Business Solutions

A Little History Please

Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg created the Gutenberg movable type printing press in or around 1450, and his amazing innovation has been identified as the most significant event of the last millennium.

Throughout time before Johannes Gutenberg, a simple book cost about as much as a high-end luxury automobile, and as a result, only kings and bishops with vast riches could afford to own a book of their own.

This very naturally led to the creation of “shared books,” of centralized libraries where scholars would spend much of their time reading books that they didn’t have to own.

The Age of the Librarian

Contrary to what many people may think, the librarian isn’t a clerk who happens to work at a library. A librarian is a data aficionado, a guide, a Sherpa and a teacher. The librarian is the essential interface between bundles and stacks of data and the untrained and sometimes aggravated user.

Of course, after Gutenberg’s world changing innovation, books started to gradually get a lot cheaper, as more and more individuals assembled their own collections. At the same time all that was taking place, the actual number of individual book titles increased dramatically, as did the demand for libraries as well. A great need for a warehouse to store all the informational treasures being created exponentially, and need was never greater for a “librarian” to help people locate what they needed.

Powerfully insightful and wealthy industrialists, especially Andrew Carnegie funded the modern American library. The idea in the pre-electronic media age was that the working class man needed to be both entertained and “slightly educated.” They should be molded into working all day and then become a more civilized member of society by entertaining themselves reading at night.

And oh yes, your kids also need a place with shared encyclopedias and plenty of fun books, hopefully instilling a lifelong love of reading, because reading makes all of us more thoughtful, better informed and more importantly, productive members of a civil society.

Everything was great… until Now

When anyone wants to watch a movie, “who is a better librarian than Netflix, with a better library, than any library in the country?” The “Netflix Librarian” knows about every single movie, knows everything you’ve seen, and better yet, what you more than likely to want to see. So… if the goal is to connect viewers with movies, Netflix has the winning formula or model.

This goes much further to rebuild the library’s main function or mission than what wrought the ire and resentment of many librarians in any case. Let’s face it, Wikipedia and the really huge databases of global information have basically served the purpose of eliminating the library as the number one and preeminent resource for anyone doing beginning to intermediate levels of research including grade school, middle school, and even some undergraduate.

Has there ever been any real doubt that online resources will continue to get exponentially better and cheaper as time passes? Your kids don’t have to hike to the library to find and use an out of date encyclopedia to do a report on FDR at the last minute. You might want them to, in order to learn the old process of research, but you know they won’t unless of course you somehow compel them.

In the end, they really need a Librarian now, more than they ever have, to help them determine much more creative and useful ways and methods to both find and use important data. The library they don’t need, not at all.