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.

The principles came from a time of self-reflection when he and others in the design world were a bit concerned by the state of the world – “an impenetrable confusion of forms, colours and noises.”

1. Good design is innovative
2. Good design makes a product useful
3. Good design is aesthetic
4. Good design makes a product understandable
5. Good design is unobtrusive
6. Good design is honest
7. Good design is long-lasting
8. Good design is thorough, down to the last detail
9. Good design in environmentally friendly
10. Good design is as little design as possible

Sometimes these days I feel about about technology (educational technologies in particular) the way Rams was feeling about design. To be honest, most days the web feels to me like “an impenetrable confusion of forms, colours and noises.” So what if we borrow Rams principles and apply them to technology? I think they fit pretty well. I think there are some powerful ideas in looking at technology this way and I could probably go on and on about each of these (I particularly like 10) .. but for now I will just leave you to think about this:

1. Good technology is innovative
2. Good technology makes a product useful
3. Good technology is aesthetic
4. Good technology makes a product understandable
5. Good technology is unobtrusive
6. Good technology is honest
7. Good technology is long-lasting
8. Good technology is thorough, down to the last detail
9. Good technology in environmentally friendly
10. Good technology is as little technology as possible

The problem with information

Information about many things does not teach understanding
(Heraclitus (B40), in Nussbaum, 1986).

The struggle of the academic library to stay relevant today is due to this switch from a scholar-centered model to an information-centered one. And the imminent collapse of this latter model is causing tension not only across academic libraries and the field of library science, but across academia as a whole.

Prior to the Victorian Era most academic libraries were what Matthew Battles might characterize as “Parnassan” – small, well focused institutions where what mattered was not the quantity of the collections, but the quality. Then our system of universities exploded and at the same time the cost of printing went down. Libraries began to put collecting at the top of their priorities. The result was that libraries changed from small, focused institutions that fostered the whole of the life cycle of scholarship, to what Andrew Abbott’s describes (pdf) as a “universal identification, location, and access machine.” And where the Internet has made it possible to finally fulfill the idea of our university library as “universal library” (again, to use one of Battles’ terms), our academic libraries have failed. In just a few short years, Google has come much closer to the creation of a universal library than our libraries have.

The problem is, of course, that we have spent nearly one hundred and fifty years crafting this idea that our academic libraries are centers for information retrieval.  Only one ALA-accredited graduate program has maintained the title “Library Science;” thirty have changed to “library and information science;” four put information first, but retain library, “information and library science;” and seventeen have dropped the library all together and are simply schools of “information science” or “information studies.”  Similar trends can be seen in the UK, where most recently the program at the University College London has changed from the department of “information and library science” to the a department of “information studies.” We don’t even produce librarians anymore, we produce information scientists.

So what we have now is a “tension of consciousness,” (see Berger and Luckmann, 1967, p. 21). We are at a point of awareness of the simultaneous existence of multiple realities. Having put all of our eggs into the “information basket” has failed us and it feels a bit late to turn back now. But the Internet has completely changed our relationship to information and as a result, the model of library as information center is going to collapse.

A New Theory of Libraries

So I would argue that it is time for a new theory of libraries (well past time, in fact). The user (the scholar) must be put back in the center of the academic research library again, but the users’ needs must be considered within the broader context of the process of scholarship. In focusing on information, academic research libraries have in part been trying to address what users want, not what they need. As Ranganathan** stated, “[t]he majority of readers do not know their requirements,” and I would argue that it has long been the role of library and librarian to help them understand them.***

The goal of any new theory of library must of course accommodate the increasing needs in research and scholarship for large quantities of information, but should not preface quantity of information over all else. As important as the information itself, is providing and supporting an environment that allows for the transformation of that information into new knowledge.

What has been forgotten, for example, is that libraries were, and should be again, inherently social places. That these are spaces not just for getting access to resources, but to people—librarians, archivists, other scholars—with whom discourse can be entered about the resources therein. An academic research library should first be seen as a collection of services that support the creation of new knowledge. From this perspective, the library is not defined by its walls or by its collections, but by those very services. The goal of a library is not then, to provide access to information, it is to provide a space, whether literal or virtual, for the support of all aspects of the scholarship process, and information provision is just one of these services. The information commons, gateway, or storehouse should not be the goal or the fate of the academic research library.

The library is a combination of tangible and intangible elements. Library is collection (of the tangible or the intangible) plus organization system, plus scholarship, but it is also the intangible environment that contributes to all three. There is no library, for example, without a culture of inquiry. Everything that is done in the library (entering, lingering, reflecting) and everything the library holds (collections of objects, living things, knowledge, information, contexts, lessons, memories), when bound together by a systematic, continuous, organized knowledge structure supports the act of new knowledge creation also known as scholarship. The result of the resources invested in the library, therefore, is not measured in the size of the collection, or even in the number or satisfaction of users, but in their experiences.****

* I applaud the efforts at Harvard to rethink their library system, but everything I have seen points to them sticking to an information-centric model.

** I realize it is a bit of a cliche to quote Ranganathan, but I think he is largely misunderstood because few people ever read more than his five laws (and I don’t mean the book, but literally the five laws themselves. The evidence lies in the fact that the book has been out of print outside of India for many years.) The real jewels of Ranganathan lay in his deep understanding of the roles and responsibilities of the library, which he summarizes—as any good marketer might—in his five laws.

*** The danger here, of course, is in libraries and librarians taking a lofty ‘we know your needs better than you’ approach. There needs to be a give and take in this process, obviously.

**** Many of these ideas and the language used to express them are based on the work of David Carr. See especially The Promise of Cultural Institutions (2003).

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.

At the risk of sounding too much like a change-fearing librarian myself, I am not saying that we can’t do this with online catalogues, just that we haven’t — and we certainly haven’t in libraries (that I know of…I would love to be proved wrong on this).  Monica Bulger has a nice post on affinity-based browsing (and a follow up) and I would love to see an application of what she is talking about in an academic setting. It is still search-based (that is, it starts with a search) but could be an interesting way of providing new types of browsing in libraries.

Coincidentally, my friend, Megan Hurst just released the latest issue of her journal, Glimpse, and it has a great article on the modification of Google Earth and Google Maps into Google Moon and Google Mars and how it is used by both scientists and the general public. The author, Dr. Ross A. Beyer says:

Although the primary audience for the Moon and Mars in Google Earth is the general public, we’ve added enough information to make this tool useful for scientists and engineers as well. I can’t overstate how useful it is to be able to communicate via a shared, dynamic, interactive map.

You can read the whole article here.

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.)

The library is a place. A learning place. The Kindle, Nook, or iPad won’t change the library as long as things are learned.

Why is this ironic? Well, because in his recent piece in the New Republic about implications of the Google Books Search Settlement, Lessig worries that this debacle of not being able to quote snippets of video is where we are headed with texts. It is a long piece, but much of his argument can be summed up:

The deal constructs a world in which control can be exercised at the level of a page, and maybe even a quote. It is a world in which every bit, every published word, could be licensed. It is the opposite of the old slogan about nuclear power: every bit gets metered, because metering is so cheap. We begin to sell access to knowledge the way we sell access to a movie theater, or a candy store, or a baseball stadium. We create not digital libraries, but digital bookstores: a Barnes & Noble without the Starbucks.

Clearly the folks at the Chronicle didn’t read Lessig’s article.. or maybe they did…

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?