Libraries Guide Us Out of Our Caves
As an early reader of each issue of Bay Weekly, I’ve been thinking about Then & Now, staff writer Kathy Knotts’ story commemorating Annapolis Public Library’s half century on West Street.
1410 West Street will be home to our capital city’s library for, perhaps, as many years to come. For that’s the spot where our Anne Arundel County Public Library system will build a new Annapolis library. Starting in 2017, the construction will cause a break in service at the library that’s always been the trunk of the county system, now spread wide to 15 branches. When construction finishes, the 2019 or 2020 Annapolis Library will be 55 percent larger and equipped for a fast-changing future.
Technology is sure to be one great force driving a future far beyond my imagining.
In researching her story, Kathy’s kids gave her some help. At the West Street Library anniversary event, seven-year-old Jordan headed for the Library Tech Then & Now exhibit. “Some objects, desktop computers and iPads, he immediately recognized,” Knotts writes.
Jordan was only two years old when the iPad came into our lives, and his ease with the machine seems intuitive. Revolutionary as it is now, iPad technology is constantly changing; before long, some yet-to-be-named machine even more amazing will surpass it.
How many cutting-edge-in-their-day computers we’ve used and junked at Bay Weekly, I can’t count. After our first wonderful Apple Macintosh 128K, I quickly took them — and the wonders they enabled — for granted. From 1993, when we bought those little Macs, I’d guess that a new computer — desktop, laptop, iMac or phone — entered my life roughly every three years. Each one in its time gave me so many powers I’d never had that I couldn’t imagine wanting or needing more. Now, when even my smallest computer connects me to the whole world and much of its accumulated knowledge, I load it up with multiple simultaneous commands and begrudge each second their realization takes.
Older objects in the Tech Then & Now exhibit that “were foreign to” Jordan — like typewriters — had longer lives.
For their first century in common use — 1860 to 1960 — typewriters’ core technology barely changed. Portables, as opposed to desk models, were a big innovation. And oh boy, when typewriters went electric even an average typist’s fingers could race. In 1961, the self-correcting IBM Selectric revolutionized typewriting. Buying my own was a life milestone. It cost about as much as our first Mac (the Macintosh 128K was originally priced at $2,495).
All those technological wonders were, each in its day, instruments of my survival. I took each of them as mine, never stopping to think that someone had made them.
Were it not for the bright ideas of big thinkers, I’d still be living in a cave — if I had the wits and luck to stay alive — telling my stories by firelight and using the embers to draw pictures on the cave walls.
Libraries have guided me out of the cave — as they do each new generation — by bringing us the big thinkers, the big thoughts and the new technologies on which we all depend for the quality of our lives.
Sandra Olivetti Martin
Editor and publisher; [email protected]