[Web4lib] At Session on the Future of Libraries, a Sense of Urgency

[Lars Aronsson]

Christopher Kiess wrote:

> ILL's are great, but who wants to wait 3 days for a book if you 
> can drive across town in 30 minutes and get it? Libraries should 
> become more connected - more of a network.

This is as naive as wishing for more connections between small 
independent bookstores.  Once things get more connected, we don't 
have many small independent bookstores anymore, only a few big 
store chains and one big Amazon.com.  If I can have a connection 
(to digitized contents), I don't need to go across town, because I 
can go across the nation or across the ocean.

Libraries and librarians have made a life, not out of providing 
information, but out of providing a remedy for the facts that 
information is printed on paper, and that books are expensive.  
When these facts change, you need to figure out what your role is 
going to be in the future. There will still be limitations that 
need remedies, but different ones.

Even printed books are changing.  Today I get two paperbacks for 
the price of one lunch meal.  It used to be the opposite, not so 
long ago.  (This is Sweden. What's your ratio?)  Why should I 
borrow books from the library, when I can afford to buy so many of 
them?  Yes, there are cases: When the book I want is no longer in 
print.  But these cases are a fraction of all that I read.

We should spend some time to think of what the limitations are of 
the Internet and its digital information society.  So far, all 
attention has been given to its potential. For a while we thought 
Wikipedia would grow exponentially, but now we discover that 
articles need to be updated.  This wasn't the case when everything 
was new.  Can we maintain 2 million articles over time, or should 
we aim for less?  What does LibraryThing look like at age 10 or 
20?  The current implementation of LT's "Zeitgeist" is timeless 
(this year's books count as much as last year's), so that will 
need an overhaul.  Altavista and Google used to index everything 
they could find, but recently Google seems to focus on web 
contents created in the last 3-4 years.  Maybe their Adsense 
doesn't earn so much from the web of 2002? Do we need entirely new 
search engines when we have many decades of web contents?  Are 
there new job opportunities in that direction?  The first phase of 
the public Internet ended in a dotcom crash.  But this second "web 
2.0" phase hasn't really peaked yet.  When it ultimately does, 
skeptics like Carr, Gorman, and Keen will appear to be prophetic.  
Web 2.0 sites might well go out of business before libraries do. 
That doesn't mean libraries won't go out of business.

> The web has moved towards a social networking model, but 
> libraries continue to have their own OPAC's and there own 
> individual presence. Google books is changing that to a certain 
> extent.

The most important aspect of that change is that libraries aren't 
part of Google's equation.  Google can kill off libraries (except 
for a handful really large ones) in a way that OCLC would never 
dare.

The summary of the ALA session seems to suggest that individual 
libraries and librarians can somehow act ("need to move forward") 
now in order to save their own business.  I think that is to 
underestimate the long term change.  People who used to run small 
independent bookstores weren't stupid.  It's not their individual 
fault that so many of them have been replaced.  The automobile is 
not the horses' fault.

Fortunately, for libraries, public funding doesn't end quite as 
fast as profitability for commercial ventures.  And central public 
libraries (one per town) often fill the same monumental role as 
cathedrals used to do in previous centuries.  This is already a 
big change from the 1950s branch libraries at a biking distance.


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se