The wisdom of ages

Having just come from the university book store, I plopped my bags down on a park bench to wait for my bus to come along. I wasn't there long before a little old man, who was surely no younger than seventy and could easily have been eighty, came along with several bags and sat down next to me. I'm not in the habit of speaking to strange people at bus stops, but he struck up a conversation right away. He first asked what bus I was waiting for and responded with a slow, 67F, which was good, because by the time it came by he was so engrossed in a story that he would have missed it had I not pointed it out to him.

Seeing my bags from the bookstore with University of Pittsburgh emblazoned across them as well as my college ID hanging from my neck, he rightly assumed that I was a student and asked what what I was studying. When I answered "library science" he became even more interested in talking and turned to face me, saying, "tell me, before you started classes here, what was your opinion of the future of libraries." We breifly discussed the impact of technology on the future of the book and the way in which people have been predicting the death of the book for centuries, for it seems that any time there is a new development that could possibly impact information retrieval people expect books to just fall to the wayside. Clearly this has yet to happen. Who wants to read a novel on a computer? Cuddling up next to a roaring fireplace with a mug of hot chocolate, a heavy blanket, and a laptop just doesn't quite cut it somehow.

Anyway, it turns out this elderly gentleman is, or was, an aero-space engineer and has taught computer literacy programs at the downtown branch of the Carnegie public library for over thirty years. He shared several stories with me, mostly relating to changes in technology and advances in information retrieval, each time starting out with the charming clause, "in my lifetime I have seen." I could have listened to his stories all day, but his bus came in the midst of his recounting the history of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and his development of the theory of nooshpere in 1918, which, in a sense, predicted the development of the internet by the end of the century. Such a sweet, intelligent little old man, and I never even caught his name.