Change is a funny thing.  Sometimes it creeps up on you so slowly you hardly notice.  The aging process is like that, I think.  One morning you look in the mirror, and suddenly you notice a half dozen wrinkles that weren’t there the last time you were paying attention.  At other times, change happens so rapidly, and so intrusively, that it seems an irresistible force.  In the scholarly communication sphere, the transition from print to electronic has been like that, but it’s hardly the first example of rapid technological change.

Anyone acquainted with the history of the 1930s through the 1960s, for example, will recall the sweeping changes that took place in aviation and rail transportation during those relatively recent times.  Had World War II erupted in 1938 following the Munich Crisis instead of a mere twelve months later, the Battle of Britain would have been primarily fought with biplanes instead of the sleek, modern Spitfires, Hurricanes, and Messerschmitt 109s whose images haunt the photographs and films of that epic struggle, and which were in turn obsolete less than five years later as aviation entered the jet age.  Similarly, the steam era in US railroading, which reached its apotheosis during World War II, came to a screeching and irrevocable end by the early 1950s as American railroads raced to replace even their newest and most powerful steam locomotives with newer, more economical, more reliable, and safer diesels.

But no matter how irresistible the technology, our response is always a matter of personal choice.  To be sure, our choices may be constrained.  If steam is your only acceptable railroad technology, your rail transportation options today are severely limited.  More often, however, the question is a matter of degree.  Purchasing a cell phone, for example, does not require that you carry it with you and leave it on at all times.  In the end, the decision about when and where to use your phone is a matter of choice, one based on your own personal sense of what is and is not appropriate and necessary behavior.

Still, there is no denying that technology can force us to make choices that we wouldn’t otherwise have to make.  Today, libraries are grappling with many such issues, one of the more visible of which is what to do about print in an increasingly electronic world.  And in truth, here at Choice we sometimes marvel at the number of our customers—roughly two-thirds—who still seem to prefer print some ten years after the launch of Choice Reviews Online.

Still, whenever I am tempted to ask, “What’s with the print fixation?” there is a speedy cure.  A quick glance at the stacks of paper covering most of the horizontal surfaces in my office invariably helps me realize there is another, more personal aspect to the print versus electronic issue.  Why, I find myself asking, would anyone keep all those stacks of paper in a world in which every document one receives or creates now resides somewhere on the office network in electronic form?  Good question, that one.  I’m working on it.