Greg Downey, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Topic: This paper reviews how the popular press has understood libraries and computers over the last half-century.

Argument: As the computer in its various forms penetrated more and more areas of the economy over the last half-century, journalists and pundits in the popular press have repeatedly predicted the death of print or the withering of the library, with the Google Books project just the most recent in a long line of death-dirges.  But tracing how this discourse of both progress and obsolescence unfolded historically, privileging certain visions of library computerization at certain times, can help us understand the path that library computerization actually took.

Evidence: A sampling of “library of the future” news articles from major daily US newspapers and newsweeklies are contrasted with a sampling of “library and computer” articles from major library and MIS trade publications over the last fifty years.

Contribution: Contribution: This paper is part of a larger social history of the computerization of libraries over the past fifty years, from World War Two to the World Wide Web, which extends the current “internalist” library history literature by paying key attention to spatial, social, and technical divisions of labor within both the human geography and the technological infrastructure of librarianship.