The Medium Is Not the Message

I'm willing to bet few of you did--and almost certainly none of you over 40. I (yeah, I'm in the over-40 camp) kept my hand down. If you're a librarian working with young people, you probably do so because you love books and kids and want to bring them together. You want to encourage kids to read that slightly more challenging book, and to create lifelong readers.

Today you're surrounded by PCs, and even if you know and teach the technology, watching the kids diving for the machines is a little discomfiting. Shouldn't the kids be reading books instead of staring at the screen, playing CD-ROM "edutainment" games, cruising the wwf.com site, or sending e-mail to their friends? When it's time to do research, aren't there at least some times kids should look in a book first?

Many librarians frown at the contrast between libraries 10 years ago--when printed words on paper were the sole reason libraries existed--and today, when things seem far less certain. There's a feeling of loss among many librarians, a feeling that the intimacy of the "one person, one book" experience is vanishing. Reading's not the same, many of us fervently believe, when kids read from a computer screen.

On Jim Trelease's Web site (www.trelease-on-reading.com), I found a preview excerpt from The Read-Aloud Handbook's 2001 edition, "Books vs. Bytes." Trelease, author of the many editions of the Handbook, expresses the uneasiness in classic form. "One of the fiercest battles being waged these days in American schools," he writes, "involves the annual book budget: Should it be spent on computer technology or on books and other printed materials?" He eventually concludes that there are times when online information is best and times when books are. But along the way Trelease does his share of computer-bashing.

To stress the inadequacy of PCs as literacy tools, he quotes Sun Microsystems' Web site: "reading speeds are more than 25 percent slower from computer screens than from paper." He also quotes from a 1999 New York Times op-ed piece by Nate Stulman, who calls the Net-connected PC "the Great American Goof-Off Machine." He cites authorities telling us something we librarians already know--that students should never assume that everything on the Net is accurate.

I don't dispute Trelease's points; they're true. But what disturbs me, and should disturb all librarians who want our profession to thrive, is how Trelease and other writers exacerbate the feeling that we need to defend books, or take the side of books. He turns the "conflict" into a state high school basketball playoff, where "the Books" are the virtuous small-town underdogs and "the Computers" are the arrogant big-city champs. If we continue thinking that way, we are doomed to fail, losing the credibility of funding agencies and kids alike. Books aren't going anywhere; Harry Potter alone should demonstrate that.

Librarians should be teaching and directing students to seek out and evaluate the best content--fiction and nonfiction--in every format, whether it's an online database, an e-book, an audiotape, or a hardcover novel. When we follow the principles of information literacy and show models of excellent content--accurate, clear, navigable, developmentally appropriate, thought-provoking--the format may matter, or it may not. Librarians should give students the skills to judge when each format is most effective, not push one format over another. Print atlases, for example, usually provide more usable, attractive maps than any online equivalent, while a periodical database beats anything in print for ease of keyword searching.

Soon we'll see nonfiction and fiction for kids in e-book formats available on lots of devices. Soon we'll check the wireless Net on handheld readers in the classroom, on the street, or in the library. Formats will change, but good content--whether The Diary of a Young Girl, Captain Underpants, or The Wizard of Oz--will stay around. Losing that "Computers Never, Books Forever" attitude will help our credibility--and our jobs--stay around, too.