Librarians of the Future?

January 18, 2010 in *OIINEWS, Libraries | 2 comments

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.

Can ‘accessibility’ go too far?

January 14, 2010 in *OIINEWS, Uncategorized | 1 comment

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.

NYPL Before and After Logos

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

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?

Google Book Search Settlement Withdrawn

October 1, 2009 in *OIINEWS, Uncategorized | No comments

Last week the Google Book Search settlement was officially withdrawn from the US court where it was being decided, “in light of the parties’ plans to modify the Settlement Agreement”. With over 400 filings in response to the settlement the final document might end up looking significantly different. Brandon Butler, Legal and Policy Fellow for the Association of Research Libraries, has created a handy guide to the filings, summarizing the key reasons for support and objection and naming some of the more interesting “key supporters” (Cornell, Stanford University Libraries, American Association of People with Disabilities) “filers with reservations” (American Association of University Professors, American Library Association) and “key opponents” (Amazon, ProQuest, the Republics of German and France) of the settlement. There are a few interesting cases (faculty of the University of California, Committee on Institutional Cooperation, Charles Nesson et al. from Harvard) where objections or reservations are coming from institutions that have contracts with Google to scan their collections. Does make one wonder whether the people that made the agreements are having second thoughts, or whether there is just some internal disagreements.

Across the pond, JISC is soliciting feedback on the settlement.

You can find the entire text of the original settlement agreement on Google’s official Settlement administration site.

When is a library not a library?

August 6, 2009 in *OIINEWS, Libraries | No comments

A few months ago Mick Jones (of the Clash) opened up the ‘Rock and Roll Public Library.’ (It has since moved from the gallery space in Chelsea to a new space.)  I heard about this from a friend’s (also a librarian) facebook feed. Several of the comments from other librarians were along the lines of ‘that’s not a library, that’s a museum’ … which got me thinking. When is a library not a library? Does it calling something a library make it so?

The initial commenter said that it wasn’t a library because the you couldn’t borrow the materials in it, but you can’t check out books from the Bodleian and I don’t think anyone would claim that its not a library.

The whole thing does take place in a gallery space, which I suspect makes it feel a bit like an ephemera show, and as Jones himself admits “It’s still by no means properly sorted.” No self-respecting librarian can call an un-sorted collection of rock memorabilia a library, would they?

Well, I am going to go out on a limb and say not only is this a library, this sort of thing is the future of libraries. Here’s why.

Jones says:

“It does raise questions about categorisation. Is it art? I look at it as one artwork, the whole collection – one piece of art, which I’m continually working on and updating.”

But unlike art in your typical gallery show, it’s isn’t for sale. And Jones encourages people to “engage with” the exhibits, take videos down from the shelves, leaf through books, etc. He even allows users to scan things.

This is precisely what libraries should be doing–getting people to think about categorisation (yes, like a museum), but allowing them to engage with the collections (unlike a museum) in all sorts of ways. This, I think, is library (and librarian) at its best. I hope this sort of thing catches on and we can start having more libraries that push the boundaries and get us to think (and argue) about libraries. I don’t think we librarians are doing are jobs properly unless we spark a couple of good fistfights every now and then.  This could be my favourite library since I heard about Berkeley’s Tool Lending Library.

If you have any other examples of great or unusual libraries, please send them my way.

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$675,000 fine for downloading 30 songs

August 1, 2009 in *OIINEWS, Copyright | 3 comments

Yep, that’s $22,500 for each of the 30 songs that Mr. Joel Tenenbaum admitted to downloading and sharing. The jury was kind enough to lower the RIAA’s initial valuation of the damages down from the $150,000 to which they are entitled for willful copyright infringement.

The Boston University student was defended by Professor Charlie Nesson of Harvard Law School and the Berkman Center, who (in classic Charlie Nesson style) turned this into a tremendous opportunity for a group of his students (Yay Charlie!). Tenenbaum was only the second person to take the RIAA to court after receiving one of their thousands of letters. More than 30,000 others have settled their cases for between $3,000 – $12,000.

One of the things that surprises me–although I suppose it shouldn’t–is how often the public library metaphor comes up in these discussions. Mr. Tenenbaum said of downloading music, “it was like this giant library in front of you.” Supporters on his Joel Fights Back site say that calling downloading music illegal is like illegalizing public libraries. And while I in NO WAY want to defend the behaviour of the RIAA, I think this both misses the point and does a disservice to libraries. Libraries have to purchase their materials. They lend them on good faith assuming you will return them, not give them away. Too often the ‘free culture’ movement devolves into a rant about how all culture should be ‘free’ for the consumer. All you have to do is go back to Lessig to be reminded that when we talk about free culture, we don’t mean ‘that kind of free’ (from Free Culture, p. xiv):

…we come from a tradition of “free culture”—not “free”as in “free beer”(to borrow a phrase from the founder of the free-software movement), but “free”as in “free speech,”“free markets,”“free trade,”“free enterprise,”“free will,”and “free elections.”A free culture supports and protects creators and innovators. It does this directly by granting intellectual property rights. But it does so indirectly by limit-ing the reach of those rights, to guarantee that follow-on creators and innovators remain as free as possible from the control of the past. A free culture is not a culture without property, just as a free market is not a market in which everything is free.

Google Book Settlement Discussions

July 31, 2009 in *OIINEWS, Libraries | No comments

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.

Future of the library and libraries of the future

April 2, 2009 in *OIINEWS, Libraries | No comments

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.

No such thing as a 'digital library' ?

June 9, 2008 in *OIINEWS, Libraries | No comments

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’?

A little something about doing nothing

April 27, 2008 in web 2.0 | 1 comment

Belief in power is a way of deferring responsibility for your own life. You give your chosen authority figure total control and allow him to choose for you what’s right and what’s wrong. You must never allow anyone else to choose for you what’s right and what’s wrong or you’re lost forever.
- Brad Warner

I read this quote shortly after reading something Clay Shirky wrote recently and couldn’t help but see some connections. I started to wonder if we have put our faith in the Great Web 2.0? I do feel like there is a sort of religious zeal for the power of the Web and that it has been amplified by talk of the Great 2.0. As if we can all agree that the Internet is clearly going to fix a lot of our problems and Web 2.0 will save the world. A lot of Web 2.0 writing comes across with an almost religious belief in a power figure. It reminds of the kinds of things that people say about their faith in their gurus.

Clay Shirky recently addressed the web 2.0 conference crowd with a well written piece about why the web is different, why it is significant. His argument is that we have been channeling a collective cognitive surplus into watching TV for the last few decades and now we are starting to emerge from our stupor and participate in things again. He has some remarkable statistics about this shift and makes a compelling argument. But something unsettles me about his argument. And his closing story–about a little girl watching a movie and walking behind the TV to try and find the mouse (look at the last two paragraphs of the post linked to above)–explained it…

Are we just trading the kind of mind-numbing stagnation of TV watching for a sort of mind-numbing activeness? What is wrong with being able to sit through a movie? and more importantly, what is wrong with doing nothing (and no, watching tv doesn’t count as doing nothing)? I don’t agree that doing something is always better than doing nothing and I think that is a dangerous mindset. Being very busy can look very productive. And the Internet has given us many, many ways to look (and be) really busy. But are we just being seduced into thinking that we are getting something done — and that there is something out there that needs getting done right now? I am certainly not defending TV watching, but I can’t defend the notion that taking part in Web 2.0 related activities like editing Wikipedia is somehow inherently better (I’m not saying its worse, either, but not inherently better). Sometimes, what we really need to do is sit down and shut up… not watch television, not update your linked-in account or your favourite wikipedia entry, not check your rss feeds… just do nothing.

(I say this as someone who spends far too much time in front of a computer and is (ironically) trying very hard to learn to do nothing.)

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Survey(s) on the use of ICTs in the Humanities

March 28, 2008 in *OIINEWS | No comments

I’m currently conducting a survey on the use of ICTs in humanities scholarship. If you are a student or faculty member in the humanities, please feel free to participate: http://limesurvey.oii.ox.ac.uk/index.php?sid=77244〈=en
I could really use your feedback.

The Subject Centre for Philosophical and Religious Studies at the University of Leeds is also conducting a couple of surveys — a bit more focused on teaching than mine. http://prs.heacademy.ac.uk/view.html/prsnews/13

I am really happy to see the amount of data gathering about the use of digital projects in the humanities increasing. The next steps will be for us all to (hopefully) coordinate our efforts and share our data :)

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