Ladder to virtual libraries

Cambridge mathematician G.H. Hardy, whom many Indians know as friend and mentor of the mathematical prodigy Ramanujan, has described an episode in his book, A Mathematician’s Apolo-gy. The story relates to a nightmare that the philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Rus-sell had. Russell dreamt that the year was 2100 AD and he was on the top floor of the Cambridge University Library watching a member of the library staff sorting out the books. As the Cambridge library is one of the select copyright libraries that receives a copy of every book published, its storage problem would naturally become acute. So the librarian was trying to select the books he considered worth keeping. Russell saw the staff member pick, look and discard in a bucket a number of well-known books, retaining only a few on the library shelf — until he came to Russell’s own magnum opus, Principia Mathematica. Russell watched with bated breath as the librarian picked up the book and started scrutinising it. Would he consign it to the shortlisted few on the shelf or will it go down into the bucket of rejects? That was when the nightmare ended and he woke up sweating, not knowing what finally happened.

This anecdote illustrates the problem faced by the librarians of a bygone era. Hardy’s book was written in 1940. The problem of storing books within a limited space, as their numbers multiplied, is a nightmare for many conscientious librarians. If a book is too good to be discarded, where does one store it? Mathematicians and scientists would no doubt have relieved the suspense of Russell by assuring him that his classic book would make it back to the shelf. But that would not have solved the perennial space problem of the librarian.

Today I have a different nightmare! I am visiting an astronomy institute with the state-of-the-art facilities. The director of the place is proudly showing me around the premises. As he comes to the end of the tour, I notice something missing. Where is the library housed, I ask him, and he replies somewhat bemused: “What do you mean by ‘housed’? We no longer need a building for it. Go to any networked PC and you can access any book, journal or document. You can transfer it to your palmtop if you wish.” In short, in today’s jargon the library of my dream has gone virtual. It does not require any space at all. With suitable search commands, a user could access whatever he needed.

Somehow, to one born in the 20th century, this futuristic arrangement does not conceptualise the library the way one knew it. The pleasure of browsing by the shelf-side, picking a book and opening it at some arbitrary page and reading on from there may not be achievable in the virtual form by clicking suitable icons of your PC or palmtop. But in terms of the end-result of providing “reading information”, the new method will be much more superior.

Of course, one has to ask here, what do we expect from a library? Is our purpose always “information”? Certainly, a member of a university or a research institute will most likely have “information” as the primary reason and there the virtual library will be most effective as an information provider. But for an astronomy student reading a classic textbook by Jeans, Eddington or Hoyle, the hardcopy edition with pages to thumb through will be a far more attractive option than the digitised version.

One crucial part of the above example is the availability of digitised literature. This has been happening slowly but surely. In India, within the university sector we are now witnessing what must surely deserve to be called a revolution. Until a few years ago, our fund-starved universities were reduced to subscribing to very few research journals, for the reason that the subscription costs were beyond their meagre budgets.

I recall being shocked when, in 1974, a senior professor of Presidency College, a prestigious college in Kolkata, told me that because of a paucity of funds their library had stopped subscribing to the journal Physical Review. Today, the library network called Infonet set up by the University Grants Commission, New Delhi, subscribes to a large number of electronic versions of journals. By the time of writing up this account, the number has crossed 3,200. By becoming members of the network at costs much less than for subscribing to all these journals, universities now enjoy access to the contents of these journals.

Apart from a swift access at low cost, and operating within a small volume of space, the electronic system has the added advantage of being very versatile. For example, in a conventional book, one reads in a sequential manner, page following page. This pattern may not follow the reader’s interest. The reader may wish to switch half way to another part of the book or to another book altogether. Sometimes in a conventional book, such jumps are facilitated by cross-referencing. But reaching the reference target in the conventional way takes time.

In the electronic system, this would be easy. A link to the book in question can be placed and the reader can bring the relevant text on the screen in a side window. This makes the electronic version multi-dimensional. The challenge lies in carrying this multi-dimensionality within the specified data-space of the reader. Thanks to remarkable growth in the storage capacity of electronic systems, this constraint may not be hard to meet.

Many types of software including image processing had their origin in some astronomical applications. Curiously, this is the reverse of what happened to the telescope. It was invented for ground-based operations with ready takers in the Army. In 1809, Galileo adapted it for observing the heavens.

Astronomical instruments are designed to work at maximum efficiency possible, since one is more often than not looking at very faint sources. So astronomers learned to make their software maximally efficient and later found that for this property it should have terrestrial uses as well.

So even though you may not study astronomy, sky is the limit on what is possible in the libraries of the future.

The writer, a renowned astrophysicist, is professor emeritus at Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Pune University Campus