In 1968, at the dedication of the new Marriott Library at the University of Utah, Wallace Stegner said, "To erect a great library in the year 1968 is an act of stubborn and sassy faith." For the people of Utah—its legislature and its private citizens—to erect this beautiful addition in 1996, as we stand at a crossroads between the print era and the electronic age, displays a stubborn and sassy faith that books have a future as well as a past. And it acknowledges, more generally, that libraries themselves construct our cultural future as well as preserve our cultural heritage. Like Janus, the god of Roman mythology, a great library looks forward and back at the same time. Neither nostalgia nor amnesia will do.

A university library has the imperative to provide access to the newest knowledge as well as the most canonical; it sanctions intellectual risks as well as cultural continuities. A great university library, by definition, must offer students and professors the newest information and the most contemporary theories and hypotheses. This intellectual delivery service occurs most prominently and efficiently in professional journals. Recently, I'm sorry to say, I had to participate in helping to decide which journals to eliminate from this library because of lack of funding. As we dedicate this wonderful addition, I want to lament this unfortunate "subtraction" and to speak about the relation between the building and the books. I am delighted to have the opportunity to thank the library's many friends assembled here and to emphasize the crucial role that a strong and well-endowed Marriott Library plays in the lives of those who teach and study at the University of Utah. I want to address as well the challenges and opportunities facing us at the moment of a worldwide reinvention of the library as we know it.

"A great library looks forward and backward at the same time. Neither nostalgia nor amnesia will do." For if the building we dedicate today has been radically altered, it is inside its walls that the real scene of transformation is occurring. The title of a recent popular book, The Gutenberg Elegies, by Sven Birkerts, succinctly captures the new source of anxiety for many readers of books—the electronic revolution. Stegner said his apprehensions about the fate of reading stemmed in part from the ubiquity of television in the lives of young people; the exponential increase in the influence of technology through computers has given rise to even greater anxiety about the future of the books and the library. Yet none of us, including literature professors with the unfortunate reputation of being technological Neanderthals, can afford to stick our head in the sand. The question is, how can our "stubborn and sassy faith in books" still embrace the possibilities of an electronic age, an age in which resources are not limited and choices are necessary?

Anyone who has used a library recently has benefited from the shift from card catalogues to online catalogues, and to networked indexing and abstracting services so demonstrably superior to their print forerunners. The Marriott Library has assumed a leadership role in offering students and faculty courses on how new technologies can give them access to information they never had before; by virtue of computers, professors have found new ways to engage undergraduates as well as graduates in intellectual debates. (This means that computer-assisted teachings helps students tap into the library's resources rather than discouraging them from reading.) To a literary scholar, the large-scale use of computers for these purposes is most welcome. Today, computers are also aids in preserving a threatened print record. I refer to a massive project, largely funded by NEH, to preserve, through digitalization, approximately 100 million books and other materials now in United States libraries printed on acid paper that are destined to fall apart and become totally unusable.

"I believe we are mistaken if we subscribe to a technological Darwinism that treats books as outmoded. Historically, film did not replace theater, and television did not replace the radio."

Yet I believe we are mistaken if we subscribe to a technological Darwinism that treats books as outmoded. Historically, film did not replace theater, and television did not replace the radio—these examples, rather than the horse and buggy or the steam engine should be our models; they suggest the importance of sustaining multiple technologies and artifacts. You may in fact remember that in Star Trek: The Next Generation, set in the 24th century, Captain Picard reads books when he's off duty, enjoying Shakespeare in print form; and some of you may know that Wired, full of the latest information on technology, is a magazine—it comes in two forms, one online and one a glossy print version sold in bookstores around the country.

If computers were going to supplant the book or journal, why haven't the editors of this hottest of magazines turned totally to an online format? Indeed, in the midst of our discussions of the obsolescence of the book, we might ask ourselves if there is anything more obsolete than the first computer we bought to make ourselves up-to-date.

I'd like to emphasize the continuing importance of both the library's physical space and the material artifacts, the manuscripts and books, that it harbors. Just as this building is not merely a functional container for the knowledge housed within, so too, the material book is itself an artifact, and reading it in the library is an aesthetic and intellectual experience of a particular kind. Theodor Adorno said that "the book form signifies detachment, concentration, continuity." "Surfing the Internet," "cruising the information superhighway"—even our metaphors suggest the different kind of reading that the "virtual" library entails—a Route 66 approach to information hunting. Have you ever noticed how metaphors of motion have replaced those of space in the vocabulary of electronic technology? And, while this shift is not necessarily negative, I want to plug the virtues of a form simultaneously "material and spiritual," as Adorno put it, and to emphasize that matter matters—a "book" is not merely a content that can be transmitted on a screen. In many cases, it is important to judge a book by its cover, and its print, and its design.

"You may remember that (Star Trek's) Captain Picard reads books when he's off duty, enjoying Shakespeare in print form."

When most people think of research, they think in terms of a research problem methodically investigated, a kind of detective work that hopefully yields a solution. Although this is descriptive of one side of the research process, it omits another important aspect, for much depends on serendipity, the fortuitous discovery of a particular book or manuscript, the sudden realization of a connection between texts that one had not expected. My point is that a library is a space for something to happen and this "something" can happen for students as well as faculty. For a good library invites students to browse among books not assigned, to discover writers out of fashion, writers who may be valued by future generations as well as writers valued in the past. It is precisely this kind of potential that a major research library must nurture, and far from a luxury, this is the lifeblood of intellectual activity. I would be foolish to suggest that the library should purchase everything in hopes that some things will prove valuable in the future. Of course, economic choices will always need to be made. But "usefulness" is a slippery concept to be treated with caution—defined carefully and creatively, with an eye toward the future. Libraries and librarians are in the business of anticipation as well as preservation, and this distinguishes a philosophy of barebones acquisitions from the provision of the ample resources of a great library. Now that we have this beautiful building, we cannot stint in providing the kind of intellectual riches it was meant to house.

"Just as this building is not merely a functional container for the knowledge housed within, so too, the material book is itself an artifact, and reading it in the library is an aesthetic and intellectual experience of a particular kind."

There is no great university that does not have a great library. The Marriott Library affects not just the quality of research produced here but the success of our teaching mission as well. Our students have chosen to come here, to benefit from the kinds of intellectual experiences which a large research university alone can offer. For the library is the center of the university's intellectual life—with all our diversity and disciplines, it is the heart that makes a University one institution. Finally, what's at stake in our support of the Marriott Library is our very definition of intellectual community, a definition that must be focused enough to treasure our local resources and capacious enough to welcome the world to its shelves, even before the year 2002.

"The library is the center of the university's intellectual life—with all our diversity and disciplines, it is the heart that makes a University one institution."

Karen Lawrence, a U of U faculty member since 1978, is a professor of English. In 1994 she received the University's Rosenblatt Prize which recognizes excellence in scholarlship, teaching, and administration.