We’re standing in a maze of towering and precariously arranged piles of books, removed from the built-in shelves that line all four walls of all three rooms of our Brooklyn Heights apartment. How did we end up with this gross overload? I flash back to our blind date two and a half years ago. Joan, the cupid who set it up, kindled our interest with book talk. “She loves to read,” she told Matthew. “He may be the best-read person I’ve ever met,” she told me. Eight months later we merged book collections and lives into a miraculously affordable apartment that could house us and our books. A small fourth-floor walk-up? Circa 1920? No problem. We continued to ply each other with favorite novels, thick poetry collections and glamorous never-to-be-opened gifts such as “The Architecture Pack.”

Turning to the shelves, I steel myself. I come from a long line of pack rats — “throwing away” and “sorting through” are not phrases in the Amon vocabulary. This isn’t a matter of choice, I think, and I will have to be ruthless. Whole sections are going to have to go. For instance, the audiobooks: both of them. The tape of Dickens’ “Martin Chuzzleworth” I bought Matthew for our first Christmas together is still shrink-wrapped (six-hour abridgement by Paul Scofield — what was I thinking?). The other, Elizabeth Smart’s “By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept,” is another easy call. We both loved the book’s poetry and passion, and we gave the tape a go on a long drive through Napa last spring. We made it through about three minutes of the singsong lament before exploding in laughter and chucking the tape out the window. We stopped to pick it up (after backing up over it) only because we thought it would make a good joke present. Ha.

Emboldened, I turn to nonfiction. Am I really planning to read that 800-page biography of Lytton Strachey, or do I just enjoy being the kind of person who might? The problem is, I am the kind of person who might. I postpone this decision and move on to unemotional reference books. Four different dictionaries, three thesauruses, “Benet’s Readers Encyclopedia”: all keepers. You never know.

But what about this two-volume almanac of Polish history, weighing in at three and a half pounds? I bought it seven years ago when I was toying with the idea of writing a novel partially set in Krakow, but it’s since become clear I will not be writing this particular novel anytime soon. Nor am I likely to develop a more casual interest in things Polish. It can go. I get ready to chuck it, only to be struck by its pristine, slipcovered beauty. “Definitive,” raves one reviewer. Thumbing its thick, cream-colored pages, I can only suppose that it is. And am I really willing to forfeit my claims on the as-yet-unwritten Great Polish-American Novel?

Stealthily, I set it back in the pile of keepers and shift my sights to another teetering stack, topped by Matthew’s old copy of “Iron John.” This I surreptitiously slip in with the other rejects. Good work.

Next I tackle the dog-eared paperbacks I was assigned during college. “Sisterhood Is Powerful”? I adopted this righteous feminist tract during my radical days at Dartmouth, but isn’t it at odds with the fact that I’m now in Freudian psychoanalysis? If it were hardback, maybe I’d keep it, but as it is I decide no. What about my copy of “Catch-22″ with hilarious juvenile annotations like “Snowden = snow = white = pure”? Won’t my future children get a kick out of these glimpses into my past? I consider my father’s basement full of schoolbooks and realize, sadly, no. The only book of his I remember fondly is his grade-school copy of “Huckleberry Finn,” on which he had crossed out the last N in Finn and written K.

I start to wonder if paperback books don’t reproduce spontaneously in their own dark corners. Two copies of Graham Swift’s “Waterland,” two copies of John Berger’s “G” — explainable. But how did Matthew and I, two publishing types, end up with three copies of Tom Peters’ “In Search of Excellence”? And why are there five copies of “Mrs. Dalloway”? A thin volume of Updike poetry turns up stuck between Philip Roth and E. Annie Proulx. Where did this come from? I vow to look into it.

Soon I have two canvas sacks full of miscellaneous paperbacks. I feel liberated. Powerful. I heft the unwanted and redundant down to the local secondhand bookstore. They’re only giving a dollar a book, but like a reluctant dog owner at the pound, I just want to see these babies end up in good hands. When even the bookstore won’t take some of our rejects, I pile the rest on our stoop, where in keeping with the miracle that is New York scavenging, they disappear quickly, carried noiselessly away along with my pile of old tennis shoes, stray pot lids and broken-zippered luggage.

Upstairs, Matthew is considering our ongoing Chekhov dilemma. I’m an enthusiast — no, a fanatic — and we own two shelves’ worth of stories, plays, biographies, notebooks and miscellaneous arcana, including the gorgeous but poorly organized Ecco Press edition of the stories, in 14 different-colored volumes. Surely this is excessive, especially in light of the shorter collection we recently bought, expertly curated by Richard Ford, which contains most of my favorites in superior translations. “The Ecco set should go,” Matthew says.

Mournfully, I start to reach for them — but their radiant spines induce a nearly hypnotic pleasure. I grab mint-green Volume Three in one hand, creamy mango Five in the other. I remember the summer I spent tracking these down, volume by volume, in San Francisco. I had no money and no job, but the absence of the elusive Volume Eight (“ecru”) triggered a paranoia (I hope they don’t notice, I thought, studying the faces of my guests) that evolved quickly into a full-blown Hitchcockian dementia. I completed the set at last after chasing a bus down Mission Street and making it to City Lights Books just before midnight on a Friday. I’d been home alone, watching TV and obsessing, when I was struck by a premonition that it was there.

And there was the fabled addendum volume to the series, with its blood-red cover and a glowing testimonial from Raymond Carver on the back: “The Unknown Chekhov.” To this day, it remains so, to me at least. I have no plans to read it, but part with it? Never.

As the sun begins to set we start panicking. Now I’m rifling through piles in a haphazard search for overlooked galleys, unused cookbooks, anything that brings pause. William Styron’s “Sophie’s Choice” stares up at me and I shamefully think — I know! I know! How can I choose? I love the gentle burgundies of the Everyman Library collection, and I need to see the dusty copy of Anne Beattie’s “Park City” sitting on my bedside table. I collapse on the couch, defeated.

“Let’s chuck the bed,” I say. Matthew solemnly nods.

“Here it is,” she said. “On the ALA’s home page list of recommended teen Web pages, the ALA recommends Go Ask Alice, a site discussing many graphic issues including bestiality, sadomasochism, group sex and other. In my opinion, the ALA has done something evil, which — as you know from Mother Laura — is something way past dumb.”

Go Ask Alice is, in fact, a site produced by Columbia University’s Health Service to provide “factual, in-depth, straightforward and nonjudgmental information to assist readers’ decision-making about their physical, sexual, emotional and spiritual health.” Its Q&A format lets people ask questions anonymously; they are answered by university health educators and practitioners. The site has earned favorably attention from media like the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Harvard Health Letter. And in 1998, Columbia’s Health Service won an American Public Health Association award for developing the Internet resource.

Alice is a searchable database, answering questions about body maintenance, colds, aches and pains, nutrition, emotional health, drug and alcohol use, relationships and well, yes, sex. “People write in and they say that they’re too embarrassed to ask their parents, their health care provider, their friends, their partners about lots of these concerns,” says Jordan Friedman, Columbia’s director of Health Education. “We also get a lot of questions — and these tend to be from younger people — that say: ‘My friend told me this about drugs or sex or depression or a diet and I’m not sure if it’s true. Do you have any information that can help me?’ They want information and they want it from a source that’s reliable. And they want it on their level. Alice does not talk down to people. Alice does not criticize her readers. Alice does not dismiss her readers.” Alice, in other words, is no Dr. Laura.

The ALA has supported a link to Go Ask Alice for over a year now, almost as long as it has had a Web site. But the link is not exactly prominent. It’s buried nine levels down in a series of subdirectories that act as informational turnstiles. “What we’re doing is providing access to information that kids need if they want to take the time to find it,” says Joel Shoemaker, the president of the ALA’s Young Library Services Association. “Nobody is going to accidentally stumble on to sensitive language without knowing what they’re getting into, not from our site.”

It’s much easier to find the URL for Go Ask Alice on Schlessinger’s own Web site, where it appears under “Monologues,” as part of a press release from the Minnesota Family Council that was posted on April 23.

Interestingly, Go Ask Alice has seen an increase in traffic since the link went live on Schlessinger’s site. “We can’t tell where things are coming from but in the last month we have had an increase in outside hits to the site,” notes Columbia’s Friedman. “We are about half a million hits over the average for a given week.” Could it be sheer coincidence?

Meanwhile, in contrast to the ALA’s cautious placement of its link to Alice, Schlessinger’s site offers a pretty provocative tease into the Alice site — direct quotes from what Schlessinger has characterized on her show as Alice’s “pornography”: “Several things might make sex with animals, also known as bestiality, appealing: It can be forbidden, secretive, and/or exciting. An animal doesn’t kiss and tell, nor does the animal complain about performance or desire orgasm — you are in control of the when, where and how.” This, of course, raises an interesting question: Is Schlessinger putting “pornography” on her site? When is “pornography” not pornography? When it’s being used by the forces of Good? When it’s being used to educate people? And who gets to decide what’s Good and what’s education?

Is there a difference between sex education and pornography? Columbia’s Friedman thinks there is: “The purpose of pornography is sexual arousal. The purpose of sex education is education.”

But regardless of how liberally the word “porn” may be scattered through Schlessinger’s radio monologues, this is a distinction that she herself does not feel qualified to address, says Keven Bellows, vice president and general manager of the Dr. Laura show and Schlessinger’s spokeswoman: “She’s not an expert on pornography and she’s not a medical doctor. This is not her issue.”

So what is her issue? “The issue is that it’s wrong for the library not to filter,” Bellows says. “Her issue is protecting children. Go Ask Alice is just our example of inappropriate material.”

Ann K. Symons, the president of the American Library Association, sees value in sites like Alice. “I know that some kids are sexually active in high school,” Symons says, “and it’s always [a librarian's] goal to make sure that young people get factual good information. Go Ask Alice has accurate information, it answers a broad range of questions and concerns, and not everybody is interested in everything on there. I would recommend it to my child — but I would also tell him that I would want to be there and I would want to talk about it with him. We believe that it is the parents’ job to decide what is appropriate and not appropriate.”

And therein lies the rub. Unquestionably, the Internet contains material that is unsuitable for young users. But there are differences in opinion about the best way of controlling access. The ALA is adamant in its stand against uniformly adopting filtering software. “Filters are only one way to modify Internet use,” says Symons. “They may be the best way in the home but they’re not the best way in the library.” Well, reasonable people may disagree. Both Schlessinger and the ALA seem to want responsible use of the Net — but while Schlessinger’s approach favors the mechanical, the ALA’s leans towards the philosophical. What we have here is a difference of opinion.

But Schlessinger does not suffer differences of opinion graciously. Over the past year, the talk show doyenne has redefined the scope of her radio practice considerably. No longer content to administer tongue-lashings to callers lamenting their divorce, infidelity, unwanted pregnancies or abusive spouses, lately Schlessinger has become a woman with a mission, a scriptural absolutist, seeking nothing less than a complete moral make-over of society. There’s no room for conscientious objectors outside of Mother Laura’s army. But does she go too far?

Bellows says she is only responding to the current cultural climate. “Many librarians have written to tell us that they’re having terrible issues with pedophiles since computers were introduced into the libraries,” Bellows says. “Now that pedophiles can access porn on the Internet they’re hanging out in libraries.”

But those letters do not appear on the Schlessinger Web site. And the ALA’s Symons counters, “We are not hearing this nor did a survey of its membership by the Urban Libraries Council” — an organization of major metropolitan libraries — “show this.” Is Schlessinger using hyperbole to make her point?

Schlessinger certainly appears to have leaned toward excess in crediting her faithful with influencing the outcome of a legislative committee vote in California. On May 18, the state Senate’s Public Safety Committee voted to reconsider SB238, a bill that if passed into law would require Internet blocking software in California libraries. Previously the committee had deadlocked on moving this legislation along for appropriations consideration. The May 18 vote allows that decision to be revisited.

“All of your letters and faxes have made a significant and meaningful difference,” Schlessinger gushed in a letter posted May 18 to her site. Not so, according to Sen. John Vasconcellos, the chairman of the Public Safety Committee, who has denied seeing any mail at all and told the ALA that he was “aghast at the hypocrisy” of Schlessinger’s claim. Reconsideration is a routine courtesy extended to every bill’s author, Vasconcellos said, characterizing Dr. Laura’s version of events as “preposterous and offensive.”

Veteran talk show host Ronn Owens of San Francisco’s KGO radio sees the danger of demagoguery as an occupational hazard. “You eventually fall into one of two categories. Either you view your program as info-tainment and a wonderful way to make a living but don’t take yourself that seriously or you begin to believe your own press clippings. Laura and Rush [Limbaugh] tend to fall into the second category. Both shows want (Laura demands) listeners who agree with them. Thus they are validated with every call. After a while you begin to see your opinions as incontestable.”

In other words, maybe Schlessinger is taking herself — and her role as the righteous moralist — a bit too far. “A lot of people talk about how they loved Laura when she first came on,” says Owens, “but she is becoming too strident, dogmatic, preachy, religious, unpleasant … She will either heed these listeners and continue her success or will eventually fall victim to listeners turning her off.” But for now, at least, Schlessinger remains America’s top-rated dominatrix.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Today’s libraries offer a variety of media and sociocultural events — they are “blended libraries,” to use a term coined by Kathleen Imhoff, assistant director of the Broward County Library of Fort Lauderdale, Fla. At the newly remodeled San Francisco Public Library, the computers are prominently displayed in the center of the library building while the books are all but hidden on the periphery. Imhoff’s own library has word processing and other types of software for patrons to use, Internet access, audio CDs, videotapes, concerts, lectures, books and periodicals in three forms (print, microfiche and digital).

Many libraries have found that this kind of “blending” is hugely popular in their communities, and librarians explain the changes in their institutions’ roles by pointing to the public demand for these new services. But other trends are at work, too.

For some time, libraries have been automating their back-end, behind-the-desk functions for reasons of cost and convenience, just like any other business. Now, the computers have moved out from behind librarians’ desks and onto the floor where the patrons are. This means that, suddenly, library-goers will have to know how to use those computers.

This sounds reasonable enough until you take a close look. Unfortunately, the same technology that cuts costs and relieves librarians of work behind the scenes increases it for the public — and for the librarians at the front desk who have to help the public figure out how to use the technology. The unhappy result: People are simply not finding the information they seek.

If you are just coming to the library to read a book for pleasure and you know what a card catalog is and you have some basic computer skills, then you are going to be OK. But if you are trying to find some specific information — say, whether software in the classroom helps kids learn better or the causes of ovarian cancer or the basic procedure for doing a cost-benefit analysis of computer systems (three topics I have actually tried to look up in the San Francisco library) — then you’re in trouble.

To begin with, library visitors must now be able to type, to use a mouse and a menu and to understand the various types of computer interfaces (terminal text, windows and browsers). It’s also nice if you know 17 different ways to quit a program, which electronic databases you should look in for what kinds of information, the syntax necessary to define your search and the Library of Congress’ controlled vocabulary. After I had been to the new San Francisco library three times, I started keeping a folder of instructions on how to do a keyword search (fi a= author, for example), since I would forget between visits.

Probably half the population has never used a computer, fewer know how to type and almost nobody knows anything about electronic databases or searching syntax. As a result, the public library is now engaged in a massive attempt to teach computer literacy to the entire country. Some librarians compare it to the adult literacy programs the library also sponsors, but this is on a far larger scale — and less closely tied to the library’s traditional mission.

The response at each library system has been different. Some libraries actually give courses in word processing, spreadsheets and so on. But even at libraries where the staff has resisted becoming computer trainers, they are still forced to devote significant resources to the problem.

Such has been the case in San Francisco, where people with disabilities can sign up to use the voice-recognition program Dragon Dictate — but only if they can prove they already know how to use the software. The librarians have neither the time nor the expertise (nor the time to develop the expertise) to teach it to them. At the reference desks, librarians try not to spend a lot of time teaching people the basics of how to use the computer, but sometimes it’s unavoidable. “We try to get them started,” says business librarian John Kenney. “We let them do as much as they can on their own and they come get us. It’s certainly a big problem.”

The San Francisco library offers classes on its own electronic catalog, commercial periodical indexes and the Internet twice a week as well as occasional lectures about the Internet. Although it seems odd to me that people now need to take a two-hour class before they can use the library, the classes are always full. But despite the excellent teachers, two hours is simply not enough to meet the needs of the students, many of whom have never used a computer before in their lives and many of whom simply can’t type. When I took the class one Tuesday, the man sitting next to me said he has used the library’s computer catalog many times, but he keeps making typos without knowing it. This unexpectedly throws him into the wrong screens and he doesn’t know how to get back. On the floor, he repeatedly has to ask a librarian for help.

“Providing technology does not mean people can use the technology,” says Marc Webb, a San Francisco librarian and one of the teachers. “Half the constituency is still trying to read English.” The library has also had to contend with the practical difficulties of making its catalog accessible via the Internet, a new service many libraries are starting to offer.

“It’s absolutely overwhelming,” Webb says. “Everyone is getting to us with multiple transports, they’re all using different software, they have Winsock or Telnet set up differently, and suddenly the library is forced to become a hardware and software help desk. When you’re trying to tell someone [over the telephone] how to set up Winsock through AOL when this is the first time they’ve ever used a computer, it’s very tricky.”

Even for people who know how to use a computer, the technology causes problems. In the past, when people needed to find something other than a book, they tended to ask a reference librarian first. Now that all the indexes — and many of the articles as well — are on the computer, more patrons are simply doing searches themselves, with no idea that they might be missing information that’s there because they’re in the wrong index or using the wrong search word.

The indexes have cryptic names like ERIC and EBSCO that give no clue as to what subject they cover. Print indexes, on the other hand, are of course located in the subject area they index, which makes them easy to find, and they also contain voluminous introductory pages listing every periodical they index, with explanations of how they are organized and instructions on their use. The electronic indexes either don’t offer this at all or make the information nearly impossible to find. (In San Francisco, the staff is aware of this problem and hopes to correct it soon with a paper guide, electronic documentation or a new graphic interface for the whole system.)

Libraries also seem content to buy indexes based on broad subject category without paying any attention to whether they actually list a specific source their patrons might want to use. An article in the December 1994 issue of the Library Journal complained that the electronic science index in use at one university library referenced only three basic undergraduate-level indexes, which ironically also were the easiest ones to use in print, rather than more complex indexes such as Chemical Abstracts.

“Surely no librarian would hand a patron a volume of the Reader’s Guide when a science index was needed, yet we are doing the same thing passively — and with the same outcome,” wrote Kevin Cook, a former reference librarian. “Through a program of technological advancement as carefully reasoned as a seaside lemming vacation, many patrons who can’t tell a Boolean operator from apple butter are now free to spool off hundreds of citations without librarian assistance — until the printer runs out of paper.”

The same thing seems to be happening in public libraries, even ones that don’t have any interest in Chemical Abstracts. Florida’s Imhoff tells me that the archiving policies at her library have changed dramatically since they put in full-text periodical indexes. Now they save paper copies in the main libraries for three to five years instead of five to 10. For archiving, they rely on EBSCO, which offers full text for some of the 3,000 periodicals it indexes. What it doesn’t include is either too obscure or scholarly for her library to need, she says.

What’s more, none of these electronic databases preserves the entire source, in its original format and in the context of other articles and advertisements, as microfiche does. Each article exists as a single record in plain text with loads of typos and no accompanying graphics.

Those patrons who do ask for librarian assistance, at least at the San Francisco library, either get a librarian who hasn’t been trained on the system (“I’ve never used the ERIC database before,” one told me) or a librarian who stands behind the reference desk and gives you a quick description of what database to look under and what string to try. If you can’t find the right screen or the string doesn’t seem to be working, you have to go back and wait in line again. At the old library, the librarian would walk you over to the print index or one of the few computer databases and start finding the information for you. Only after it became apparent that you were on the right track would the librarian leave you to it.

But the librarians simply don’t have time anymore. I don’t mean to pick on the San Francisco library staff, who are doing their best under difficult circumstances. It’s just that they don’t yet have enough reference librarians to cope with the deluge of new patrons and questions that new libraries create.

Critics of the “blended library” and of libraries’ shift from books
to computers are often writers who lament that public libraries are less
and less useful for serious research. Many librarians respond that the
public library is not and cannot be a research institution — it’s paid for out
of tax money and it must be responsive to the community it is in and
serve its needs. Today’s public, it seems, wants computers more than it wants
books.

I suspect that’s because we are living in an era when the potential
of technology is almost always exaggerated and its practical limitations
ignored. In the library, computers make finding things more difficult –
unless we are prepared to dramatically increase funding for training,
system maintenance and more reference librarians. As it stands,
librarians are now the slaves of an unfunded mandate.

The hysterical urgency of the pressure libraries feel to computerize is based on a big lie: the widespread notion that the computer itself is some kind of important information source analogous to the book, but somehow more useful and wonderful. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Computers are not simply books in electronic clothes. Multimedia and
games are fun, but do not offer the same kind of information as books
and magazines. The same can be said of databases, which are even further
removed from narrative form. And the Internet, although extremely useful
in many ways, is currently no replacement for a print library.

The Internet has 30 million to 40 million Web pages; the library contains 25 million books with many pages each, says Karen Coyne, a specialist in library automation at U.C.-Berkeley and Western regional director for Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. The Web also has no standard information retrieval tools and is completely disorganized, she continues. The library, on the other hand, has an extremely complex indexing system using controlled vocabulary and comprehensive cross-referencing.

“Unfortunately, documents do not define themselves,” she says. Doing a keyword search in an Internet search engine throws up too many false hits to be useful, leaves out stuff you’re really looking for, and cannot yet select material for different user levels, such as children.

“It’s cruel to make people have to weed through every bit of info in the world to find what they need,” she says. She also notes that many information sources on the Internet are administered by part-time volunteers. Sites come and go without notice and quickly go out of date. So far, there is no guarantee that sites will be archived and available to future generations. (“I know in a couple of years some graduate student is going to come in here asking for Salon,” Kenney tells me.)

Coyne writes on her Web site: “As a telecommunications system, the Internet is both modern and mature; as an information system the Internet is an amateur operation.”

One day, the information on the Net could rival the richness of
print. One day, when screen resolution improves, we will even be able to read it without squinting. But until then, what will matter in a library, what has always mattered in a library, is the quality of the collection and, of course, the public’s ability to access it and use it. Too bad that, today, such ideals don’t brand a library as “visionary.”

News outlets reporting the figures portrayed Microsoft as the model Corporate Citizen, a company doing well by doing good. “Microsoft shares wealth,” headlined the San Francisco Examiner, in a typical treatment. Microsoft has accepted the accolades with blushing modesty. “It’s been a long-standing tradition at Microsoft to be involved in philanthropy,” says Microsoft spokesperson John Pinette. “That goes back to before the company was founded, when Bill [Gates'] mother was on the board of the United Way.”

Some are even starting to place Bill Gates in the pantheon of the great philanthropists of all time. When Microsoft donated $10.5 million in computers and software for rural and inner-city libraries last October, the head of the Brooklyn Public Library was moved to proclaim from the podium, “In the same way that [Andrew] Carnegie built the buildings, Gates is providing the second wave that will continue the opportunities.” Computer users may well start experiencing a warm fuzzy feeling every time they boot up Windows, knowing it’s the product of a company that Really Cares.

But like many things in the computer world, there’s more to the story than what fits on a single screen. A quick scroll through Microsoft’s charitable donations soon makes it clear that Bill Gates is not so much a philanthropist as he is a Virtual Philanthropist. Of the $73.2 million that Microsoft donated to charity in 1995, $62.1 million, or about 85 percent, was in the form of free software.

Now, free software is a grand thing. I wouldn’t mind having some free Microsoft software myself, maybe that cool new version of Word with the fully customizable Toolbar. But free software  even $62.1 million of it  ain’t philanthropy, not if the word is to have any meaning (derived from the Greek philanthropos, meaning humane, benevolent, loving people).

First of all, the software donations cost Microsoft considerably less than the $62.1 million figure suggests. That total isn’t what it cost Microsoft to produce the software they gave away; it’s what’s known as the “fair-market value” of the software, or what it might have commanded if sold on the retail market with no discounting. The higher the value of the donation, the bigger the tax write-off, and Microsoft is hardly the only company to stretch the equation to their advantage.

“I’m not going to fault Microsoft on the way it reports their numbers because we do the same thing,” says Fred Silverman, senior manager, Worldwide Community Affairs for Apple Computers, which last year gave away computer equipment the company valued at $5 to $6 million. “But anyone who looks at Microsoft’s numbers is welcome to make his or her own analysis of the true value of the donations based on their knowledge of mark-up in the industry.”

Since software retailing for $300 often costs less than $20 to manufacture, the value of Microsoft’s donated software is probably inflated by a factor of 15 or more. But more telling than the funny math is the self-interest involved in Microsoft and other high-tech companies giving away product in the first place. Far from being a selfless act of charity, there are strategic benefits to Microsoft in donating software. Giving away software increases market share among people who probably couldn’t afford to buy the product in the first place. It squeezes out marginal competitors by preventing them from grabbing a foothold in the market, creates a pool of future customers, and widens Windows’ lead as the dominant operating system.

Giving away software is a sound marketing strategy, but it’s not philanthropy, any more than it would be if the Ford Foundation gave away millions of dollars’ worth of free transmission parts that only fit Ford cars.
But then, maybe it’s a sign that the old analog concepts of philanthropy are giving way to a new digital paradigm, a more efficient delivery system in which the benefits of corporate giving flow smoothly back to the corporation.

Philanthropy has come a long way since the time of Andrew Carnegie, the man to whom Bill Gates has been compared. Considered by many to be the father of American philanthropy, Carnegie spent much of his adult life amassing a huge fortune by creating the Carnegie Steel Company. At age 65, he sold the company to J. P. Morgan for $400 million and devoted the rest of his life to giving nearly all of his money away.

Others before him had made substantial charitable contributions, but Carnegie was the first to state publicly the audacious notion that the rich have a moral obligation to give away their fortunes, a philosophy which became known as the Gospel of Wealth. One of Carnegie’s lifelong interests became the establishment of free public libraries as a way of making education available to everyone. There were only a few public libraries in the world when Carnegie began promising a library to almost any town that would provide a site and promise to maintain the building. He donated more than $56 million to build 2,509 libraries throughout the English-speaking world, many of which are still serving their communities. By the time Carnegie died in 1919, he had given away more than $350 million, practically his entire net worth.

To this day, Carnegie remains the altruistic standard against which all philanthropists are compared. Of course, Carnegie did get one tangible benefit in return for his generosity — seeing the family name plastered on impressive buildings and foundations. That’s the same benefit being reaped by Bill Gates’ personal philanthropy, which is separate from Microsoft’s corporate giving. As an individual, Gates was particularly generous last year, donating $15 million to Harvard (where he dropped out in his sophomore year) to fund a new electrical engineering, computing and communications facility in his name. Gates and his wife, Melinda French Gates, have pledged $12 million to help pay for a proposed $52 million building for the University of Washington Law School, to be named after his father. In addition, Gates gave the University of Washington $12 million in 1991 to establish a department of molecular biotechnology and $10 million in 1995 to fund an endowment for undergraduate students, named after his mother.

As turn-of-the-century industrialists discovered before Gates, philanthropy has its rewards, serving to associate the family name with noble civic projects rather than bank vaults bulging with money. Otherwise, Gates’ personal giving has displayed an admirably low level of self-interest.
The same cannot be said, however, of the generosity brandished by Gates’ company. Microsoft — along with many other corporate givers — has turned Carnegie’s Gospel of Wealth into a strategic marketing tool. Over the last decade in particular, corporate giving has become intimately associated with marketing and corporate image, seeking as much to enhance the company as help the community.

“There’s much more pressure now to prove that charitable donations are producing a return to the company,” says Myra Alperson, senior research associate for The Conference Board, which tracks corporate giving. “In many companies, corporate giving is no longer a small department floating out on its own. There’s much more involvement by the public relations, advertising and marketing departments. Sometimes they’re run entirely out of the marketing department.”

High-tech companies, and Microsoft in particular, were slow to institute corporate giving programs. The young nerds who built the computer industry were social outcasts, unburdened by the notion of “giving back to the community” that more established industries had developed over the years. But of late, high-tech companies have discovered how to make their corporate giving, like their hardware and software, faster and more efficient. By making donations to targeted groups in key market areas, corporate giving can be turned into a strategic advantage. Charity not only begins at home; it ends there, too.

In the case of computer companies, giving away free product is a way to increase market share, influence future purchases, create good will at relatively low cost, and get a tax write-off for your efforts. Hewlett-Packard gave away $56.3 million in equipment in 1995, about 79 percent of its reported total corporate giving, second only to Microsoft. IBM donated $56.3 million in non-monetary support, about 79 percent of its total corporate giving.

Donations of free product in the computer/office equipment industry make up about 47 percent of total contributions, compared to an average of just 17 percent among all industries. The only other business sector that comes close to giving away as much free stuff is the pharmaceutical industry, in which one-third of its charitable contributions were donated product. There may be no such thing as a free lunch in America, but there’s plenty of free software and drugs.

To hear most high-tech companies tell it, they donate product for the same reason Andrew Carnegie gave away his money — pure altruism. Any benefits that flow back to the company are merely an unintended by-product of Doing the Right Thing.

“I suppose you can make the argument that if you’re giving software away, that in the end you’re increasing public acceptance of your product,” says Microsoft’s John Pinette. “But most of the people getting these products are very, very happy to get them. And the places we’re giving away software are pretty small markets. So I think we can stand up and say that the motivation behind our giving is altruistic. We believe in our products and we want to give them to people who have a need for them. We’re trying to help in any way we can.”

But behind the scenes, Microsoft works hard to maximize the strategic impact of all of that love for their fellow man. Two years ago, the company hired an outside consultant, Craig Smith, to devise a strategic plan to direct Microsoft’s corporate giving in ways that guarantee the greatest return to the company.

“There are a lot of profits to be made by computer companies in the schools,” says Smith, president of Corporate Citizen, another non-profit organization that tracks philanthropy, and author of the book “Giving By Industry.” “There’s brand loyalty you’re after with the kids. The schools are one of the last areas where there’s a huge loyalty factor to Apple. Microsoft has a big education group to try to change that. The schools are also a way of reaching parents and getting into edutainment. The main reason parents buy home computers is to augment their children’s education.”

In 1995, Microsoft’s contributions to “education,” mostly in the form of free software to schools, amounted to $44.9 million, or about 61 percent of its total donations. Microsoft committed $1 million in software, hardware and online access to the national headquarters of the PTA to enable it to link with its state offices and to provide technological training to its members.

“Getting involved with the PTA can assist the marketing agenda of getting computers in the schools and helping to reach parents,” says Smith.

Microsoft is also seizing a beachhead in the public libraries, Andrew Carnegie’s old love. Microsoft is spending about $10.5 million on computers and software for rural and inner city
libraries, and also funds the Libraries Online! program, which has provided technology to 68 branches from nine different public library systems. Unlike Carnegie, who didn’t profit a dime from his support of libraries, Microsoft is expecting its investment to pay dividends in the
future.

“Right now there’s no company that ‘owns’ the libraries, so to speak,” says Smith. “It’s an uncluttered market. At this time, there isn’t any direct marketing advantage to being in the libraries, but it’s a great place to demonstrate some possibilities with computers.”

Other Microsoft donations have a political purpose, rather than a marketing bent, such as its support of a variety of job training programs.
“Supporting job training sends a message to Washington that the computer is a job creator, not just a job killer,” says Smith. “Basically, it can help retain the deregulated status of the computing industry, keep the regulators at bay, and gain a marketing advantage.”

Of course, it’s Microsoft’s money and software to give away, so it’s hard to complain too much about the company’s steely-eyed philanthropy.

“It’s not philanthropy, it’s marketing,” corrects Smith. “It’s all coming out of their marketing budget.”

But you wouldn’t think that if you read Microsoft’s Annual Report of Giving, a heartwarming celebration of the company’s own generosity. Laden with the sort of soft-focus photographs of jes’ plain folks that HMOs feature in their brochures during open season enrollment, the report makes Microsoft sound more like a social service agency rather than the world’s largest software company. “Everyone at Microsoft celebrates our connections with the people and organizations who make the world a better place,” the report declares. Bill Gates, the man who would be Carnegie, closes the brochure with a stirring end note: “As a young growing company, Microsoft and its employees are not often recognized as having any traditions. But we do have one that reaches back well over a decade. We give.”

Microsoft gives, but increasingly with an eye fixed on what it will get in return. Andrew Carnegie supported libraries, too, but unlike Microsoft, he didn’t fill the shelves with Carnegie-compatible books designed to create a pool of future Carnegie customers, nor did he view philanthropy as a strategic tool in accumulating more wealth. Microsoft may have learned the value of giving, but not what it means to be truly generous.