*OIINEWS

Dan Greenstein did a particularly nice job at the recent ‘Survive or Thrive’ conference of explaining the current relationship between academic libraries and their parent organizations (universities) and the impact of the current fiscal crisis on that relationship.

I particularly appreciate that he focuses not on what we can do in libraries going forward, but what we ought to be doing. One of the things he points out is that most libraries spend most of their budget on their general holdings (that is, the things that are not unique). He argues that we should be spending our time/efforts/budget on those things that make us unique.

He emphasized that libraries needs to move quickly–and as a community–to develop services.

Yes, it’s long (45 minutes) but worth it.

[talk] Dan Greenstein at Survive or Thrive conference from UKOLN on Vimeo.

Last week as the New York Public Library opened a new branch in Battery Park, Council Member Jimmy Van Bramer said,

Any day we open a library is a good day.

Meanwhile, Boston announced the closure of perhaps as many as 10 of its 26 branch libraries and Los Angeles announced huge budget cuts that will likely mean similar closures.

As someone who spends more time thinking about academic libraries than public ones I am interested in the language used on both sides of the debate to characterize libraries. And while I am saddened by the potential closure of so many libraries (mostly because I think once you close a library you are never really likely to get it back…despite the new NYPL branch), I am almost more saddened at the language used in the American Libraries article to describe libraries.

“Libraries are about books and librarians,” said one of the Boston residents protesting the closures. And BPL’s president Amy Ryan called librarians “information navigators” and said, “we can’t take a car designed in the 1970s onto today’s information superhighway.”

I think they are both wrong. If you look at the opening of the NYPL branch it seems to me that the most important thing in public libraries are the people who go into them. As much as I hate to say this (being both a fan of books and a librarian), we can’t build or sustain libraries for books, information, or librarians, we have to build them for people and communities.

There is a lot of discussion these days about the convergence of libraries, archives, and museums.The Center for the Future of Museums had a recent guest post on this topic, also introducing the IMLS-funded wiki on the same theme. The University of Calgary has actually merged its libraries and museums into what they are calling their Library and Cultural Resources, which also interestingly contains their university press.

This is all inevitable, I think, but it is really important to realize that this is not a convergence, but a re-convergence. If you look back far enough there was no difference between libraries and museums… or publishers for that matter. These were spaces for scholarship, regardless of the objects they held. And they were usually run by philosophers who spent much of their time assembling new editions and collected works (i.e., publishing).

It is easy to get caught in the newness of all of this and the result is that people get lost in the details (eg., what would an integrated search of library and museum catalogues look like?), or in why the convergence is happening now. Perhaps there is some value in looking at why these institutions separated in the first place? And the most important thing is to figure out what these institutions are converging around. (Hint: it isn’t technology, or services, or metadata, or economic sustainability, or even physical spaces…it is the thing that all of these elements purport to serve.)