By Joel Achenbach
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 12, 1999; Page A01

Tom Mann learned the art of research as a private eye in Louisiana. Now he works at the Library of Congress. He's that restless gentleman at the reference desk, the one who, hearing a question, darts into an alcove, whirls up a tightly spiraled staircase -- years of experience have given him the navigational skills of a bat -- and pops back down with the perfect book, his fingers flying to the right page and paragraph.

These days, Mann is incensed. He's something of an oxymoron, a raging librarian. He's angry about a proposal that, if approved, would shelve books at the library not by subject matter, as is traditional, but by size.

The plan would save space, lots of space. Shelves could be precisely the right height, with no gaps above the shorter volumes. There would be four types of books: small, medium, large and folio (extra large).

No longer would books migrate through the stacks over time in a dynamic environment of expanding scholarship and creativity. A book would have an eternal resting place. The computer would know its location.

Such a system, Mann notes, would eliminate browsing -- "discovery by serendipity," as he calls it. "Shelving the books on Capitol Hill by height rather than by subject would be the worst thing that could happen to the basic structure of the Library of Congress," he said. "It would change LC from a library into a warehouse."

What's going on here is something much bigger than a shelving dispute. It goes beyond one library, one librarian. Tom Mann's protest is but a puff of wind in a gathering cultural storm -- the information hurricane.

Institutions and individuals alike are coping with a deluge of books, journals, tapes, legal records, documents, e-mail and uncounted gushers of raw data. All this material is supposed to be stored and preserved. It's supposed to be arranged in some sensible fashion. The problem exists at every level, from small businesses to great archival institutions to the ordinary household. You can't simply cram all this information in a box and stick it in the attic, because the attic is already jammed, as are the basement and all the closets.

Compounding the problem is the fact that information disintegrates. Books turn brittle. Tapes fall apart. Films degrade into gunpowder.

The latest crisis is "digital preservation." The binary code surging through wires all over the world is in danger of turning to gibberish as computer programs become obsolete. The Information Age, the experts warn, could become a blank spot in human history.

The problem speaks to the irony of modern civilization. The success of the species has spawned unforeseen burdens and side effects. The prodigious output of the human mind is a grand and wonderful achievement -- but now what do we do with all this stuff?

History's Pages

The book, the illuminated manuscript, the papyrus scroll, do not merely record the story of civilization. They're a piece of that story.

The historical phenomenon we know as the Renaissance in Europe was essentially driven by the rediscovery of ancient writings. Some were retrieved from the secret vaults of monasteries; some trickled in from the Arab world. Gutenberg's invention of the printing press revolutionized the flow of information. But no one could afford to take a book for granted. A book was so precious and rare a commodity that in a typical library it was kept chained to a desk.

In 1472 the library at Queens' College in Cambridge, England, had precisely 199 books.

At the height of the Renaissance there were people running around who could claim with some plausibility to have read every important book ever written. The essayist and statesman Francis Bacon complained that "the whole stock, numerous as it appears at first view, proves on examination to be but scanty."

He wouldn't be such a big talker today. No one can read everything.

For the modern person with the slightest intellectual ambition, the world of knowledge is overwhelming, a vast ocean, horizonless, plunging to impossible depths. The best you can do is occasionally go for a swim.

More than 50,000 books are published every year in America alone. The number of different journals published globally is estimated at 400,000. The media moguls promise that soon every home will have access to hundreds of television channels. The World Wide Web coalesced in 1992, and now has millions of sites.

The information glut is hardly the apocalypse that some imagined might come about at the millennium. The world's not ending, it's just becoming incomprehensible. The complaint of every university professor is that there is no way to keep up to date with the research even in a narrowly defined field. At academic conferences, people with PhDs find themselves baffled by the lectures of their colleagues. The expertise is too extreme. There is no common body of knowledge, no common language.

"It's the Tower of Babel syndrome."

That's James Billington talking. He's Tom Mann's boss, the Librarian of Congress. Every day Billington must fight the battles of the Too-Much-Information Age. He worries about the nuts-and-bolts issues, such as shelving and digital preservation, and he also worries about broader philosophical matters, such as: Are we truly wiser with all this information?

"It's significant that we call it the Information Age," he said. "We don't talk about the Knowledge Age."

Billington has a professor's reverence for knowledge, viewing it as a kind of temple erected through the ages by the sweat of many a forgotten laborer. He subscribes to a formula: Pieces of raw data, when mildly processed, can turn into information, which then, through much added effort and value, can rise to the level of knowledge -- which finally is the foundation for wisdom.

But he thinks that in this era of Web surfing and chat rooms and data overload we may be going in the wrong direction. He mentions the poem "The Rock" by T.S. Eliot:

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

"Our society is basically motion without memory," Billington said. "Which, of course, is one of the clinical definitions of insanity."

An Avalanche of Data

The archivist of the United States, John Carlin, has the absurdly difficult job of storing all the official records of a large information-obsessed country. The National Archives has billions of pieces of paper, not to mention the Nixon tapes from Watergate.

"There are about half a dozen machines left in the world that can play those tapes," Carlin said.

He's bedeviled, like everyone else, by digital preservation, but what makes the situation particularly acute for Carlin is that countless government agencies are dumping their data on him. Agencies that used to hang on to their paperwork for a quarter-century are now passing along boodles of electronic records after only a few years. Carlin at one point went to NASA and explained that the Archives couldn't handle the profusion of data being beamed down from satellites, about every conceivable aspect of the Earth's atmosphere, oceans, land masses, volcanoes, ice sheets and ozone holes.

The problem of digital preservation has to be addressed, says Carlin's deputy, Lewis Bellardo, "or memory will be lost for the latter half of the 20th century."

Carlin and Bellardo point to an example. They are trying to preserve electronic data from the Reagan and Bush administrations. The computer system used at the White House to handle correspondence during the 1980s and early 1990s -- and even early in the administration of President Clinton -- is already so out of date that the vendor no longer will repair it.

It's a peculiar thought -- that digital information, those little 0s and 1s, are somehow imperiled. But those digits are a form of code, and they require computers -- hardware and software -- to become meaningful. "Unfortunately," writes researcher Jeff Rothenberg of the Rand Corp., "the intended reader of a digital file is a computer program, not a human." And those programs rarely survive more than a few years.

The problem is a bit like the Y2K computer bug, a flaw built into the structure of the computer universe. Most computer programs use proprietary codes instead of an "open standard." Archivists and librarians would love to see a trend toward openness, but in the meantime, from a preservation standpoint, an electronic document may as well have been scrawled with a wet finger on a paper napkin.

"It's an infinite obstacle. Once solved, it won't be a problem at all, but right now it's pandemic," said Abby Smith, director of programs for the Council on Library and Information Resources.

Information that gets lost tends to be stuff that no one thought would ever be of value. Most silent movies are gone forever -- deemed, in their day, a disposable medium. Much of Johnny Carson's "Tonight Show" is gone, recorded only in the evanescent medium of warm memories.

Lost information is a fact of human existence. Languages get lost, as do cities. The rise of civilization is a story told in rubble and broken pottery. The members of prehistoric societies did not think they lived in prehistoric times; they merely lacked a good preservation medium.

Language itself is a kind of code that does not automatically translate over the centuries. Egyptian hieroglyphics were mystifying for a thousand years, until the discovery in 1799 of the Rosetta Stone, which juxtaposed a passage of hieroglyphics with the same passage in Greek and demotic text.

So much else is lost. There is virtually no documentation of the life of William Shakespeare. Smith points out that in 16th-century England, a piece of paper was a precious object that no one could afford to use just once. They'd scrape the ink off, bleach it, and use it again. Blank paper was more valuable than old information.

The Information Archaeologist

For 20 years, a box of recordings sat unheard in a corner of the Library of Congress. They were interviews with Holocaust survivors, conducted in 1946 by an Illinois professor. The problem: The recording medium, reels of magnetized steel wire, popular in the 1940s, had become obsolete.

Engineer John Howell saved the day. A white-haired veteran of the library staff, he searched for years to find a device that could play the interviews. In the '40s there were many types and sizes of wire recorders, and so he had to find precisely the right machine. Finally he tracked down two Peirce wire recorders, ancient contraptions full of vacuum tubes. Neither worked. So he cannibalized parts from one and managed to get the other to work. Painstakingly the interviews were played and re-recorded on modern equipment.

As Americans reach old age they clean out their attics, he said, and they send the Library of Congress their old tapes, wires, wax cylinders, odd-format record albums, dictation machines and various other outmoded gadgets. He'd like to see all these formats saved, so the information isn't lost.

"It would be nice if we had a couple of technical people we could put into storage, too," he said.

He was joking, but he was precisely on point. Across the country there is information stored on formats that are barely clinging to life, preserved by the know-how of a few white-haired engineers who are not quite ready to retire.

No Tome Unturned

There is another repository for old information: The little bookshop around the corner.

Few are as obscure, and peculiar, as J.F. Ptak Science Books, tucked among the row houses on Volta Place NW in Georgetown. Not many people ever seem to be inside, which is fortunate, since there's hardly any room to maneuver amid the clutter of books, maps, journals, lithographs, laboratory gadgets, test tubes, thermometers and fossils.

In a glass case is a wax model of the interior of a lung. This is information of sorts, in a particularly visceral form.

Look closely at that blob floating in formaldehyde: It's the larynx of an owl.

The proprietor, John Ptak, is as thick and sturdy as a textbook. From the look of his shop he's more collector than salesman. In Alexandria he has a storage facility so packed with books it is impenetrable, essentially a solid cube of paper.

Ptak is particularly pleased with his most recent bonanza: 90,000 pamphlets from the Library of Congress.

The pamphlets are, in library jargon, "ephemera," stuff that's potentially disposable and of no obvious value. They date to World War II and earlier. A quick glance reveals a Depression-era treatise on the dangers of marijuana ("Assassin of Youth"). There's a prospectus for grazing land in Nevada. There's a contract, written in Italian, for the construction of a factory in a Nazi death camp.

This is old information, but to Ptak it is marvelous.

"Why bother saving a 1931 Yugoslavian cigarette export catalogue?" Ptak asked, holding up one of his items. He answered: "Why not? In its own way it's a magnificent thing. It's got to be worth something."

The Library of Congress, after sorting through the material and saving the most valuable items, gave the pamphlets to Ptak in exchange for a collection of rare photographs and other materials. Billington, like several other library officials, didn't know anything about the exchange. When your collection gets big enough, hardly anyone notices when 90,000 pamphlets covering hundreds of feet of shelf space suddenly disappear.

Told that the exchange involved ephemera, Billington said ruefully, "I'm interested in ephemera."

Everything is important, potentially. The trend in history departments throughout academia has been away from the traditional great-men-fighting-wars version of history. "Social history" explores lives of ordinary people, the forgotten classes, the individuals who were not kings or generals or popes.

And this means there is no easy way for the keepers of knowledge to separate the nuggets from the great, surging mass of information.

An Early Precedent

Almost from its origin, the Library of Congress had the ambitious goal of a universal collection. When the British burned the Capitol, they destroyed most of the library's books. Thomas Jefferson offered to sell Congress his own collection of books, many in French, Spanish, German, Latin and Greek.

Cyrus King, a Federalist Party lawmaker, objected.

"The Bill would put 23,900 dollars into Mr. Jefferson's pocket for about 6,000 books -- good, bad and indifferent; old, new and worthless, in languages which many cannot read, and most ought not to."

Jefferson countered that there was "no subject to which a Member of Congress may not have occasion to refer."

Congress bought. Quickly, the Library of Congress became jammed, with books overflowing the shelves.

The Jefferson Building in 1897 provided a new, spacious home, but that, too, filled up. Two courtyards were converted to book stacks. They filled up. The opening in 1939 of the Adams Building, a no-nonsense box with miles of shelves, relieved the problem, but it filled up. The Madison Building came along in 1980, larger than any building in the area save the Pentagon. It filled up. A new warehouse 40 miles from Washington will open next year.

The library has 113 million items already, and every morning 20,000 more items slam into the loading dock. The stacks are so full that in some areas the floor is used as an auxiliary shelf.

"We are not happy with them being on the floor," said Steve Herman, the chief of the general collection. "It's not good from a preservation point of view. Someone could kick them."

Library Evolution

Billington struggles with the problems of running the world's largest book stack.

He has a swank office with a two-dome view -- the Capitol beyond some trees and the gorgeous Jefferson Building just across the street. His desk is cluttered with the multiple media of the modern workplace: newspapers, videos, memos, books, magazines. He can talk on the phone, write on a computer or bang out a letter on the electric typewriter he refuses to relinquish. He's not fond of e-mail. He doesn't surf the Internet.

Billington is in many ways a kindred spirit to Tom Mann. Both are book people in an electronic age. One of Billington's first acts when he took over the library was to save the old card catalogue, the weathered wooden drawers with carefully typed listings of every book in the library.

But although Mann and many other reference librarians are horrified by the idea of shelving by size, Billington does not seem bothered by the proposal. He feels the library must evolve. The dispute, he says, is a sign of a wrenching cultural shift there. It began in 1992 when, as a security measure, the library "closed" the stacks, those sturdy steel shelves holding millions of volumes, the leisurely browsing ground of scholars. Only select staffers can get in now. The shift to computer searches is hard on everyone, Billington said.

The library has purchased a new computerized cataloguing system that will come online in the fall. Only then will Billington and his aides decide whether to start shelving by size. The great advantage of computer-based searching is that it isn't restricted by the physical structure of the library. Billington has a vision of a library without walls, an "active catalyst for civilization," as he once put it, rather than a "passive mausoleum" for old books.

The entry point is the Internet. The library has been putting many of its priceless prints, maps and documents on a searchable Web site. Everyone in the knowledge business is racing to keep up with changing research habits. (Many college students, says Abby Smith, rely entirely on Internet sources for their papers. "There's a whole generation of kids who think that if it ain't on the Web, it doesn't exist.")

The dream of many librarians is that someday the collective knowledge of civilization will be available on the Web. Right now it isn't. It takes time and costs money to scan the pages of a book into a digital format, and no one can afford to plunge into the stacks and do that with the millions of books at the Library of Congress.

A venture called Project Gutenberg has the goal of putting 10,000 texts online by the year 2001. Mann, for one, is dismissive of the effort. The e-texts, he says, will never catch up. The library, he points out, gains 10,000 new books every two weeks. "Not only is the electronic virtual library not catching up to the print world," Mann has written, "it is in fact falling farther and farther behind every day."

Billington believes the library must play a role in saving the Internet from turning into a dumb-bunny domain, a mere offshoot of what he calls the "audiovisual culture." The Internet shortens attention spans, he says. It destroys the sentence, the foundation of the English language, with its diction-mangling chat rooms. And the Internet is heavily skewed toward recent information, the latest data, with little trace of older material. A person might surf the Web for hours and not encounter anything written before 1995.

"It's inherently destructive of memory," Billington said. "You think you're getting lots more [information] until you've found out you've made a bargain with the Devil. You've slowly mutated, and have become an extension of the machine."

Epilogue

The worst fear of a librarian is that knowledge will be lost, that the world will somehow see a repeat of the tragedy of the burning of the great library of Alexandria, in Egypt, by the forces of Julius Caesar in 47 B.C. The library is reputed to have had 600,000 papyrus scrolls. It had the singular collection of the world's knowledge to that point, and it all disappeared in flames.

Except even that story is hard to nail down. It may have been an entirely different building destroyed by the Romans. There are accounts of the Alexandrian library being destroyed in A.D. 273, 391 and finally in 645. The number of scrolls may have been only 40,000. The problem is, the contemporaneous accounts have been lost.

The greatest library in the world left behind virtually no data, and no one is even sure of its precise location.

ABOUT THE SERIES

Throughout this year, Washington Post staff writers will explore some of the major ideas and controversies facing humankind on the eve of the 21st century, from the degradation of the environment to the riddles of the cosmos.