Interesting perspective on the role of the librarian versus collection
of print books.
The future of the library
What is a public library for?
First, how we got here:
Before Gutenberg, a book cost about as much as a small house. As a
result, only kings and bishops could afford to own a book of their
own.
This naturally led to the creation of shared books, of libraries
where scholars (everyone else was too busy not starving) could come
to read books that they didn't have to own. The library as warehouse
for books worth sharing.
Only after that did we invent the librarian.
The librarian isn't a clerk who happens to work at a library. A
librarian is a data hound, a guide, a sherpa and a teacher. The
librarian is the interface between reams of data and the untrained
but motivated user.
After Gutenberg, books got a lot cheaper. More individuals built
their own collections. At the same time, though, the number of
titles exploded, and the demand for libraries did as well. We
definitely needed a warehouse to store all this bounty, and more
than ever we needed a librarian to help us find what we needed. The
library is a house for the librarian.
Industrialists (particularly Andrew Carnegie) funded the modern
American library. The idea was that in a pre-electronic media age,
the working man needed to be both entertained and slightly educated.
Work all day and become a more civilized member of society by
reading at night.
And your kids? Your kids need a place with shared encyclopedias and
plenty of fun books, hopefully inculcating a lifelong love of
reading, because reading makes all of us more thoughtful, better
informed and more productive members of a civil society.
Which was all great, until now.
Want to watch a movie? Netflix is a better librarian, with a better
library, than any library in the country. The Netflix librarian
knows about every movie, knows what you've seen and what you're
likely to want to see. If the goal is to connect viewers with
movies, Netflix wins.
This goes further than a mere sideline that most librarians resented
anyway. Wikipedia and the huge databanks of information have
basically eliminated the library as the best resource for anyone
doing amateur research (grade school, middle school, even
undergrad). Is there any doubt that online resources will get better
and cheaper as the years go by? Kids don't shlep to the library to
use an out of date encyclopedia to do a report on FDR. You might
want them to, but they won't unless coerced.
They need a librarian more than ever (to figure out creative ways to
find and use data). They need a library not at all.
When kids go to the mall instead of the library, it's not that the
mall won, it's that the library lost.
And then we need to consider the rise of the Kindle. An ebook costs
about $1.60 in 1962 dollars. A thousand ebooks can fit on one
device, easily. Easy to store, easy to sort, easy to hand to your
neighbor. Five years from now, readers will be as expensive as
Gillette razors, and ebooks will cost less than the blades.
Librarians that are arguing and lobbying for clever ebook lending
solutions are completely missing the point. They are defending
library as warehouse as opposed to fighting for the future, which is
librarian as producer, concierge, connector, teacher and impresario.
Post-Gutenberg, books are finally abundant, hardly scarce, hardly
expensive, hardly worth warehousing. Post-Gutenberg, the scarce
resource is knowledge and insight, not access to data.
The library is no longer a warehouse for dead books. Just in time
for the information economy, the library ought to be the local nerve
center for information. (Please don't say I'm anti-book! I think
through my actions and career choices, I've demonstrated my pro-book
chops. I'm not saying I wantpaper to go away, I'm merely describing
what's inevitably occurring). We all love the vision of the
underprivileged kid bootstrapping himself out of poverty with books,
but now, (most of the time) the insight and leverage is going to
come from being and fast and smart with online resources, not from
hiding in the stacks.
The next library is a place, still. A place where people come
together to do co-working and coordinate and invent projects worth
working on together. Aided by a librarian who understands the Mesh,
a librarian who can bring domain knowledge and people knowledge and
access to information to bear.
The next library is a house for the librarian with the guts to
invite kids in to teach them how to get better grades while doing
less grunt work. And to teach them how to use a soldering iron or
take apart something with no user servicable parts inside. And even
to challenge them to teach classes on their passions, merely because
it's fun. This librarian takes responsibility/blame for any kid who
manages to graduate from school without being a first-rate data shark.
The next library is filled with so many web terminals there's always
at least one empty. And the people who run this library don't view
the combination of access to data and connections to peers as a
sidelight--it's the entire point.
Wouldn't you want to live and work and pay taxes in a town that had
a library like that? The vibe of the best Brooklyn coffee shop
combined with a passionate raconteur of information? There are one
thousands things that could be done in a place like this, all built
around one mission: take the world of data, combine it with the
people in this community and create value.
We need librarians more than we ever did. What we don't need are
mere clerks who guard dead paper. Librarians are too important to be
a dwindling voice in our culture. For the right librarian, this is
the chance of a lifetime.
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
