Libraries of the Future, or: JUST DO IT
Libraries of the Future, or: JUST DO IT!
On 2 April, I went to Oxford for the “Libraries of the Future” event, organised by the Bodleian Library and sponsored by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). This is part of an ongoing JISC campaign, launched a year ago, which was covered in a special supplement to the November 2008 edition of UPDATE (www.cilip.org/update).
I went, in part, as one of the pioneers (I can show you the arrow-wounds) of the JISC’s last Great Leap Forward, in the early 90s, with the Follett Report, Information Strategies and the eLib programme (http://www.ifla.org/IV/ifla66/papers/001-142e.htm). My badge for the event proclaimed me a CILIP Councillor. As a Councillor, I can represent settled CILIP policy, but it’s the function of the Policy Forum to make such policy, and the PF was actually meeting the same day
(http://www.cilip.org.uk/NR/rdonlyres/4C6C21DC-3EDB-4896-BF2E-38EB96565A8F/0/PF42agenda020409.pdf).
The Future is always coming, but it’s also never quite here yet, so any settled CILIP views will I’m sure be welcome whenever they are ready, but in the meantime I thought it useful to be a fly on the wall of this particular conversation, bringing you early intelligence of what went on, with just the one personal sortie into the debate (us flies don’t have any hands to sit on 
).
The event was opened with an avuncular address from JISC Executive Secretary Malcolm Read, who had presided over the first Great Leap nearly 20 years ago, and sounded as if he intended to be there for the next one in 2029. He pointed out that the Follet Review makes interesting reading today, not just for all the things it got right, but also for the fact that in 1993 it failed to predict the effect of the World Wide Web. What killer development will this conference prove to have overlooked, I wonder?
The event was structured around 5 “perspectives” (Librarian, Public Sector, Researcher, Commercial Sector and Citizen), each lead by a speaker in the real world of the Martin Wood lecture Theatre, and followed by 80 delegates physically present, plus a Second Life theatre full of Avatars and a very active Twitterfeed – some 177 virtual participants (at one point the Twittertrend was reported as second only to that for G20!). Since each physical presenter was flanked by giant screens on either side displaying the Second Life and Twitter responses in real time, the initial effect was a little disconcerting (an extra eye would have been useful).
Sarah Thomas, formerly Librarian at Cornell University and our host as Director of Oxford University Libraries, predicted that the physical Library would continue to be cherished as a place, but its usage would be transformed.
It would persist in providing havens of peace, but accommodation freed up from the need to store paper would be available for new and “buzzier” uses: spaces for socialisation, group work, peer learning and teaching, and outreach to schoolchildren and lifelong learners.
Information services would be seamlessly multimedia: text, data, audiovisual and even olfactory and haptic, “the smell of madelines and the rough male kiss of blankets” (!).
Above all, the Library would be a key collaborator in the knowledge creation of the future.
Former MLA Chief Executive Chris Batt started with a quote from Susan Greenfield: “We cannot be sure that someone born at the beginning of the 21st century will have any particular nostalgia for the paper book” .He then attempted a SWOT analysis of the Public Library.
Its strengths included its popularity (a third of a billion physical visits a year), and its willingness to innovate (The People’s Network, new kinds of building for Newcastle and Aarhus, targeted services for pre-schools and reading groups). Its weakness was fragmentation (compare the parochial library card with the ubiquitous credit card). Few sectors have so many lead bodies (DCMS, MLA, CILIP, LGA, CLG, DCSF, SCL etc) and so little leadership.
Current emphasis on knowledge, creativity and learning for life presented opportunities to build on its brand identity, its network and its community interface (it gets more exposure to more people than any other elective public service). But it is threatened by a requirement to demonstrate public value in money terms, a lack of national coherence, private sector creep, and a failure to plan for change.
To make the future their own, librarians need to be reflective, do some scenario planning, build a common narrative, and find a few new friends in high places. In the future the juggernauts of education will be replaced by the learning society, and librarians will have to become information warriors, defining, mediating, managing and leading this movement. Their mission must include the removal of all barriers to access, a universal right to knowledge, and the empowerment of every citizen to embrace learning and exploit knowledge in their everyday lives.
Professor Peter Murray-Rust of Cambridge University, representing the research community, declared that his immediate mission was to upset some of the people present. As an initial statement, on the remaining big screen between Second Life and Twitter he displayed his own blog, completing a sort of unholy trinity of social networking.
Most researchers of his acquaintance already regarded the University Library as an irrelevance, apart from possibly as a purchasing agency. They looked to their own discipline for what support they needed in the scholarly publication process.
The Librarians of the future will not emerge from the Libraries of today. The researchers of the future won’t want journals, they’ll want little bits of lots of papers, and they won’t respect faculty or subject boundaries, as their work will be interdisciplinary. If they need an information service, they’ll JUST DO IT for themselves
- example 1: OpenStreetMap - an accurate Wiki map, built from the GPS inputs of innumerable bicycle couriers, and bypassing the monopoly of the Ordnance Survey.
- example 2: PubChem – structural information on 20 million molecules, placed in the public domain in the teeth of opposition from the American Chemical Society.
- example 3: SourceForge – created to control collaborative software development, with comprehensive version control features that could equally be applied to any type of online document
- example 4: yes, Wikipedia – instead of whingeing about its inaccuracies, universities ought to be collaborating to improve the quality of its content.
This is where the Web is going anyway. It’s not possible to direct it but at least one can contribute small improvements. Natural Selection is in force and it’s impossible to predict what development will wither and what thrive. Everybody is going to be pervasively connected, but the driver for this will be Home Entertainment, not Higher Education.
There is a danger that scholarship will be privatised. The university presses have flunked the opportunity of digital publishing. It is a scandal that the funding of research is governed by impact factors devised and owned by Thompson ISI. Academe, including librarians, must speak out and act, or lose control. The bottom line is: JUST DO IT.
A questioner wanted to know why diversity of provision for local communities was a bad thing? Chris explained he was not arguing for bland uniformity but for consistency of entitlement and standards for interoperability. This remains difficult while libraries are small parts of large competing organisations.
It was suggested that the Librarians of the future should be called Informaticians. Sarah thought this might be confused with “morticians” J. Peter said that in the long run, everyone would need to be an informatician.
One SecondLife avatar asked what aspects of library school courses would prepare students to be librarians of the future. Peter said the students might well have more appropriate skills than the teachers. This is when I contributed my twopenn’orth: in the UK at least, the role of the Library School is to impart the knowledge base and ethical foundations that will underpin any professional career: the student may indeed bring some appropriate skills with them, and will acquire further job-specific skills during their working life as part of continuous professional development. The panel Chair (Professor Vincent Gillespie - JRR Tolkien Professor of English, no less) asked what one quality the librarian of the future would need, and there were no surprises in what each panellist proposed:
· Programming (Peter)
· Advocacy (Chris)
· Multitasking (Sarah)
Santiago de la Mora, Google’s Head of Book Partnerships Europe, said that Google’s mission was “to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. Google’s audience was the 1.4 Billion users of the Web, and they started with the internet because online content was relatively easy to organise: the big challenge is to make offline content (journals, video, books etc) similarly accessible.
The raison d’être of the Booksearch initiative is to improve the power of searching. Known-item searches are easy, even on fairly limited metadata. When the user has queries without any idea of where the answer lies, then searching on the entire text comes into its own. Booksearch aims for:
- Comprehensiveness (digitising all the world’s books)
- Accessibility (for any person, anywhere)
- Diversity (across a broad spread of subjects and languages
How much the user gets to see of an item depends on its copyright status: there are 4 possible user experiences:
· Full View
· Limited Preview
· Snippet view
· Catalogue view (no preview available)
Google has already brought some 20,000 publishers into its Partner Programme, while public-domain content is being provided by 29 library partners, 7 of them in Europe, including the Bodleian.
As a result, more and more books are coming up on searches, not because of a match on the author or title, but because of a match on the content of the book. Publishers are therefore reporting increased interest in their backlist, and libraries are empowered to exploit all of their stock, regardless of publication date. In this exemplar of the concept of the “long tail”, everyone benefits.
Robert Darnton, Director of Harvard University Library, but formerly professor of cultural history at Princeton, started by recalling the dystopian future view of Louis-Sebastien Mercier (1768) called “L'An 2044”. The library of the future contains just 4 cupboards, into which have been distilled the contents of all the millions of books ever published: by 2044, the books themselves have been destroyed!
In Chicago during the great depression, library usage shot up. There is evidence that this is happening again, though this time it may well be less for access to books than for access to the internet – when retrenching, home broadband access is the sort of discretionary expenditure that will go first.
Use of such resources requires the assistance of the librarian: the online user interface does not come naturally to an older generation, while the young need to be disabused of a belief that all information is online, and that it is all equally authoritative. There is a need to break the tyranny of the Google relevance-ranking, and get users to question their sources.
So long as authoritative online reference material continues to be a largely paid-for resource, the library will continue to have a role as intermediary.
One new medium does not immediately replace another (manuscript book publishing continued for three centuries after the invention of printing). But devices like the Kindle and the iBook show signs of being taken into the mainstream.
In the 19th century, the free public library movement was spurred by the philanthropy of Andrew Carnegie. In the 21st, the world’s greatest digital library is in private hands. Where is the digital Carnegie?
There followed a long debate between the panellists and those physically and virtually present. Some of the points made are captured below:
- Google’s success in aggregation is built on its business model: the business model of public and academic libraries (each relatively small and powerless constituents of large competing organisations) actively raises barriers to sharing. Even large organisations whose mission is information (like OCLC and the BL) persist in hanging on to their “own” data.
- Libraries should divert resources in order to digitise more of their materials, and bring them into open access.
- Commercial publication is not the only, or even the best, way of ensuring quality control of scholarly communication. As it becomes clearer that peer review and version control are well catered for in Open Access, and as more and more universities and funders mandate Open Access, this could become the dominant mode.
- With 7 million books already digitised, and an immediate target of 20 million, Googlebooks is becoming the greatest library in the world – a modern Alexandria
- Alexandria didn’t end too well: Google is a monopoly, and the legal settlement it has with publishers effectively precludes commercial challenges. It is benign right now, but what if things change (Chris’ nightmare scenario is a take-over by a consortium of Russian oligarchs and Rupert Murdoch)?
- The custody of the world’s knowledge is passing out of the grasp of libraries. We were asleep at the wheel, and Google JUST DID IT.
VERDICT: Cornell, Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Princeton (oh, OK and Croydon)– the provenance of most of the speakers did tend to restrict the range of future library scenarios discussed; no reference to Information Skills training or to school or college libraries, or to the evidence-based agenda of health or government libraries, for example. Nevertheless, it was an event full of ideas and challenges, and worth attending, whether physically or virtually. But as I compared the grey hairs in the lecture theatre with the nubile avatars on Second Life, I was reminded of the late great librarian Henry Heaney’s take on Acts 2:17 - “Young men have visions and old men dream dreams – but the world is forever run by the middle-aged”
For more blogs (and tweets) on this debate, see:
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/campaigns/librariesofthefuture/debate.aspx