A Tangled Info Web

I am reasonably at home .with computers, so I know that computer searches are so primitive they are best compared to a phone conversation in which the speakers have to hang up and reconnect every time one of them has completed a sentence. It has to do with a phenomenon called "connecting to server." The scary thing is that library systems in other cities are going the same way we have in New York-making the counterintuitive, anti-intellectual decision that computers are ready to replace the printed page.

Who made the decision that everyone who is not computer-literate-very computer-literate, in the ease of our new library-could be left in the cold? Who is pretending that men and women from low-income neighborhoods, schooled without computers and without computers at home, can use this library? And how many decades will pass before everyone who graduated from pre-computer colleges is dead, and until inner-city and rural public schools have computers in sufficient numbers to teach all their children how to use them? Indeed, precious few minority faces are to be seen at the computer stations in our fancy new library.

And what about my mother? She has yet to conquer the ATM. Is she to be disconnected from all the world of science because technology is not among the sciences that interest her?

And what does all this technology have to do with reading? In my household, we read science books for pleasure all the time. We have Stephen Hawking on black holes and Steven Weinberg on the origin of the universe. We have Carl Sagan's wonderful book about brain evolution. We have an excellent work on the history of surgery and another on the origin of species. We have taxonomic guides to birds, trees and flowers. But we can't take our love of science to the library, because science there has been made into an unlovable search for "key words."

Computers, in their prolonged infancy, are not ready to substitute for stacks of books. Personally, I doubt they ever will be, if for no reason other than you cannot take computers into the tub with you and you can't balance them on a pillow when you've gone to bed for the night.

I hope the New York science library will store a couple of rows of its computers upstairs where the inaccessible science journals are, and make way for the science journals on street level, where the people are-the people who actually want to read journals.