World Libraries Grapple With CD-ROM

By KATHERINE ROTH, AP

NEW YORK (AP) - The domed conference room was filled with the world's foremost librarians, their voices hushed with the urgency of the difficulties they face.   It's a global problem - touching on saving the record of civilization itself - and no clear answers are in sight.  Often more comfortable quoting 17th century authors than surfing the Internet, representatives from more than 35 libraries gathered to discuss how their institutions can keep up with an increasingly digital world.

``There's a lot of pressure,'' said Wim van Drimmelen, head of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in the Netherlands, that country's national library. ``The students of today hardly know there are books.  If they have to write an essay, they start surfing the Net.''

Only a fraction of libraries have full-fledged plans for archiving digital material.  And while businesses increase the amount of digital information, libraries - and frazzled librarians - are left trying to figure out how to handle it all.

``It's not unlike the field of chemistry just after the discovery of the molecule,'' said Richard Ekman, secretary of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and keynote speaker at last week's Virtual Libraries summit at the New York Public Library.   ``The characteristics of digital data are still not very well understood, and they're still changing. It may simply be too early to find answers,'' Ekman said.

Ariane Iljon, a specialist in information technologies with the European Commission in Luxembourg, put it another way: ``The basic definitions we're dealing with,'' she said, ``have become vague.''  In a global environment, collections are scattered in numerous museums, archives and libraries. The technological age is proving too costly and fast moving for libraries to easily decide which hardware and software to buy.

``It's certain that the future of libraries lies in part in the digitized library,'' said Jean-Pierre Angremy, president of the Bibliotheque Nationale de France. ``But you cannot afford to digitize everything. We don't have the time or money.''

While the Dewey Decimal System and the proper temperature for storing fragile documents are well known, it's still unclear what software will be compatible with computers in future decades - or centuries. And it's unclear, too, how to best store electronic data to avoid losing it.

``If you take a piece of paper, it lasts 500 years. If you take a CD- ROM, it lasts 10 years. It's frightening,'' Angremy said.  ``There's a new type of CD-ROM, which might possibly last 100 years, but it's very, very expensive.''

New York Public Library President Paul LeClerc warned that, unless someone keeps pace, parts of contemporary civilization might be lost to future generations.

``If a historian in the year 2090 wants to retrieve information about this culture, this moment in history, the books just won't have it all,'' he said. ``We're used to preserving books, but whose responsibility is it to preserve all this digital material?'' Many libraries have their own projects under way. In France, the national library has digitized about 80,000 books at a cost of about $20 million, Angremy said. One purpose of the librarians' conference, he added, was to avoid overlaps in saving the past's treasures.

``We are currently digitizing all the books from the 16th to the 19th century on travel in France and Africa,'' he said. ``The Library of Congress is digitizing books on travel in America, and the Germans are digitizing a lot of travel books from around Europe.'' As a result, he said, ``there is a kind of universal virtual library on travel which is being constructed.''  Whatever the landscape of the libraries of the future, their holdings may well be more digital than in book form.  ``I'm convinced that the library down the road won't exist in the sense that it does today,'' Angremy said. ``Digitized books won't exist there. They will be in your home, on the Internet.''   Yet the traditional library, with its reverent quiet and book-lined shelves, will likely remain.  ``You may not need to go there often, and you will do most of your research at home,'' he said. ``But there is always a point where you need to have the original.''

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