The Astonishing Age of Information Technology

In 1987, the Richmond Times-Dispatch contemplated the future of local libraries thirty-eight years ahead, in the far-flung year of 2025. “There will still be books on the shelves,” the reporter assured readers, but there would also be “books stored on lazer disks…read from video display terminals.”¹ The article was correct that there are still books on the shelves, lots of them, as well as the fact that we have electronic books – though they might not have been as popular if you had to read them from a terminal in the library.

News articles about libraries follow predictable patterns. One cliché is the article asking if libraries are becoming obsolete, and another is one seemingly surprised that libraries “have more than just books” to offer the public.² Both of these articles fall for the same fallacy, that libraries are a place for books, when in fact libraries are a place for information. For this reason, they are often early adopters of new technologies that provide access to information in new ways.

For many centuries, books and documents have been the primary vehicle to share information and for this reason many libraries continue to offer books, but they have never been the exclusive method. Information can be visual and auditory in addition to written, and increasingly all these forms can be digital as well as physical.

Next year, the Library of Virginia will celebrate its two-hundredth anniversary. Through those years it has seen a great many technological advances that have changed how information is preserved and accessed. As a library and an archive, the staff not only have to keep informed regarding both past and present forms of media, but have to prepare for future ones as well.

At the start of any new organization, it can be a challenge to gain access to the current technologies, let alone the cutting-edge ones. For decades, the library fought battles to acquire enough space and shelving just to house its collection in a building free of rodents, mold, and asbestos.³ In 1940, the Virginia State Library (as the Library of Virginia was known at the time) moved from the current Oliver Hill Building to a building in Capitol Square between 11th and Governor Streets (now the Patrick Henry Executive Office Building). Its new home provided the latest advances in fire-proofing and spaces to take advantage of technologies not in existence when the former building was built, including a “micro photography lab” that could be used to create microfilm.⁴ By the time it moved again, in 1997 to the current building, those technologies were becoming outdated as well.

A precursor in many ways to digital scanning, microfilm (microphotographic images of documents on film viewed via a magnifying device) allows for a more portable and sustainable copy of the original item. Microfilm is no longer being produced at the same rate as in the past, but it is still used daily in many institutions around the globe, including LVA, though the machines we use to view it have become smaller and smaller.

Both photography and videography were invented after the formal organization of the library in 1823, but as audio-visual information began to be an important aspect of everyday life (and therefore, the historical record) it quickly became part of the library’s collections as well. The first dedicated “picture librarian” was hired in 1959 to oversee what is now our visual studies department.⁵ In the 1970s, the state library maintained a lending library of over 2,000 16mm-film reels; now we have a YouTube channel.⁶

As computer processing and digital technologies have progressed, both the types of information storage devices that have to be preserved, and the ways we can interact with information preserved on them, have proliferated. Archivists at LVA and other institutions in recent years have had to learn how to both preserve and present information that is “born-digital,” such as the gubernatorial records of the Kaine and Northam administrations. But these challenges have also provided new ways to look at the historical information.

Embracing new technologies is not always smooth-sailing. The creation of a downtown power station in the 1920s meant to bring electricity to many state buildings wreaked havoc on both artifacts and archivists alike as it vibrated the entire library building.⁷ A 1945 Richmond Times-Dispatch article praises the state library for hosting instructive classes on the “Barrow method,” a now discredited technological leap in preservation that called for laminating documents. Preserving not only the materials themselves, but the records of our past practices and mistakes, makes certain we will be better prepared for the next 200 years.⁸