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Discussions about ‘informal learning’ seem to be growing. I am interested because libraries and museums have always been really important spaces for informal and unstructured learning.
I think it is important to study and understand how it works, and why informal learning is good. But can you actually plan for information leaning? At some point if you are planning for it, doesn’t it in fact cease to be informal?
Seth Godin’s short post on the library of the future got a lot of librarians stirred up, which is how I found out about it. He criticizes the current model of libraries as “community-funded repositories for books that individuals don’t want to own (or for reference books we can’t afford to own)” and says it is unsustainable. The strange thing is that I think even the people who seem to agree with him get it wrong. (‘It’, of course, being what libraries are and will be in the future.)
The comments and criticisms seem to fall into two categories. Either people get defensive, or they agree with his criticisms of the current state of the library and say that the answer lies in focusing more on the organisation of information and becoming an ‘information hub’ (i.e., libraries need more computers).
But the most important bit in Godin’s post is the last sentence:
What we need to spend the money on are leaders, sherpas and teachers who will push everyone from kids to seniors to get very aggressive in finding and using information and in connecting with and leading others.
This isn’t organising information and this isn’t more computers…not that there is anything wrong with either of those things, it’s just not what libraries need to focus on. Notice there isn’t a mention of these “leaders, sherpas and teachers” being librarians, but why shouldn’t they be? This reminded me of discussions I have been having with friends and colleagues about the future for libraries and librarians. As my friend Indy puts it, librarians should not be information managers, but agent provocateurs. This is what I think Godin is getting at. I don’t want to peddle information for a living. I want to make people think.
The New York Public Library recently redesigned their logo.
In their words, this was in an attempt to make a “new logo that is user-friendly, accessible, dynamic and relevant.”
The Library of Congress recently did the same. In both of these cases, the new logos are radically simple. There are practical reasons to go with a simple design. In the LoC case, you can tell they have thought a lot about how and where the logo would appear.
Image courtesy of the Brand New website: http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/an_iconic_lion_for_an_iconic_institution.php
courtesy of Brand New: http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/the_librabry_of_congress_gets_its_wings.php
Yet there is something unsettling to me about both of these. Somehow these both seem dumbed-down. Does the new (eerily Disney-like) NYPL lion really seem more user-friendly and accessible? It seems to me that its cartoon-ish nature just makes it seem out of place, that it looses its connection with the lions outside its doors that originally inspired the logo. It just doesn’t represent the very complex, awe-inspiring place that does everything from provide services to recent immigrants, to host a reunion of the Velvet Underground and sends out strange Tweets with quotes from Roger Moore’s biography. In that way it isn’t user friendly, it is misleading.
Both of these cases seem also to move away from a geographically-based icon to an object-oriented one. And I think that is a dangerous move for libraries these days. If information is getting more and more ubiquitous, don’t we need to remind people that libraries are in fact important as spaces as well (even if the spaces the libraries are creating might be virtual)?
It’s possible that I am reacting to a general dislike that I felt immediately for these new identities, but I just can’t shake the feeling that they both point to a trend. I am a huge fan of usability and accessibility, but I think these are both examples of something else entirely…something I can’t quite put my finger on. Am I over-reacting?