There is a story of a general who once reported that he was engaged in a triumphant retreat before an enemy advancing in utter disorder. A similar claim could be made by public libraries in the face of the competition the Internet has brought to the traditional information-access-and-provision aspirations of those libraries.

Conventional wisdom, which could also be defined as herd opinion, does not necessarily stand up under close scrutiny by the informed and sceptical mind. The Internet should not be simply accepted by public librarians as an electronic service enhancement opportunity. It is also a social phenomenon which should be examined for the multiplicity of ways, some all but invisible, impacts on public librarians, libraries and the way both operate.

This is not to suggest public librarians should be cautious about connecting. On the contrary, a reaction of undue caution by both librarians and decision-makers has been an unplanned output of the Internet, and a hindrance to public library connectivity. Human beings are curious creatures in that they often create the very conditions which they fear most. Fear of erosion of the role of public libraries in an increasingly electronically connected information environment may result in public librarians rejecting that environment and becoming protective of the status quo. Unquestioning acceptance of conventional wisdom about the appropriateness of materials on the Internet, and compliance with calls for control and restriction, may result in marginalising the library in favour of corporate control of information by organisations whose focus is profit rather than provision of a free public good.

Taking another look at performance measurement

Performance measurement in public libraries is in the process of evolving to become more output oriented. But in doing so a classical economics approach is frequently taken - planned outputs are measured, all else is ignored. The single category, outputs, if subdivided, would deliver data not only on planned outputs, and also on waste1, shocks and surprises2 and obscured consequences3. Librarians have belatedly started to perceive their libraries as systems. Developments in performance measurement are gradually reflecting this perceptual shift. Inputs are being transformed by processes into outputs. Data is being collected at either end of that continuum but to have real impact on decision-makers public librarians need to be able to provide information about outcomes, the so-called intangible benefits of public library provision and use in the community. Words are being mouthed about outcomes, but little or no data is being collected. The invariable justification is that outcomes are an intangible. Claiming data cannot be collected results in cursory examination of such outcomes, platitudinous statements, and little or no attempt to collect data. Conventional wisdom suggests that outcomes and outputs differ. An alternative approach would be to accept that there are no intangibles, there is only insufficient data. This approach would view both outputs and outcomes as outputs. The data may be exceptionally difficult or expensive to collect and as a result it may be decided, on grounds of cost-effectiveness, not to aim for comprehensive collection of such data, but acknowledging that the issue is a data lack rather than a measurement impossibility, changes the approach to outcomes. Outcomes are merely outputs for which the data is incomplete. Both must be observed and described and thoughtfully examined.

In this paper the writer will attempt to examine the interaction of selected outputs/outcomes of the Internet, other social and organisational changes, and characteristics of public libraries. Such an examination must, by its nature, be somewhat disjointed, representing a listing of a multiplicity of factors rather than a single coherent, multi-part system of impacts. The author makes no claim to comprehensiveness nor to exhaustiveness.

The reader is encouraged to approach this paper as if it were electronic, darting from paragraph to paragraph and taking everything out of context.4 The writerâs aim is to raise questions which lead to further questions, thus such a model of use is entirely appropriate.

The interaction between a human ecology and a technological ecology creates tension in any age. We are a society which is wasteful of human talents and potential, which looks for technological or engineering solutions to all problems and challenges, human or otherwise. If the skeleton of an overarching Îsystemâ can be discerned in the impact of the Internet on the public library, this surely must be one of the essential connectors. While the interaction between organisational transformation and technological transformation exacerbates the impact of the Internet on public libraries, at a time when delivering the promise of technological transformation is requiring the highest of skills in information management and retrieval, organisational restructuring, downsizing and competitive tendering has reduced both the skill pool and staff effort available in libraries. An unplanned set of new skills is required, as is the time, confidence and capacity to develop them. In particular, precisely because the Internet is designed for and by technicians, is often difficult to use, and at this juncture serves higher education and defence industry well, but secondary education and the public interest poorly5

Fundamental discontinuity

The emergence of the network, in particular the development of the World Wide Web and its growing assortment of browsers, is a fundamental discontinuity for public libraries. During 1995 our civilisation changed profoundly. In this single year we moved from an atomised disconnected hierarchal civilisation to public recognition of a networked interconnected globalised civilisation. This was the critical moment of transformation and virtually all public libraries in Australia missed it.

It is common for commentators on technology to claim that historians will look back on the period between 1980 and 2020 and classify it as one of the small number of historical eras when humans reorganised their whole civilisation round a new tool. During the last major discontinuity, the move from the Agrarian Age to the Industrial Age, large numbers of rural workers were forced off the land and out of cottage industries into the factories, and the few people who gained control of industry made a fortune as a result.

It could be argued that there is a direct parallel in the struggle for control of the Internet by selected rich and powerful corporations. Libraries are peculiarly vulnerable at this juncture. They are vulnerable because of aspirations born of the capacity of networked electronic information to be commodified as readily as shared, and vulnerable because of a curious and unfortunate history. Melbourne playwright, Bill Garner claims that libraries are natural victims:They attract violence...In uncertain times, libraries try to lie low and stay very still, but it does not work. They always seem to catch the eye of the conqueror. At the very least they have to be censored, but sacking and burning have also proved efficient...libraries do threaten the new order because they contain the history, the ideas, the imagination, the very independence and identity of the old order...6

Threat to the physical library

The Internet gave birth to the concept of the library without walls. In some senses there is much to be said for the concept - academic research particularly relies very much upon electronic communication and text transfer. Yet for the library user, the interlibrary loan system, union catalogues and other forms of cooperative service delivery have for many years provided access to much more than is housed in any one library. Generally speaking this has been relatively transparent. The great myth of the Internet is that libraries will be obsolete because the Internet is seen by many, particularly the uninformed, as the repository of all knowledge. The physical library is an important anchor. In cyberspace layer upon layer of potential and limitless perspective replaces the feeling of being grounded that provides us with a sense of security. Nonetheless, the public library as we know it, may not survive beyond the turn of the millennium, and the form the public library of the 21st century takes will depend very much on the capacity of public librarians to identify and describe all outputs and outcomes which impact on the society in which any particular public library operates. Increasingly, this will be the global or semi-global society.

Commodification of information and Expansionist ambitions

The new order is business, the dominance of the so-called free market. Despite its basically techno-anarchic nature, control of the on-ramps to the Internet, if not the Internet itself, is part of this new order. New technologies are a source of wealth and influence.

The public library was conceived as an institution with a social role. That role is still important. Gloria Steinem has suggested the public library is the last refuge of the modemless. The public library also has a role in a market driven economy, to identify those areas where markets will under-supply information or where economic and other forces cause information to disturb moral or ethical bases of society.

Puritan work ethic

As workplaces, libraries represent a highly developed representation of the puritan work ethic. They are serious places, filled with earnest workers, dedicated to serving their clients, very often for those clients own good. Ever since John Calvin linked work with salvation, play has been seen as an antonym to work, and play in the workplace as anathema. To the casual observer, surfing the net, particularly the World Wide Web with its colourful gifs and cool sites must seem like play. But play is where cognition and culture meet. The world of culture and ideas is indivisible. and it is essential that librarians become expert in understanding the cultural aspects of the Internet, as well as understanding its mechanics and having the intellectual resources to make efficient and effective use of its bounty. Experiment and systematic curiosity, two very good synonyms for surfing the net, are the essential elements of learning.

Censorship

Tough measures to censor the Internet, particularly the World Wide Web are being discussed, drafted, legislated, and offered as a service by corporations opposed to the essentially techno-anarchic nature of the Internet. Increasingly, society is being encouraged to regard the absence of censorship as a system failure and to remove the technology (or person) responsible for this failure. But as Net pioneer John Gilmore is often quoted: ãThe Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.ä7

This decentralisation of control of the Internet means that the delivery system for controversial materials is the same worldwide network that delivers multiple public goods, including educational resources. Censorship is technically difficult. The only protection we can provide children is to give them moral grounding and some common sense. The public library has a role in this. Vicarious experience, through fiction particularly, is one means of reducing the vulnerability of children.

With the possible exception of Queensland, censorship of literature has not been a major issue for Australian public libraries for a considerable time. The experience of librarians has been almost exclusively restricted to dealing with the occasional challenge to material after it has been incorporated into library collections, presumably because they met pre-established selection criteria. Reaction to the hype about pornography on the Internet has presented public librarians with two unplanned outputs - challenges to access to materials in electronic form before they can be considered for ãacquisitionä, resulting in the removal of decisions about selection from librarians to others, and imposition of community standards of communities other than their own.

Robotic filters sift the good and the bad indiscriminately. A case in point was the short- lived attempt at censorship by America On Line which resulted in denial of access to information on breast cancer and breast cancer support groups. At least some of the firms providing net filtering services deny to customers information about what is being censored.

At the end of 1995, a prosecutor in Munich informed CompuServe that a proportion of the Netâs newsgroups violated German law. CompuServe immediately closed access to those newsgroups imposing on all of its four million subscribers worldwide, the standards deemed appropriate for German minors. CompuServeâs alleged rationale for the ban was that content on the newsgroups violated German law.8 Contrary evidence suggests that9 the motivations for the ban related more to commercial considerations than to legal ones.10

The object of propaganda is to repeat a message so often, and in such a variety of guises, that it becomes part of conventional wisdom. The belief in the Îproblemâ of pornography on the Internet is a case in point. A recent CIRCIT study11 reports that schools which are actively using the Internet acknowledge that there is material on the Internet which is considered inappropriate for school students, but many saw the publicity and dangers as grossly overstated and few actual first-hand examples were identified.

The success of propaganda depends on a climate where a feeling of virtuousness is to be preferred over honest conviction. Our approach to censorship has as much to do with the puritan work ethic (the appropriateness of pleasure) and the values and practices with regard to information and authority that operate in schools as it has to do with honest convictions (and data) about the need protect children and others. The Internet is equated with sinful pleasures - sex and play.

Pleasure

Thirty years ago, Tom Lehrer sang a ditty called ÎSmutâ at the hungry i in San Francisco. In introducing the song he told the audience:Unfortunately the Civil Liberties types who are fighting this issue have to fight it, owing to the nature of the laws, as a matter of freedom of speech and stifling of free expression and so on. But we know whatâs really involved. Dirty books are fun. Thatâs all there is to it. But you canât get up in the court and say that, I suppose. Itâs simply a matter of freedom of pleasure, a right which is not guaranteed by the Constitution...

Values and practices of schools

The values and practices within schools inform the attitudes of adults to children. Public libraries are particularly vulnerable to the impact of these values because of the perception of many local government elected representatives and administrators that the major role of the public library is to service the needs of school children. Formal education is still organised according to subject categories that were set in stone in the last century, and follow subject hierarchies that owe a great deal to the theory of evolution and the permeation of this theory into many aspects of social and educational life, including library classification schemes. Schools thus have entrenched hierarchies of knowledge and power, as well as stringent control over the content and form of communication within the school, and educational practices which compartmentalise the universe of knowledge. Libraries display many of these same characteristics. Like schools, they display an essentially one-way flow of information.

The Internet has dispensed with both human and knowledge hierarchies.

The roles of the participants in cyberspace are much more fluid than in either schools or libraries. Most are both seekers of information and actual or potential sources of information. As seekers of information we are not bound by pre-defined hierarchies, they are free to search out and organise information according to personal and idiosyncratic schema. A critical task for public librarians is to accept the reality of the Internet, and apply commonsense and service principles to integrating these two conflicting environments. As they say in Harlem, It be's that way: deal with it.

The authority of adults

Practice in schools and libraries asserts the authority of adults to control and dictate the way in which the next generation will think what the next generationâs values will be, what their beliefs will be, what their opinions will be, what their point of view will be.

Technological advances now allow libraries to discontinue differentiation between children and adult in membership of libraries. For statistical purposes (if such statistics actually do have any use other than as a curiosity) information as to age/school form could be captured. Although public libraries have in the past differentiated between children and adults in issuing membership cards, and there possibly are still libraries which will not allow children to borrow adult materials on a childâs card, in general no correlations are drawn between demographic characteristics of the borrower and the materials borrowed. It is curious that non-differentiation of access on grounds of age has raised so many hackles, and created so many business opportunities for those who would claim the capacity to filter access. The result has been the equivalent of issuing all members, both adult and children, with childrenâs cards in a library which restricts access to adult materials to those who hold adult cards. In other words, only the censors will have access. The right of freedom of speech and press includes not only the right to utter or to print, but the right to distribute. When material is censored and either suppressed entirely or access to it limited in some way, the censors (a category which must always include those who do the actual work of removing or changing access) must know what they are censoring. In the strictest sense of the word the material is not censored, but rather confined to a special elite. Public librarians must ask, ãHow is that elite selected?ä

Personal impact on public librarians

The personal impacts on public librarians are potentially the greatest challenge of the Internet for public libraries. These impacts are the increase in workload, and the exposure to new, radical and challenging ideas. Development of Internet skills requires a considerable time-commitment12 and resource-discovery is time consuming in the absence of selection aids. Together with direct service-related usage these tasks are generally added to an already full workload.

Connection to the Internet also brings increased workload and increased complexity of decision-making due to the expansion of the constituencies served by any particular public library. The library rapidly attracts users from afar, users which display a sense of entitlement to service. Even if the decision is taken not to provide reference services, for example, to non-residents, when it is easy to e-mail for information non-residents will do so, and it takes time and tactful effort to advise them of the fact.

Professional activities, such as materials selection, become much more complex when remote, on-line sources are included in the libraryâs collection, and the impact of an increased professional network with the concomitant potential for having oneâs ideas challenged, can be disturbing.

Materials selection

When decisions are made about what items to buy for the library, those items are often examined very carefully. Many Internet resources change virtually daily, a situation acknowledged by the National Libraryâs decision to assign ISBNs to home pages based on the analogy with loose-leaf publications. Monitoring is impractical, and there is a significant element of unpredictability.

When a library selects books it purchases the books which meet all selection criteria (including affordability) and does not purchase those which do not. Even if a library selects resources on the Internet, and provides links to them, library users may use search tools to seek out and gain access to other materials, including some which the library might have rejected. Selection is no longer a guarantee of control of either access or quality. Library selection policy and practice invariably support the notion of not purchasing an item if a better one is available. This no longer applies. Libraries can recommend particular Internet resources, but cannot control the overall net quality of the total collection by ensuring non-availability of resources, and lack the cost or space considerations which supported the necessity to make choices on quality and utility.

Factuality vs Social Snapshot

The criteria of validity, currency and accuracy are much harder to access in electronic materials than other library materials because systems of review are not well-developed. Constructive use can be made of materials from the Internet or elsewhere which do not meet these criteria. For example, discussions of any topic on listservs will provide many and varied perspectives, much of which is opinion. Factuality is no longer necessarily a valid criteria selection because such materials are not accessed solely to be assimilated. The user may be the most appropriate evaluator.

Indivisibility of information packages

Information in traditional collections is purchased in packages which may be much larger than the information actually sought. When providing clients with requested information the general practice is to offer them specific, concrete embodiments of informative material such as books. The relevance of these information packages is variable. More commonly, clients define their queries for themselves and answer these queries by locating the optimally relevant information packets available in or through the library. The result is high variability in consumption. Utilisation of information technology reduces indivisibilities and permits customisation.

The professional commitment of most librarians to Îbalancedâ collection is supported by the nature of robotic browsers. Most online users initially encounter particular web sites by using search engines. Any search for controversial subjects will bring up not only those sites that support such ideas, but also many sites which take an opposing stance.

The line between censorship and selection has proven to be a fuzzy one for a number of librarians and other commentators on the issue. Censorship advocates commonly assert that librarians censor all the time and that there is no difference between censorship and selection. In a sense, as far as electronic information is concerned, they may be half-way right. One of the reasons librarians select materials is that libraries have finite resources to purchase and house library materials. On the Internet, neither of those presents much of a problem. The other reason librarians select is to save the time of the library user. When collections have a particular focus and collection is not universal, it is easier for the user to find what is appropriate to meet a particular need.

As George Orwell said in 1984He who controls information, controls decisions,
He who controls decisions, controls the future.

The exponential growth of information available to libraries has obscured the simultaneous reduction of availability. The capacity to control the distribution as well as the production of information conferred on organisations and individuals by electronic publishing and communications has enabled them to exploit that information for profit. Libraries deal in reproduced information. Reproducing information costs a minute fraction of producing it. No matter how many people read it, the utility of the information is maintained, but its commercial value, measured by what people are prepared to pay to read it, very quickly drops to nothing unless the producers of the information control access to it. Advances in information technology have given producers of information the capacity to provide for-fee access. Because, once information gets into a library it becomes, to all intents and purposes, a free good, the perception of information as the new embodiment of wealth has the potential to cut off supply to libraries. Information does not dissipate with use. Producers must compete with past producers but society benefits with an accumulation of knowledge, which can only be protected by libraries.

Cultural bias

While public libraries have made progress in providing service to indigenous people and those from Non-English Speaking Background, the truth of the matter is that those populations are served significantly less well than the mainstream English-speaking user.

Despite our assertions to the contrary, there is still strong, hostile, and deep resistance and opposition to multiculturalism and to indigenous people in our society and in our libraries. Some of it is direct and palpable. Some of it is deep and subtle. Deceptive definitions are applied in library, definitions which bias the library user against either the materials or the topics, and reflect the language, experience and viewpoint of pre multi-cultural, pre-reconciliation Australia. A tokenist ãfestivalä approach to other cultures is the norm in public libraries. Other cultures are celebrated for ãcoreä clientele, white middle-class ãAustralianä Australians, rather than individuals from those cultures being equitably served. It is an uncomfortable fact that women and children tend to be better served than men.

The Internet is culturally biased by the very nature of its low rate of uptake in developing countries and its bias towards urban populations and the English language. But it is also biased towards the sciences and towards men, both areas of service in which the public library tends to be relatively weak. Ironically, Aboriginal people have become prolific publishers on the Net to the extent that Aboriginal information and culture is much more evident on the World Wide Web than on the shelves of the average public library.

Impact of ideas

It would seem to be a contradiction in terms to suggest that potentially the most disturbing impact on public librarians may be the impact of ideas. Libraries are, after all, the repository of ideas. But ideas in libraries are controllable. When ideas are codified and fossilised in print, they can be accessed or ignored at will. Much of what librarians do with books and their contents could be done to blocks of wood with a good blurb. The speed and frequency with which new or revised editions appear is controlled by the limitations of the process of producing a print copy. Documents and databases on the Internet have much in common with the books on the shelves. The disturbing ideas may well be those that come through the e-mail and newsgroups. The Internet opens public librarians to the ideas and discourse of the rest of the profession on an unprecedented level. Librarians, comfortable in their sinecure for decades, will suddenly be thrown in the path of librarians who are professionally highly passionate. Librarians who have spent twenty years concerned only about obtaining the latest novel will be exposed to those who question every fundamental assumption.

The Electronic Environment and Oral Tradition

Authentication is an important issue on the Internet. It has been suggested, for example, that 100% of the Internet versions of Martin Luther Kingâs ãI have a Dreamä speech contain inaccuracies13 In many ways, the Internet is an oral environment. Librarians could reinvent their original major role in this new-old environment: authentication of texts. In the essentially oral environment of Ancient Greece, Homeric poems were handed down orally through several centuries. The first written text of the Iliad was made in Athens in the middle of the Sixth Century BC However, copies were not duplicated or circulated, they were used only for references. There was little, if any, punctuation or word division. Texts were read aloud and often did not indicate a change of speaker. This meant that reading was difficult time and readers tended to make up characters or change lines as he went along. Texts copied by hand are prone to corruption. Storytellers would add their own words and thoughts, scribes who did not like a passage would make up their own; if an ancient reader found a passage difficult to understand, he would change it. Every time a work was read or copied, it was, to some extent, reinvented.

When Ptolemy ordered that a complete collection of Greek literature be gathered and stored in the great library at Alexandria, the librarians had to develop catalogues of the text to be copied, and rent or borrow the texts from other kings so that the scribes might copy them. In order to protect against forgeries, the librarians were forced to develop new principles of textual criticism. They had to decide which text passages were accurate transcriptions of oral recitations and not merely the writings of some unknown actor or scribe. They would study the work and then write commentaries indicating which verses they considered fraudulent or corrupted by scribal emendation. Aristarchus of Samothrace developed an entire system of marginal scholia, marginal notes to point out what he considered irregularities or spurious verses. This may be a very important role for librarians to reinvent four thousand years later.

Conclusion

A negative reaction to the anarchy of the Internet, and the trickle-down effect of increased conservatism in public libraries, is potentially a major threat. The Internet changes the community, both in terms of boundaries and as a political entity. Indicative of the magnitude of the social impact of the Internet is the necessity of re-thinking the role of public libraries, the responsibility public librarians to their clients, and their relationship with those clients. In a new world, old thinking is an impenetrable barrier to progress.. Public librarians who step out of their libraries will realise that the message of the Internet is ãDorothy, weâre not in Kansas anymoreä. The twister has struck, and has done its work of transforming the reality in which public libraries must now operate. The work of Ken Dowlin, the librarian at the San Francisco Public Library suggests that the electronic library is a new form of political community.1 There is no going back.. Like the Emerald City, the Internet is both an exciting and different place, and an illusion which will change the professional lives and aspirations of public librarians who visit it. Like Dorothy, we have to learn to differentiate between these. Like Dorothy we are presented with pitfalls, dangers and opportunities, including the opportunity to examine beliefs and habits, keep what is good and enhance it with magic and colour.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

1. Waste is traditionally regarded to be inefficiency, the use of more resources to produce an output than is necessary. The Quality movement regards waste to be a product or service which cannot be used as produced, despite being intended as an output. Waste cannot be identified until the outputs have been created and examined.
2. Unintended consequences may be more significant than the planned ones.
3. All systems produce consequences which may not be immediately visible to those working within the system, or which may be deliberately obscured because they would be inconvenient if visible. Such consequences may be visible to those outside the system, or may subsequently become visible as a result of developments external to the system. This could be called the "Babe" factor, in honour of the movie which was a box-office success, is forecast to win numerous awards, and has resulted in plummeting pork sales.
4. Peter Lyman, in conjunction with the educational publisher, McGraw Hill, studied the way students used standard textbooks when they were presented electronically (the Primus project). The two major findings were
   
1. the information people would use cannot be predicted on the basis of their discipline, everyone reads in an interdisciplinary manner; and
   
2. the assumption that the unit of knowledge was the article or chapter was wrong. The unit of knowledge turned out to be the paragraph. It was found that rather than using the book sequentially, students made full use of the electronic capacity and skipped backwards and forwards in defiance of any narrative form in which knowledge is cumulative. Lyman, Peter, Designing the Global Reference Room. Follet Lecture, London, 9 June 1994. http://ukoln.bath.ac.uk/follet_lectures/global_ref_room.html
5.  Lyman, Peter, Designing the Global Reference Room. Follet Lecture, London, 9 June 1994. http://ukoln.bath.ac.uk/follet_lectures/global_ref_room.html
6. Garner, Bill, CCT - neither a borrower, nor a lender be, Australasian Public Libraries and Information Services 8(4) December 1995 pp 173-177, p 173
7. quoted in Howard Rheingold, Why Censoring Cyberspace is Dangerous & Futile. http://www.well.com/user/hlr/tomorrow/tomorrowcensor.html
8. CompuServe Blocks Pornographic Sites, Fanning Fears About Internet Censorship, Wall Street Journal, 28 December 1995.
9. For more Der Spiegel coverage of the CompuServe ban, see: http://hamburg.bda.de:800/bda/int/spon/online/exc103.html and http://www.spiegel.de
10. Der Spiegel suggests that CompuServe banned the newsgroups in order to avoid having to wage a legal battle in Germany over its rights despite the fact that most of the German legal establishment interprets existing German law not to hold liable mere carriers of illegal content.
11. Management of Student Access to Controversial Material on the Internet, Melbourne, CIRCIT, 1995, vii-viii
12. From observation of the writer's own staff, a minimum of 200 hours
13. Bosmajian, Haig, Inaccuracies in the reprintings of Martin Luther Kingis 'I have a dream' speech, Communication Education, 31 1982,, 107-114
14. Lyman, Peter, Designing the Global Reference Room. Follet Lecture, London, 9 June 1994. http://ukoln.bath.ac.uk/follet_lectures/global_ref_room.html