Libraries

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.

There’s been surprising little discussion of the Google Book Search settlement outside of the US but I think it is worth paying attention to. It has important implications for libraries, but also for copyright law.

To catch up on the discussion, here’s some good resources.

The actual settlement: http://books.google.com/googlebooks/agreement/

A Discussion Around the Google Book Search Settlement with Alexander Macgillivray of Google (soon to be of Twitter)

And a workshop at Harvard’s Berkman Center about the next steps and alternative approaches.

Enjoy.

The JISC and the Bodleian are today holding an event on the ‘Library of the Future’ so this seems like an auspicious time to begin laying out my own thoughts on the what the library of the future may (and perhaps should) look like. Over the next few months, I will begin sharing my work in this area as a way to start testing out these ideas which play such a central role in my research activities.

The first thing I might explain is how this fits into my dissertation and how my dissertation work fits into the future of libraries. The simple answer to this is that it provides the answer to the ‘so what?’ question. While my thesis project is about looking at the impact of digitisation on the practice and output of scholarship (particularly with regard to materials from the Himalayan region (more on that later)), I am doing it all with an eye toward understanding the intersection and libraries and the Internet. Figuring this out will be crucial to the future of the library.

So, over the next few months I hope to write on the following and more:

- The current mis-understanding of what an academic library is and does
- What libraries used to be and what can we learn from them
- What should be at the centre of the library of the future
- The role of the library in education

Here’s an attempt to abstract my thoughts on this now:
At some point in the last 100 (maybe 150) years, libraries became erroneously focused on information retrieval. Information retrieval is one service provided by libraries, but it should not be all that they do. Google does information retrieval better than libraries and we will never beat them at that game. If we try, libraries will be gone in the next 50 years. Libraries will survive, though, if the they re-invent themselves as a collection of services that support the creation of new knowledge (of which information retrieval is only 1 service). This is what libraries used to look like and the direction they should move (back) toward now.

the pause is important because nothing happens in it
- Dr. David Carr, The Promise of Cultural Institutions

the process of learning … and I think the process of scholarship is not about continual interaction and engagement. There is a need for reflection and contemplation. There is a constant sort of dance that takes place between states of action and engagement, followed by withdrawal. Each is as important as the other.

So when I speak of libraries as a space where information can be turned into knowledge, it is because libraries (offline) provide a place for both of these activities. This is why I think such a thing as a digital library may not actually exist. If one cannot be online passively, if the very definition of going online requires action and strives for interaction, then one cannot withdraw while in such a space. In your very pauses, you are going offline. Is it therefore possible to truly create a ‘digital library’?

I reread the JISC, BL, UCL report that I mentioned in my last posting and it has left me equally unsettled about what precisely it is that people think that libraries and librarians do. There seems to be a general mis-characterization of libraries and their relationship to research, information, and knowledge. This becomes evident in the concluding recommendations / implications for research libraries section of this report.

The report comes down firmly on the side of libraries/librarians becoming more involved in understanding their users. This has seemed like an obvious direction to go in for some time now. A friend of mine gave an keynote address to this effect almost 20 years ago.* He said that librarians are “user experts” and the future of the profession lies in embracing that role, but I’m afraid no one seems to have listened because here we are are all over again… wondering what our users do and how libraries can stay relevant in the face of the Internet.

Beyond advocating the role of libraries/librarians in teaching information literacy, the authors of this report seem to have a very common–but I dare say wrong–(mis)perception of libraries as primarily a place for information retrieval and the librarian as “intermediary” in the information retrieval process. The logical outcome of this sort of thinking is that that the Internet and Google are a threat to libraries.

…tools like GoogleScholar will be increasingly a real and present threat to the library as an institution (p. 9)

The problem isn’t Google, but a mis-representation of librarians as providing only (or even primarily) information retrieval services. And librarians are just as guilty of this misrepresentation, if not more. This is in many ways the classic Aristotelian dilemma of confusing the accidental with the essential. Information retrieval is just one quality of libraries, the accidental, in Aristotle’s terms. Libraries are dynamic spaces for discovery, learning, knowing, and creation. Libraries are essentially there to facilitate the creation of knowledge. They do this by connecting people with information AND providing the tools for them to organize, evaluate, and transform it. They are about structuring relationships–between researchers, and between publishers, researchers, information, and knowledge.

If libraries fail or become irrelevant, it will be because they have failed to support all of these roles. Libraries used to provide all of these roles, but shifted to more of an information retrieval focus at some point (I think in the mid twentieth century). So, while I agree with the report’s doomsday speculation about the potential irrelevance of libraries, I disagree with the “why“ and the “how to avoid it“ scenarios. If you thought your job was to retrieve information for people… or somehow stand as “intermediary” between a patron and the information they need, I have news for you… you are going to be replaced by the Internet.

* You can download a pdf of that speech here. And you may be interested to know that its author is now heading up an organization–the Open Learning Exchange–that has the potential to change what we think of as a library. Dr. David Carr, is someone else who I think really gets what a library is… and I am always looking for others… any thoughts?

Last September JISC, UCL, and the British Library released a report on the information seeking behaviours of the “Google Generation.” I think this is a significant report, and I have a number of reactions to it, so I think I will spread my response(s) over a few postings…I was also pleased to see that they have recently released all of their work packages as well. You can find the whole report here.

This report does a few great things.

1. It debunks a lot of the myths about the “Google Generation” being good at finding information. It turns out they just aren’t. (This should not come as a great surprise to reference librarians, and if it does, we have a problem.)

the information literacy of young people, has not improved with the widening access to technology: in fact, their apparent facility with computers disguises some worrying points.

2. The authors point out how so much writing today overestimates the impact of ICTs on young people and they have some evidence to back that up. Unfortunately, I think they fall into a bit of their own trap by constantly over-emphasizing the ‘unprecedented’ nature of the digital shift. This is not the first time that people have feared that a new technology would dumb down society:

Socrates, in conversation with Phaedrus said about that new technology, writing:

for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.
:: Plato, Phaedrus, translated by Benjamin Jowett ::

When the report talks about the perils of “power browsing,” I think they start to drift off their mark, though. I don’t think “power browsing“ is inherently a bad thing, just dangerous if it is the only method of selecting information. I would have liked to see the report dig a little bit deeper into the importance of teaching real research skills (of which evaluation is one component). It is not about teaching students evaluation skills so they can be good researchers, it is about teaching a whole suite of research skills because this is how we turn information into knowledge.

The report also has some harsh, but I think fair, things to say about the current state of libraries and librarianship (more on that to come…). Overall, its definitely worth a read. And they provide an executive summary :)