simple search and every reader finds their book. But there are deeper and interesting questions about reading that will arise in the context of digitisation. For one thing,there is a sense in which electronic books are dissipating the identity of the book.

I don’t mean just in the sense that instead of an identifiable volume you have electronic data.

Those who study habits of reading may have something more systematic to say on this. But there may be a delicious irony in the fact that the only books whose identities survive a digital age are fiction,where sequence is essential to the structure of the book. Just a limited experience with devices like Kindle suggests that in non-fiction the temptation will be to situate little parts of the text in context of parts of other texts; the ease of referring to other texts will make the identity of any single text more nebulous. We will read concepts,and key words and particular threads,not books as a whole. In the new libraries our power to find what we are looking for has been immeasurably enhanced. But there is a poignancy and uncertainty about Ranganathan’s second deep claim on behalf of libraries: they let content find you. Libraries are not about seeking answers to your questions,they are about prompting questions you never dreamed of asking. What protocols of reading will do justice to the quest in a digital age?

India’s library structure is woefully inadequate. There are plans underway to revive some public libraries. But given the way that we are destroying the assets we already have,there is reason to be sceptical that we will get it right. Libraries were the great empowering spaces of the last few centuries. Of the great new public libraries,the Beijing Public Library is a spectacle to behold,an acknowledgement that a civilisation measures its achievement in part by the quality of its libraries. Whether we can do that kind of a monumental project as a measure of our knowledge aspirations is an open question. But we do have an opportunity to put a library in every pocket,and we should make it a priority,thoughtfully and systematically.

The writer is president,Centre for Policy Research,Delhi

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