Libraries are changing, despite their facades. And they're changing to high-tech service companies with embedded librarians, according to some library professionals. Of course, that assumes they aren't defunded out of existence.
For ladies and gentlemen of a certain age, the library is changing too fast. For kids, it's not changing fast enough. University students are caught in the middle. Their library experience must be like surfing: riding the edge of a moving wave, never quite cresting, never quite crashing. Such a state has to be thrilling, but ultimately exhausting.
One popular image of the library of the future comes from the cartoon Futurama. The temporally misplaced character from our own time, Fry, enters Mars University’s Wong Library with his friends. It contains the largest collection of literature in the universe. Zoom in on two CDs, one labeled “Fiction” and the other “Non-fiction.”
In many ways, the library of today looks much the same as the library of yesteryear. The card catalogs may be consigned to a basement storage area and the tables where they used to stand are studded with computers. But otherwise there are carrels and stacks, stairs and information desk, patrons and librarians.
Transition is underway: from a place where you go to get information to a place you go to create; and from a place you go to create to a service you use.
From kids to adults
Sarah Houghton, the director of the San Rafael Public Library in California and the blogger behindLibrarian in Black, said the little kids who come into her library expect three things.
“Every screen is a touchscreen,” she told Ars, “and when it’s not they get confused as hell. Kids expect instant delivery of everything. If you can’t get it right that second, it doesn’t exist. When you tell them that a thing they want doesn’t exist digitally, that it’s a physical thing and that’s it, it blows their mind. If there is some book they need to write a report on, say, Mayan culture, and it’s not online, they get mad.
“I’ve encountered people in their mid-late 20s who have that same expectation.”
Although many libraries are slow to change, the expectations of today’s children make that change a certainty.
From books to tools
One of the biggest changes university libraries have seen in recent years is in the number and types of tools available to find information.
"With enhanced catalogs, digital surrogates, linked databases, and the hardware to bring all of these things to the fingertips of a library user, a library user becomes a walking catalog.”
“When libraries got rid of their physical card catalogs in favor of online catalogs, plenty of folks were worried that the experience of finding things, especially by physically browsing library stacks, would be diminished, ” Chris Bourg, Associate University Librarian at Stanford, told Ars. “(But) our catalog SearchWorks, has a feature which allows users to virtually browse the book covers of related items across 17 different campus libraries at once—something that would obviously be impossible to do physically.”
Daryl Green believes recall is one of the great improvements in the technological profile of the modern university library. Green is a rare books librarian at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and an author of the collection’s excellent Echoes from the Vaultblog.
“I think that emerging technologies will only make recall quicker in catalogs and databases,” he told Ars. “A reader can trace a foot-noted lead with lightning-fast speed and determine whether the citation they’re following is something that requires their attention or not within a minute of seeing a footnote. Previously, this crucial step in the research process (following the breadcrumbs) was the most labor intensive, but with enhanced catalogs, digital surrogates, linked databases, and, most importantly, the hardware to bring all of these things to the fingertips of a library user, a library user becomes a walking catalog.”
Another change librarians have noted is the university library’s ongoing change to a multiuse space.
“We think of the library as a hybrid environment that consists of physical spaces, people, and objects; as well as a digital entity that provides online access to digital resources, services and tools,” Bourg said about Stanford’s libraries. “But the truth is that technology has simply provided libraries with new ways to fulfill our age-old mission of collecting, preserving, organizing and providing meaningful access to information in support of teaching and research.”
Green agrees.
“The nature of the academic library has always been to provide a platform for research, study, social activity and discovery,” he said. “I think, at its heart, the nature of the library will never really change, but the services that we provide and the role that we play in a student’s or researcher’s life will constantly shift.”
From building to service
Another denizen of the Stanford Library is Elijah Meeks. Not a librarian per se, Meeks is a “digital humanities specialist,” most recently the co-creator of the interactive ORBIS atlas of Roman history. He sees the university libraries in the future behaving like Google.
“I see libraries of the future, those that survive, as acting like high-tech services companies, mini Googles focused on a particular demographic and physical footprint. Like Google providing, as best it can, a massive variety of services, I see the university library doing the same. This Google Model would require more than the cool Google offices and transparent walls (we have some of those in some of our buildings). Instead, it needs small, agile teams focused on doing really good work and recognizing the value created by supporting a broad constituency.”
Steven Gass, associate director for Research and Instructional Services at MIT, sees the economics of the university library as militating toward a consolidation of collections. Satellites and branches have been closed all over the country and Gass sees the future of the university library as one of continuing consolidation of physical collections but mitigated with innovations like “embedded librarians.” These are librarians who live out in the different departments, labs and research centers of a university, responding to the specific needs of their scholars and students.
“Their job,” he told Ars “is to know what those are doing and be proactive and push out relevant material.”
The most extraordinary example of this concierge function may be the Welch Medical Library at Johns Hopkins. This library closed its physical doors to patrons at the first of the year. Patrons can download articles and other materials online or use its embedded librarians to access information, including books.
An important role that librarians are going to need to play, according to Gass, is that of online credibility coach. By and large, people know, or learn, often osmotically, what constitutes a credible source in a book. It is a safe bet that a book on Chaucer published by Oxford University Press is going to be more reliable than one published by Hustler. But how to do the same for material that is native to the Web?
“It is a shared goal among colleagues nationwide to promote good information learning skills,” said Gass, “how to identify quality information, to instill new academics with how to think about information, about its quality, to teach the 'tricks of the trade,' so to speak, in assessing accuracy.”
From the capital to the borderlands
This transition time is one of great opportunity for those involved in libraries, but all transitions, all borders and verges, are places of great vulnerability as well. Grand changes are possible here, but so are operatic failures. The future seems promising. It’s the present that worries some librarians.
“The myth that the information scholars need for research and teaching is, or soon will be available for free online is a dangerous one,” said Bourg, “especially when it is used as an excuse to cut funding to libraries. Right now libraries face enormous but exciting challenges in maintaining print collections and services where they are still necessary, while simultaneously developing strategies for collecting, preserving, organizing, and providing access to digital objects. I fear that if libraries across the nation don’t get the resources we collectively need to meet these challenges that we may be at risk of losing big chunks of our cultural record because of a lack of funding for digital collecting and preservation. “
If there is one thing that all librarians worried about, it was this: the de-funding of libraries. It has happened from the university research libraries all the way down to the neighborhood libraries that set expectations students bring when going to college.
Houghton traveled to Denmark last summer and visited the public library in a small, poor town.
“Their library was five times bigger than mine,” she said, “It had better computer technology, better everything.” The reason for that was simple, she said.
Issues relating to whether the Internet should be governed or managed, and if so, how, are exercising the minds of many across the globe. Those who believe freedom of expression is a fundamental right of individuals are agitated over attempts that are made from time to time by governments to decide what people should read, listen to or watch. Those who argue that the Internet can and does strengthen democracy in communities and countries also realise that control over the World Wide Web by not just governments but by powerful corporate establishments as well can and does throttle its potential to empower the weak and the underprivileged.
Even as the “digital divide” in the world and across nation-states slowly but inexorably narrows (according to one estimate, at least two out of three people on the planet still have not used the Internet), debates on who decides what can and cannot be publicly disseminated tend to swing from one extreme to the other. The point of view of free speech libertarians is that anything and everything should go (stopping short of child pornography), while those at the other end advocate strict control over content on a variety of claims and considerations, from protecting children from purveyors of porn to checking those who allegedly abuse their right to free speech to create social disharmony, including religious intolerance, defame others, disrupt public disorder and/or compromise national security. A balance is urgently called for.
As these debates rage, the Indian government’s reaction has been rather ham-handed, clumsy and peculiar, if not downright regressive. The department of information technology has chosen to define the word “intermediary” in a ludicrous manner to include telecom service providers, network service providers, Internet service providers, Web-hosting service providers, search engines, online payment sites, auction sites and cyber cafes. And the new rules have defined as “unlawful” all content considered “grossly harmful, harassing, blasphemous, defamatory, obscene, pornographic, paedophilic, libellous, invasive of another’s privacy, hateful, or racially, ethnically objectionable, disparaging, relating or encouraging money laundering or gambling…” The government expects the intermediaries, instead of the judiciary, to identify such content and remove it on their own within 36 hours, saddling Internet service providers with an adjudicating function for which they are neither equipped, nor capable.
These rules were sought to be annulled in the Rajya Sabha by CPI(M) member of Parliament P. Rajeev on May 18, a move which was supported by the Leader of the Opposition and BJP leader, Arun Jaitley. Faced with a unified Opposition, Union minister for communications and information technology Kapil Sibal said: “My assurance to the House is that I will request the MPs to write letters to me objecting to any specific words (in the rules). I will then call a meeting of the members and the industry and all stakeholders. We will have a discussion and whatever consensus emerges, we will implement it.”
The story does not end here. Even as the discussion on the IT intermediary rules was taking place in the country, in October 2011, the Indian government quietly and without any public discussion took a position in the UN General Assembly that effectively implies greater government control over the Internet. Of course, New Delhi’s position was cleverly couched in language that makes it appear as if government control over the Internet was not being advocated or suggested. And, where it is, it is only to challenge the current global structure that controls the functioning of the Internet which is heavily biased in favour of the United States.
These are two different issues that need to be separated.
American and Western domination over key resources, notably root zone server systems and the management of names and addresses through ICANN (Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers), is a matter of grave concern for all informed observers of the Internet and not just activists, especially those in developing countries. While the not-for-profit ICANN claims that it is an independent, non-governmental global body accountable to different sets of stakeholders, including civil society, these claims are taken with more than a pinch of salt given its relationship with the US federal government in particular and the American establishment in general.
There are already two UN bodies, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), that are engaged in examining various issues relating to the functioning of the Internet.
What India suggested in October last year was the establishment of a Committee on Internet Related Policies (CIRP) that would be under the UN Conference on Trade and Development (Unctad) and governed by bureaucrats and politicians representing the governments of 50 countries across the world, including the governments of nations that have a rather questionable track record of freedom of expression, such as China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Rwanda and Cuba.
The Indian proposal says the CIRP would strengthen the Internet “as a vehicle for openness, democracy, freedom of expression, human rights, diversity, inclusiveness, creativity, free and unhindered access to information and knowledge, global connectivity, innovation and socio-economic growth” and that any attempt by governments to “take over”, “regulate” or “circumscribe” the Internet would be “antithetical”, not only to the Internet “but also to human welfare”. It adds that India’s commitment to “multi-stakeholderism” is evident from its proposal to have four advisory groups, one each for civil society, the private sector, inter-governmental and international organisations and the technical and academic community.
That sounds fine on paper. But could the medicine prove worse than the disease? Civil society representatives, technical experts and academics in India will have to intensify struggles on at least three fronts. One is to ensure that politicians and bureaucrats do not effectively control the CIRP if and when it is formed. Two, efforts to reduce the domination of Western governments and multinational corporate oligopolies over the Internet will have to continue with renewed vigour. Thirdly, it must be ensured that the Indian government listens to more voices while rewriting the fine print of extant IT guidelines relating to “intermediaries”.
Only then can one hope that the Internet will truly be able to serve the wider interests of the majority of humanity.
