STRAIT to the future

8th Asia-Pacific Specials, Health and Law Librarians Conference

Libraries and the Future

.. a talk for the 8th Asia-Pacific Specials Health and Law Librarians Conference, August, 1999

Karen Coyle
California Digital Library
http://www.kcoyle.net

Not too long ago, the New York Times ran an article about a lawyer who had chosen to go into the field of "cyber-law." When asked why she had chosen to enter an area that many people found to be nearly impossible to understand, she replied that what she liked about the field was that it let her get back to the basic concepts of her profession. It was like being able to re-discover the ideas of the field of law.

We can say the same thing about our field. We often voice concerns about our future in terms like: will there be libraries in the future? Will there even be books? But we can easily turn those questions into an opportunity to think about the basic concepts of our profession. We have to begin by asking what it means to contemplate the future of libraries: are we asking if there will be buildings with shelves and books? I hope we are asking something more profound, something more like: what does it mean to be a library in the future? What aspects of the present library do we need to transport into that future time in order to meet the goals of librarianship?

I don't have ready answers to those questions, but I have found some areas that I think are worth contemplating, and I want to share these with you.

Change

If there is anything that is affecting libraries right now it is the changes that are being brought on by new technology. The most dramatic change that we face is the change to digital information formats. Many people will say that digital is just another format, and that libraries have already incorporated formats like video and audio into their collections. But the change to digital from analog is much more than just a change to a different format. The move to digital information resources changes some of the most fundamental things about libraries.

When you buy a book you own the physical object. You can read the book once or you can read it many times, you can re-sell the book, you can give it to a friend, keep it forever, or destroy it. And, of course, you can lend it. The one thing you cannot do is make a copy of the book. That would violate copyright.

With digital information resources you sign a license that allows you to access the text or file, but you do not possess it. The file remains the property of the publisher or provider, and you are a mere user with no rights to lend, re-sell or even archive. How can this be? It comes about because of a particularly difficult quality of digital information, its ability to be easily and perfectly copied at very little expense and in hundreds or thousands of simultaneous copies. Unlike books and magazines, publishers are not in the business of producing consumer copies of digital works. No longer do we have an object that is hard to copy, but easy to lend. Instead we have a digital file that is very easily copied, and for which lending, and even viewing, requires making a copy.

This fact leads to another property of digital information, which is that of control. With hard copies, once a book or journal is published it goes onto store shelves and into homes and libraries. Each of those copies is out of the hands of the publishers. The cat is out of the bag, so to speak, and the copies and the ideas inside those copies cannot be withdrawn. One of the main roles of libraries has been to keep the public record of all that has been published, even as ideas have become embarrassing or have lost in popularity. Libraries, in a sense, have kept us honest. They have also been a buffer between the publishers and the public, reducing the control that publishers might exert over who has access to information. But in a digital world where resources stay in the hands of publishers, the library's role as the public commons of knowledge is in danger. The owners of digital information can, in theory, withdraw their resources from some or all users, and we have already seen cases where this has occurred.

For many librarians the most frightening aspect of our digital future is the possibility that we will not be able to archive these works. If libraries do not retain copies, then our role as the repository of the intellectual output of our civilization is at risk. This is combined with the great increase in output, not from traditional publishers but from every single person who has access to a computer and a connection to the Internet. Already many of the files of the early days of the Internet are lost forever because they were not in the hands of anyone who could or would archive them. It's a whole new problem, and one that even libraries are not equipped to face. It is ironic that it is our most recent, most modern past that is being lost.

The analog world upon which we built libraries may be sliding out from under us, which means that we need to adjust to this new environment. And the first step is being very aware of it. And the next steps will depend on how we define our goals in relation to our role in the information food chain. That role isn't fixed; as a matter of fact, it's very much in flux right now.

There are other changes, many other changes that are also taking place. Our users are increasingly using the library from remote locations and expect to be able to do so without any loss in quality of information retrieval. At the same time, digital and networked information gives us new opportunities to serve users with materials that previously were not immediately available. And because of the new-found commercial interest in information services, there are companies that would like to reach out directly to information users, eliminating the library as the intermediary.

Libraries add value

With all of these changes, where do we begin to redefine the library for the future? The best place is to start with an investigation of those basic concepts that we mentioned before. I'll mention only three today, although there are others, but the best way to summarize them all is to say that "Libraries Add Value."

The greatest value that we add to everything that we do is that libraries provide service. This differentiates us from publishers and information brokers of other kinds whose role is to provide a product. The focus of the library is not on the "product" of the library but on its service to the users. This may seem rhetorical, but in fact it is an entirely different model on which to make decisions, develop features and measure success. Although "customer service" is emphasized in many businesses, it is always in support of the business. In libraries, customer service is entirely in support of the customer. This service-aspect of libraries is our greatest strength, but often it is also our best-kept secret.

Another value that we add is one that is not well understood by the general public: we create collections. In the debates around the ubiquity of digital information, you can often hear non-librarians making the statement that libraries are limited by their budgets and physical size (which is true), and that if libraries had unlimited budgets and no walls, every library would contain every available source of information (which is not true). For these speakers the entire concept of a collection is lost, and I suspect that it is also lost on many of our library users. The careful selection of information resources with a particular audience in mind is one of the greatest services that we provide. The ideal of a world where every search takes place against the whole world's pool of information resources is not ideal at all. Given unlimited budgets, a school library and a law firm library are still going to be very, very different. And yet, each library is only an entry point into the vast realm of information; a foyer in a mansion-like über-library, as it were. A collection is not a limitation, it's an ideal starting point.

The library is the archive of the world's collected knowledge, preserving the present for the future. This is a role that libraries have played for millennia, and one that is at risk today as we move into the digital age. "Archive" in this sense does not mean a kind of dead storage; we intend for this knowledge to be accessed and used. No other institution contains and makes available this full range of human intellectual output. Publishers do not "archive" their own works in this sense, and they are not in the business of keeping non-profitable products in their active list. The Internet, while growing quickly as more is added every minute, is more like a sieve than an archive, as documents drop off and are lost forever.

Skills for the future

Librarians are highly skilled professionals, educated in the organization of information and the management of collections and services. But there are some skills that we didn't learn in library school that are essential for today's libraries.

Promotion
Libraries are modest institutions, and few have "Publicity" as a major item in their budget. But publicity or advertisement is a primary information resource for our potential users; it is how people find out what services and products are available to them. So it's no wonder that many people don't know what the library can offer them. Publicity, of course, can be very expensive but there are also many low-cost opportunities to promote the library to its target audience.

Presentation
In our desire to provide our services as economically as possible, we sometimes forget the experiential aspect of information seeking. Library services will be competing with some of the best-designed commercial information offerings in the online world, and users will rightfully expect the library's interface to be pleasing as well as easy to use. It's not just a matter of adding catchy graphics and splashes of color: when users are experiencing the library "virtually," design aspects of the system take on the burden of explaining the library and the information environment, and for providing many of the services that users enjoy when the visit the library physically. We need to learn more about the area of human-machine interface and how it can work for us and for our remote library visitors.

Personalization
The word in marketing today is: personalize. Online sites are attempting to create "brand loyalty" by allowing users to personalize the site to their own needs. Personalization can be more than a marketing technique, however. Today's information seekers are facing a vast information universe that moves and grows at machine, not human, speeds. They need tools to help them make use of this environment, to organize their own information stores, to remind them what they've already done and where they left off. The study area that some libraries used to provide for their regular scholars needs to be recreated in the virtual world. We need to give users a place to store their notes, keep track of their bibliographies, save searches that they want to try again. Eventually, library systems should be able to offer a user only items that they haven't retrieved before. This is personal service much like the ones we provide from the reference desk.

Design for change
Early in this century, the vision of libraries was one of timelessness, such as the Carnegie ideal of marble floors, sturdy shelves and books containing the wisdom of the centuries. The world we are moving into is considerably less solid, and much more prone to change. In a sense this is contrary to everything we have learned in terms of how libraries should be run. Libraries have succeeded partly because they have embraced standards and built solid, durable systems. The library functions of tomorrow need to be just as sturdy, but they also must be nimble, able to change without losing their purpose. This is a whole new way to look at how we do things, and means that we have to learn new design skills.

Conclusion

The real questions about the future of libraries are questions of values, not technology. With the rapid pace of technological change, we cannot know what physical or virtual form the library will take in the upcoming years. As librarians, our role is to investigate the technologies available to us and to make sure that they enable those core values of service, collection and intellectual independence that libraries embrace today.