A Tangled Info Web

AT A TIME WHEN THE AMERICAN PUBLIC IS LAMENTING the deficiencies of science education throughout the country, the New York Public Library has chosen to remove its science journals from its shelves. Along the way there also must have been a hell of a book burning, because the books are gone, too.

When I heard the city's new science library had opened for business right around the comer from where I live in midtown Manhattan, I was very pleased and strolled over one morning for a visit. I was delighted by the sight of row upon row of computers and printers, all brand new, humming and blinking expensively. But as other visitors Filed in, I noticed the quiet hum was repeatedly interrupted by people frustrated by their unfamiliarity with computers, complaining about the bugs in the search software and griping that they couldn't go to a librarian to reserve a computer-they had to go to a computer to reserve a computer.

I didn't want a computer. I wanted a book-you know, hard copy. But when I went to get one, I was aghast at the poverty of the collection: its randomness, its sparsity, its age. A 15-year-old astrophysics book is good only for roasting wienies. For current information, you have to go to the machines. You can't avoid them because there is no guide to the Dewey Decimal System at the main librarian's desk on the main floor of the city's main science library. This is progress?

When I went to the science-periodicals section and fined out a request ticket for a journal I needed, I was told to take a seat. "Excuse me," I said. "A seat? How long will this take? .... Half an hour," the librarian told me. Yes, half an hour to get one copy of one journal, whereas just a year ago in the old library I could walk up to the stacks and put my hands on dozens of publications in the same amount of time. And not by the farthest stretch of the imagination is any word-search software going to substitute for a quick look at a couple of dozen contents pages, especially when you have to boot up just to find out which journals the library subscribes to. Well, actually, that's not true. Even if you do boot up, there's no way to find out which journals the library subscribes to.

Let me say that again: neither man nor beast can compile, nor can you put together for yourself, a list of the science journals housed in this library. New York City's new science library is also home to our business-and-industry research materials. Its proper name is the Science, Industry and Business Library, and its 10,000 periodicals are all mixed together in the print version of the journals directory. The directory is not alphabetical by name; it's not arranged by subject; it's not arranged by year. It seems to be random. "How does this index work?" I asked a librarian. "I dunno," he said, "but I know it's no good. You should go to the computers."

"You mean I can get a list of your science journals on the computers?" I asked. "No," he said, "you can't." The software cannot retrieve a list of the science journals.