Illustration by Joseph Kennedy.

Chapter 4: Second Action Second Renovation

Rooms for data processor and faculty offices were installed on the first floor of Rand Hall for the Cornell Computer Center in 1959. Additional interior walls were erected to expand the office spaces on the west end of the second floor of Rand Hall. Today, the digitized collection of the entire library can be contained within the memory of a hard drive smaller than the size of a single book. But in 1959, the physical space required by a digitized library would have occupied more area than a traditional library of book stacks containing the same amount of information.

The bulky computers from the 1960’s remind us that technology changes quickly and that those innovations create new sets of spatial parameters. Since then punch cards and strictly allotted time slots have given way to user friendly interfaces and a nearly ubiquitous accessibility to information. With the entire sum of human knowledge essentially available to everyone from their pocket sized smart phones, any place has the potential to be a “library” as long as it has a cell signal or reliable internet connection. 

Unlike the information in a book, the content on the internet is ephemeral - simultaneously being deleted and rewritten. These rapid changes within the internet are now being continuously downloaded and saved by the Internet Archive. Cached versions of historic webpages that no longer appear active online are available as far back as 1996 through the Wayback Machine maintained by the organization and others like it for future scholarship. In 2009, the Cornell University Library shared its collection of almost 80,000 digitized public domain books with the Internet Archive.

Age imprints an intrinsic importance on an antique book in a way that does not exist with its digital counterpart. These snapshots of the early internet may one day be approached with the same reverence that we currently have for the old books from our past. Whether an indexed library of the internet would remain exclusively online, or if it would partially manifest itself in a physical location using printed medium remains to be seen. 

(The internet is currently a reflection of the “real world” that takes information from the outside to reformat and disperse so that it is more easily legible. But what physical armatures do we need to make information generated in the digital sphere more accessible in the physical one.)

This is the fourth part of a series of small essays that recount the history and present of Rand Hall at Cornell University. The first part can be found in the inaugural issue of Ed, "The Architecture of Architecture," available for purchase here. The second part can be found here and the third part here.