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

Wed Jul 2 09:55:21 EDT 2008

Lars,

This is an intriguing conversation to me and I think you make some good
points. Some of your points seem to support my arguments and some are
clearly in opposition.

What we are really talking about here is being replaced. Will it happen? I
don't know. Can we save ourselves? In some sense, your analogy concerning
the independent bookstore or the horse and the automobile are good. But, I
think they leave one primary element out of the equation – skill. It doesn't
take a particularly complex skill set to be a horse or own an independent
bookstore. It does take a good amount of skill and experience to be a
librarian. What you are talking about and arguing is the library as an
entity being replaced. Does it logically follow that the librarian will be
replaced? I have always thought the library was the tool and the librarian
was the expert who knows how to use the tool. What happens when the tool
changes? If we can disassociate the librarian from the library or conceive
of a world where an information professional works in conjunction with
multidisciplinary teams, we might be able to move forward.

So, back to the issue of whether we can save ourselves. I think as a
profession we have an obligation to at least entertain some ideas as to what
our future holds and what direction we should move in. It tires me to no end
that every time someone has the audacity to criticize our profession or
suggest change, 50 librarians jump up to defend libraries. Libraries are not
the issue here. Librarians are. To avoid entertaining that discussion while
decrying our purpose is to deny the inevitable demise of libraries and
purport the end of our profession. A horse can't stop being a horse.
Librarians can adapt to a new world and a new information age. My
explanation follows.

Your discussion of the problems with the Internet is particularly intriguing
and I largely agree. The perception that information is found easier today
than it was 20 years ago is just that – perception. Unfortunately, sometimes
perception is everything. But, I would contend that we have large problems
on the horizon. I'll give an example. I work in a special library – a
hospital – where we perform a lot of research for physicians and nurses.
Let's suppose they want information concerning pain management for
orthopedic surgery. They are essentially looking for a journal article – a
review or possibly a meta-analysis. They don't know this, but I do. Now,
let's suppose they somehow muck their way through PubMed or some other
database and find a group of articles they want. Let's say they find 5
articles and we have access to four of them. But they are in 3 different
databases and one of them has to be ordered from a large academic library.
This would take them hours. It would take me 10 minutes. This is to assume
they even found the articles they wanted (which they probably wouldn't
have). Even with federated search tools and link resolvers, it is not easier
to find information today…at least not yet. My work is very specialized
though. The public librarian? Well, I don't know what it is like in Sweden,
but in America our public libraries are little more than popular bookstores
and video stores. They are not the cultural icon they once were. But, what
more would you expect from a culture that brought you McDonalds and WalMart?

This brings me to my final point. There is something inherently wrong with
my culture. People in my culture know more about their favorite TV show than
they do about art or literature or history.  My point is that when you have
a culture that is more interested in American Idol than fine art or
literature it is hard to sell libraries, research, scholarly conversation or
the like. While I admit this is a sweeping generalization, there is some
truth to it.

I think libraries in my country will be here for awhile, but the large ones
will survive and many of the smaller ones will go away. I think it will be a
sad day when we close our art museums or our libraries if that should ever
happen. Art is what makes us human – the ability to express. Museums and
libraries have always been purveyors of what makes us human.

chris
C.L. Kiess, B.A., M.L.S.
Information & Knowledge Specialist
Columbus Regional Hospital
Library & Knowledge Services

On Tue, Jul 1, 2008 at 8:50 PM, Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se> wrote:

> 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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