I have been reading Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages by Alex Wright, a book I first saw mentioned on Khoi Vinh’s blog, Subtraction.

Chapter ten of the book is called “The Industrial Library,” and goes over some of the contributions of Cutter, Dewey, and Ranganathan to classification and library science. At the end of the chapter, Wright mentions an 1883 essay by Cutter entitled “The Buffalo Public Library in 1983.”

This sounded intriguing to me, and I was able to find the full text on Google Books rather quickly. It appeared in the Papers and Proceedings of the American Library Association for 1883. Here are some links depending on what you want:

Wright is interested in how Cutter foresaw electronic book requests for readers and a telegraph-style network that allowed libraries to share information. That is interesting. But I found some of Cutter’s blind spots and apparent enthusiasms that haven’t aged as well to be more interesting.

For example:

  • Cutter seems obsessed with circulation, not of books, but of air. “Ventilation was their hobby,” Cutter writes of his notional 20th-century librarians. “Nothing made the librarian come nearer scolding than any impurity in the air.”
  • I believe all librarians are referred to as “he” or “him.” But, then, this is Cutter writing, and not Dewey.
  • Reading fiction in “1983” is still looked down upon. The librarian of the future says “We have not yet escaped the preponderant use of fiction though we have diminished it since your day. It used to be 75 per cent. Thanks to our training the school children in good ways it has fallen to forty. I doubt if it gets much lower.”
  • I found his description of the photographic catalog system (pages 52-3 in the original pagination) completely incomprehensible.
  • In “1983” open stacks haven’t been invented yet. Readers enter the call number they want on a litle device in their desk and a boy runs and gets the book for them.
  • The library of “1983” is open every day, and kept open as late as anyone wants to stay.
  • Gender segregation still goes strong in “1983” with separate service desks for men, women, and children.
  • Cutter’s librarian of the future uses the term “great unwashed” unironically: “Every one must be admitted into the delivery-room, but from the reading-rooms the great unwashed are shut out altogether or put in rooms by themselves. Luckily public opinion sustains us thoroughly in their exclusion or seclusion.”

In short, the library of “1983” is suspiciously like a librarian’s ideal of a library in 1883, plus some electric lights and a telegraph.

If I have time, I plan to delve into these Papers and Proceedings a bit more. The other essays will lack the prognosticating of the Cutter essay, but they seem like they’ll furnish a fascinating look at the concerns of librarians from 125 years ago. The report on library architecture and the report on fiction in libraries look particularly interesting. From the latter: “The time was–perhaps to some still is–when the announcement that fiction reading was spreading through the community would excite alarm like the cry of cholera.” There is also an article entitled “The Work of the Nineteenth-Century Librarian for the Librarian of the Twentieth” by a certain R. R. Bowker that looks promising.

I’d love to read my own blog and others like it with 125 years of hindsight. On second thought, I think I may be lucky to be spared that particular fate. I can hear them now: “Social software? I guess that is what people talked about before the singularity.”