Internet Librarian
 By Joseph Janes
American Libraries Columnist
Associate dean, Information School, University of Washington, Seattle
intlib@ischool.washington.edu
August 2007
The Library, Reinvented
If we don’t do it, who will?
As I write this, I’m getting ready to head to D.C. for ALA’s Annual Conference, which is, as always, an exciting prospect; but I’m even more excited about heading from there to teach a course on “Rethinking the Library” at the University of Toronto. Obviously, this is a notion on a lot of people’s minds these days, and I hope the students and I will be able to think well and creatively about what libraries are, have been, could be, and should be.
Most of us grew up not pondering the idea of what a library was, because it was so pointedly obvious: It was the building downtown or across the campus or wherever that had the books and the magazines and the friendly librarians, and that was that.
My first real experience at exploring this question was during the days I ran the Internet Public Library, where we decided that a library needed four essential elements: stuff, help, place, and values. A lot gets distilled down into those four simple words, but they’ve stayed with me for over a decade now, and they still work. I’m sure we’ll do a lot of poking at those this summer.
The status of stuff
In looking at that quartet, the element most likely to change in the short run is, as we have all learned, stuff: the materials and resources that libraries collect and manage to serve their clientele. As the nature of the stuff changes, the place and help and values also must change, each in its own way, in response—even values, which aren’t exactly as immutable as we might like to think. (Have a look at how the ALA Code of Ethics has evolved in the last 75 years.)
So in the context of a lot of discussion about “rethinking” and “reconsidering” and “reinventing,” I offer this pointed and troubling question: In the highly radically decentralized and networked world in which it appears we will all reside for the foreseeable future, would libraries be reinvented by anybody except us? This is, at least in some part, an empirical question. Let’s look at the evidence. Is there anything in, say, the blogosphere that calls itself or recognizably looks like a “library”? In MySpace or Facebook? In Flickr? Wikipedia?
There are, as I’ve written, librarians doing their best to figure out how to provide service in virtual-reality domains such as Second Life. Librarians were also behind Yahoo Answers, becoming ever more insinuated into the fabric of Yahoo (plus Google Answers, before they pulled the plug). For that matter, Usenet groups have had FAQs for a long time. None of these, though, seem authentically generated by the communities themselves; they’re built by librarians or large corporations. And if FAQs are the nearest equivalent to a library in this world, then who cares?
In the real world, libraries as we know them evolved because people and communities thought they were important, vital, met needs, and were worth the time and effort and money, in the context of the information environment at the time.
O tempora! O mores! In the context of the information environment of today, what do we get? Social connectivity sites and lots of sharing. (Yahoo is abandoning its Photos service in favor of Flickr, since they say most people want to share rather than store. Whatever.) Search engines. Communication tools like IM and Twitter.
Will the library re-evolve? One hundred fifty years ago, most “public” libraries charged subscriptions for membership and use; the free public library movement was still a couple of decades away. Is it happening again? I’d love to see examples of “new” kinds of libraries; if I get enough, I’ll share in a future column, and if not . . . well, that’s another story.
|
