NEW ORLEANS -- Will America's public libraries survive the explosion of the Information Age?
Technology is the reason Atlanta was able to put libraries in public housing projects: a half-dozen cheap, portable electronic libraries where kids have been lining up after school to get in.
But technology -- and profit-minded publishers and information providers -- are also the reasons that Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Free Library and the rest of the nation's public libraries may one day be "free" in name only.
The exhibit hall at the American Library Association's 112th annual conference here this past weekend was thick and noisy with talking encyclopedias, card catalogs dancing across colored TV screens, and sources of all the world's knowledge that looked as if they belonged in a video game arcade.
"Right now the public library is behind the technology information curve," said Sonja Gustafson, a Microsoft Corp. manager hawking the company's newest education software. "But there's still no single greater access point for information than the public library."
Such high-tech gizmos as Microsoft's "Encarta" software -- a 29-volume encyclopedia complete with sound, video, graphics and animation on a single compact disc -- sell for less than half the cost of an $800 set of traditional encyclopedias.
But where a neighborhood library would purchase a set of book encyclopedias and keep them on an open shelf for anyone to walk in and use, some electronic publishers -- fearing multiple access to one source of information may hurt their profits -- want to charge library users each time they use a computer terminal.
Ron Dubberly, a former Baltimore County librarian now in charge of the public library system in Atlanta, is thrilled that electronics allows him to put a library anywhere there are electrical outlets and telephone lines.
"We've put libraries in neighborhoods where children have no bucks," said Mr. Dubberly, who wants to put more of them in boys' and girls' clubs, senior centers and shopping malls and on the street corners. "We can't afford to build traditional branches, but suddenly we electronically expanded the walls of our system. That's equity and we couldn't afford it any other way."
But Mr. Dubberly sees a tough fight ahead to convince publishers of electronic information to allow libraries to pay for the product once and allow the public to tap into that information as often as it wants without charge.
