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James O'Donnell, in his thoughtful book Avatars of the Word (1998)—there's a supplementary website here,—argues that until fairly recently the role of the university professor was to be "the supreme local authority" on his or her subject. But then university libraries started getting larger, and the most learned professors started writing more books, books with which those libraries could be stocked. (Whether the increasing numbers of books or the libraries' cravings for them came first, I cannot say.) In England especially the late 19th century saw the creation of vast reference projects—the two most famous of them being the Oxford English Dictionary and the Dictionary of National Biography—which would do much to make great erudition available throughout the English–speaking world.
Later came additional technologies that were especially important for newer academic libraries, many of which were in North America: microfilm and microfiche allowed such schools to provide their patrons with old newspapers, magazines, and books that they never could have found paper copies of. More recently came scanning and digitizing: the magnificent high–resolution images of old and rare books from Octavo, for instance; the vast accumulation of plain–text files of public–domain texts from Project Gutenberg; specialized collections of books in various formats, like the Christian Classics Ethereal Library; and so on. Add to this the increasingly wide online availability of the best scholarly articles—though at a price—from Project Muse and JSTOR, and it becomes increasingly difficult to think of the professor, supreme local authority though he or she may be, as the best possible authority.
In this context, O'Donnell thinks, who needs professors to provide information? Rather, "the real roles of the professor in an information–rich world will be … to advise, guide, and encourage students wading through the deep waters of the information flood." And O'Donnell is moved to think in this way largely because, as a scholar of the late classical world, he has worked primarily on thinkers whose problem was a scarcity of information, not an overabundance. Much of O'Donnell's work has been on Augustine, a man who, as O'Donnell's rival biographer Peter Brown has noted, was "steeped too long in too few books." And his first book was about Cassiodorus—you can get the full text of the book on O'Donnell's homepage—a man who devoted the latter part of his life to collecting what we would think of as a very small monastic library and teaching monks how to use it.
So for O'Donnell the contrast between the current scene and the world of his own scholarly expertise could scarcely be greater. But there are other scholars who remind us that we are not the first to wrestle with the problem of "information overload"—and there may be lessons for us in how some of our predecessors dealt with this issue. Perhaps the most interesting of those scholars is Ann Blair of Harvard, who is working on what promises to be a fascinating book about information overload in the 16th century—the early days of the printing press and the Protestant Reformation. (You can find a copy of a preliminary article on the subject here: scroll about halfway down or search for the name "Blair.")
Blair shows that many scholars, starting in the 16th century and continuing for another hundred and fifty years or so, were—how shall I put it?—freaked out by the sudden onslaught of texts. In the 17th century one French scholar cried out, "We have reason to fear that the multitude of books which grows every day in a prodigious fashion will make the following centuries fall into a state as barbarous as that of the centuries that followed the fall of the Roman Empire." That is, "unless we try to prevent this danger by separating those books which we must throw out or leave in oblivion from those which one should save and within the latter between what is useful and what is not."
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