Dividing
his time between South Hadley and Prague, Andrew Lass is helping
Eastern European libraries gain a new lease on life.
The story of how Andrew Lass has spent the past decade of his life and nearly four million Mellon Foundation dollars has everything to do with his love of books. An MHC professor of anthropology since 1981, Lass has been dividing his time between South Hadley and Prague, while working on a project to give major Eastern European libraries a new lease on life. His Czech and Slovak Library Information Network (CASLIN) has equipped libraries--one more than 500 years old-- with computer technology and training that puts their networking capabilities on a par with those in the United States. As one might imagine, Lass has, all the while, been learning the complex price of Eastern European- style progress.
Lass's lessons in former East
bloc economies actually began much earlier, in the 1950s, when his
parents, both journalists and native New Yorkers, moved with their
son to Prague. Lass attended Prague schools during the heyday of
Communism and eventually enrolled in the city's Charles University,
one of the four oldest universities in Europe. But after the USSR
invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, life became more difficult, and in
1973 the Lass family was forced to leave the country. At the close of the Cold War,
seventeen years later, Lass finally returned for a visit. "My
friendships were all there," he says, sitting in his Williston
Memorial Library office, his Toshiba displaying a state-of-the-art
Web site for the National Library of Prague, 3,000 miles away. "It
was as if they'd kept the chair warm for me," he says. One of his
closest classmates from their college years happened to be working at
the National Library and gave Lass a tour that would plant the seeds
for CASLIN. "It was shocking," he says now of the historic building,
a former seventeenth-century Jesuit monastery. "Books were in heaps,
there were holes in the roof with water dripping on manuscripts." The
exception was a splendidly preserved Baroque reading room, featured
in a poster above Lass's desk, where it seemed, as Lass observed,
"time had stopped." But from "books, to morale, to the budget," he
said, the institution was a paradigm of dysfunction. How, he
wondered, could he best help an old-fashioned institution in a
culture where change comes at a snail's pace? Through a connection at the
American Council on Library Resources (CLR), Lass made contact with
the Mellon Foundation, which had been seeking opportunities in
Eastern Europe at the time, and began what would turn into a ten-year
collaboration with Richard Quandt, senior adviser of the foundation
and professor emeritus at Princeton University. Year by year, trip by
trip, and grant by grant, a now exhausted Lass managed to furnish
twelve university and scientific libraries in two countries with
computer equipment and library software, including the training of
technical staff and management, to bring their system up to world
standards and lay the groundwork for a consortium much like that
providing linkages for the Five College system. In doing so, he's
become an expert in the politics of transition in the Czech Republic,
and in library science and automation. Lass has recently completed a
coedited book with Richard Quandt titled Library Automation in
Transitional Societies: Case Studies from Eastern Europe, just
published by Oxford University Press. On sabbatical for the year
2000, Lass is now working on an in-depth ethnography about his
Eastern European technology venture, which he now looks back on as "a
peculiar kind of fieldwork." He will address "the human resource part
of it . . . the micropolitics of technology transfer." While he sees
his "insider-outsider" status in Czechoslovakia, and his connections
via "friends in high places," as key to his success with CASLIN and
related projects, Lass's experience has taught him that "you can
implement technology with relative ease, but the conditions that
facilitate its optimal use take much longer to change."
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