SPAM-LOW: Re: [Web4lib] At Session on the Future of Libraries, a Sense of Urgency

Wed Jul 2 09:14:56 EDT 2008

As the director of one of the "small" libraries being discussed, here's my 2
cents worth.

People are using their local, small libraries more than ever. We are close,
usually on the route they take to run their errands; we are friendly,
helpful and can conduct a good reference interview (try that on Google or
Amazon) and we will go out of our way to get them something for free.  We
offer a variety of stuff to borrow, entertaining programs based on their
requests, computer classes, literacy programs, and ILL and most, if not all,
for free. 

With the current economic climate, the price of gas and a desire for a
return to "small town life" within the confines of our out of control pace
of life - the small, local library offers something you can not find
everywhere, a return to the "old days" with the technology of today. The
best of both, if you will. We are busier than we have ever been, are
checking out more items than ever, have more people coming to our library
than ever - because we offer this "best of both" philosophy. 

I believe that the future of the small, local public library is not in
changing into Barnes and Nobel or beating Amazon and Google on the internet.
It is in offering to people the opportunity to find the best of technology
at the wonderful, stress reducing pace of yesterday. 

Consider us an oasis on the desert of today's information highway. 

Andrea 

Andrea Berstler - Director 
The Village Library of Morgantown 
PO Box 797, 207 N Walnut St 
Morgantown, PA 
www.villagelibrary.org 
610-286-1022 
Preserving the Past . . . Preparing for the Future . . . 

Life will always throw you curves, just keep fouling them off... the right
pitch will come, but when it does, be prepared to run the bases.  ~Rick
Maksian

-----Original Message-----
From: web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org
[mailto:web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org] On Behalf Of Lars Aronsson
Sent: Tuesday, July 01, 2008 8:50 PM
To: web4lib at webjunction.org
Subject: SPAM-LOW: Re: [Web4lib] At Session on the Future of Libraries, a
Sense of Urgency

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

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