In his continuing series about Government Information Liberation, John Shuler considers the role of collections in libraries. One particularly revealing moment in his discussion is his day 60 post in which he describes a series of questions that he poses to his graduate students to get at the "fundamental things we do."

The Question and Conclusions

Can doctor still be a doctor without a hospital? They usually answer -- of course. Can you be a lawyer with out a courthouse? Again -- affirmative. Now the money shot -- Can you be a librarian without a library? Dead silence.

One would hope that the questions prompt a discussion and don't just end in "dead silence." Although John doesn't tell us what the discussion, if any, was, he does give us his conclusions: possession of "material" might have once been central to the purpose of libraries but, in the digital age, possession is much less important part of what libraries do.

Even though John qualifies his conclusions to allow for some limited role of collections for some libraries, he overwhelms his caveats with assertions that collections begin and end with the physical ownership of "material" and that "we will not own (possess) much of the material." He even coins the phrase "Gutenberg Librarians" to deprecate "possession and/or control" (66) of information by libraries.

So, John's essential, bottom-line conclusion, regardless of his caveats, comes across clearly: The net, John says, has brought on "the beginning of the end" of library collections (35).

I think his conclusion is wrong and the question he asks is misleading. You can see how misleading the question is by turning it around and realizing that the professions/institutions he uses are not parallel:

• Do doctors build hospitals? (No)
• Do lawyers build courthouses? (No)
• Do librarians build libraries? (Yes)

But the real problem is that the question implies a shared understanding of what a library is -- a shared understanding that I think we need to articulate explicitly. I think that, before one asks "Can you be a librarian without a library?" one should ask "What is the role of the library is in the digital age?" John has been outlining what he thinks the role of librarians should be and he apparently wants to separate the role of librarians from the role of libraries. Very well: let's examine the roles of both with some discussion, not dead silence.

Librarianship

I think John is implying is his series of posts that librarianship in the digital age will be about helping people navigate a complex, networked maze of shifting, changing information. Librarians will help users "connect the dots" and find connections that are not otherwise explicit (47). While there is nothing wrong with this view, and there is much to recommend it, it doesn't go far enough and it misses a key role for libraries.

As John portrays it, this view accepts that libraries will be less about selecting and preserving information and building digital collections and more about providing services for information over which librarians have no control. Librarians, in this view, are valuable precisely because they have no control over information.

This view accepts that information will be tightly controlled by producers and distributors. What is available, who can use it, under what conditions it may be used, and when it becomes no longer available will all be controlled by government agencies, publishers, individuals, organizations, and other "content" producers.

John also proposes that "librarianship" will be more important than "libraries." To me, this sounds like librarians will be analogous to travel agents who, because they deal every day with the complex, difficult, disparate, unconnected systems, are better able than the traveller to navigate these systems and find the best flight at the best price. So librarians, in this view, will help casual information users navigate a variety of complex, difficult, disparate, unconnected, public-freely-available and proprietary-and-licensed information systems. Just as travel agents have no control over what flights or trips are available or what they cost or what restrictions are placed on them, so librarians will have no control over what information is available or what it costs or what restrictions are placed on its use.

In this view, librarians will not manage collections but will license the right to read from those who control information. Whether the license comes in the form of payment of dollars to a commercial vendor and a written contract that licenses access, or an FDLP designation, or a contractual "partnership" with GPO, or the anointing of permission by Google Books legal department, the result is the same. As a recent article in Library Hi Tech says, "In future, librarians will no longer manage media, they will manage rights" (Böhner, Dörte. Digital rights description as part of digital rights management: a challenge for libraries. Library Hi Tech 26, no. 4 (2008): 598-605). This view reshapes the role of librarians from information providers to information gatekeepers; from information curators to business-officers who sign contracts and pay bills.

Who would want to go into that field?

Libraries

John hasn't said much about the role of libraries except to assert that, for many people, the digital environment is now the "default library" [emphasis added] that supports broad access to a "collection" of government information (51).

But, shouldn't we be asking about the future, not just describing the present?

Shouldn't we be asking about the relationships between doctors and lawyers and information? Certainly doctors and lawyers need a body of literature to practice their professions. Instead of asserting that users have access today, shouldn't we be asking, "Who will build and manage and preserve those collections and ensure long-term, free access to them?"

Shouldn't we be asking what guarantees we have that the information we want today will be available if we want it tomorrow? Shouldn't we be asking who controls access to that information and what are their reasons for providing access? Shouldn't we be asking who will pay for long-term preservation and access?

Just because users who are not familiar with information policy, information economics, or information technologies are happy with current access to information does not mean that they will be happy with the access (or lack of it!) tomorrow or in ten years or a hundred years. Providing easy access at one point in time does not guarantee easy access at a future point in time and can actually mask problems of long-term access.

It is one of the roles of librarians to think beyond today and one of the roles of libraries to guarantee access for tomorrow. We need to think about the long-term. Using short-term convenience as a reason for avoiding that kind of thought is evading one of the key roles of librarianship. And assuming that producers and distributors will have the same values and ethics and practices as librarians is to confuse the role of producers with the role of currators.

Maybe the real questions we should be asking are:

• Can lawyers practice without libraries?
• Can doctors practice without libraries?
• Can libraries exist without librarians?

The word "library" does not mean "I have some information." If it did, bookstores would be libraries and publishers would be librarians. We need libraries in addition to publishers and bookstores (and government agencies that distribute information as a by-product of another, primary, mission).

It is all about control

Let's be clear, then. Even in the paper and ink world, libraries and their collections were about wresting control of information from producers and distributors and granting control to local communities and information users. A publisher could take a book out of print, but a library could keep it available. A user could purchase a book and pay for magazine subscriptions, but could use the information for free at the library. Libraries leveraged economies of scale for the benefit of the community, enabling every community member to have benefits of access to information that no individual could possibly afford.

The need for wresting control of information away from those who wish to control the access to and the use of information has not changed in the digital world. But the battle lines have shifted and we need librarians in the fight to keep free, open, usable access.

"Content providers" want to replace copyright with license agreements. Producers want to charge for every single use and dictate who can use information, under what conditions, and in what way. Governments want to be able to alter and even withdraw information after it has been released. And the proliferation of requirements to register to read or use information portends a world in which people will not have the right of privacy when reading.

It is ironic that, given technologies that enable almost unlimited use and re-use of information and that enable information to be distributed and used and re-used almost without cost, we face a horde of stakeholders who want to limit access, charge for every use, restrict re-use, and look over your shoulder to see what you're reading.

More inaccurate conclusions

As noted above, John hedges his conclusion a bit. His wording is that "possession is much less exclusive or destiny for any one institution" and preserving and organizing the information sources "will remain important -- but is no longer our exclusive responsibility" (66). He expands on that idea:

• [G]overnments are taking back their possession of information sources. (60)
• [M]any other web sites [are] capturing the lost or deleted pages. (60)

And from these, he draws conclusions:

• [Information will] remain with the producers or be delivered directly to the users by the producers. (50)
• [W]e will not own (possess) much of the material we mediate on behalf of our user communities. (51)
• Possession ... is no longer a social good that is dominated [by] the dominion of libraries. (60)

To me, these summarize one possible scenario out of many. And, IMHO, this scenario is not one librarians should be content to accept or embrace. Why? Because it almost certainly guarantees that a lot of bad things will happen: loss of access, loss of free access, licensing constraints, DRM constraints, loss of information, loss of usability of information, and more.

Different Questions, A Different Answers

In a separate post, I will examine those issues in more detail, but I'll close this post with some assumptions and a couple of final rhetorical questions as a way of addressing John's question, "Can you be a librarian without a library?" The assumptions:

Society needs: organizations that select that information that deserves preserving from the plethora of information that surrounds us; organizations that then acquire, organize, and preserve that information; organizations that provide trusted, free, private, secure access to and service for that information.

Society needs organizations that have the complete mix of all of these roles as their primary mission (not a secondary mission or a by-product of publishing, or dissemination, or making money). In the case of government information in a participatory democracy it is particularly important, even essential, that society has such organizations.

Reliance on those who have some, but not all, of these roles will ensure that some of these roles will go unfulfilled. Reliance on organizations that have some or all of these roles as a secondary mission or by-product of another mission will endanger free access to information, preservation and integrity of information, and the privacy of readers, and will increase the risk of the loss of information.

The rhetorical questions:

• What would you call an organization that fulfills all the roles listed above but "The Library"?
• Why would libraries want to abandon these roles to organizations that do not have these roles as their primary mission?
• If libraries do abandon these roles, what is the risk that society will lose free, open, access to its essential information?

I think those questions lead us to conclusions that are very different from the the ones John reaches. I will examine this in more detail in another post.

I am often struck by the parallels between libraries and newspapers, librarians and journalists and how technology is affecting these institutions and professions. As I reflect on John Shuler's comments on Government Information Liberation, the following article caught my attention:

• 12 Questions about the future of journalism by Bill Kovach, The American Scholar.

Bill Kovach is a senior counselor to the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a founder of the Committee of Concerned Journalists, a former Washington bureau chief for The New York Times, a former editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and a former curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.

In reflecting on the future of journalism and our democracy, Kovach asks twelve provocative questions, which, I think, parallel some of those that John is asking.

I am still catching up after a brief vacation offline, but I will rejoin John's discussion soon and try to examine both the profession of librarianship and the institution of libraries.

For all you Doctor Who fans out there, I just got word that in this week's episode, "Silence in the Library", the good Doctor and Donna visit an abandoned outer space library complete with data ghosts!

[thanks to the shifted librarian!]

A New Website Devoted to Envisioning the Future of Libraries, D-Lib Magazine, May/June 2008, Volume 14 Number 5/6. "What is the future of academic and research libraries? A recently launched web site from the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) entitled Libraries of the Future (http://www.jisc.ac.uk/librariesofthefuture) addresses that question and others concerning how the libraries of today may evolve to address the needs of future information users."

A few weeks ago, I attended a one-day library conference for Northwest gov. docs. folks.  The day long meeting was hosted by one of our community college depositories.  Part of the day included a tour of the library's gov. docs. collection. 

You must know that this particular depository is very diligent about their 5-year retention of documents for their collection.  When the fifth year arrives, they discard all those items except for those they want to retain.  As I have worked there before as an adjunct faculty, I remember how full of titles the gov. docs. stacks were.  Nowadays, the shelves are getting a lot emptier...very stark indeed. 

This got me thinking about what our role iis n a government document world that is primarily online.  How are selective depositories that don't need to retain that much research-oriented material in their collections are able to survive as a fully functional depository?  How are depositories who do maintain a research-oriented collection handle their collection as more and more documents arrive as online only?  Will the tangible collection become an archive instead of an active up to date collection?  How can depositories make a case for staying in the system and insure their survivability?

Let's first take a look at the differences between a main stacks collection and a depository collection.

Some Differences Between Main Stacks & Depository Collections:

*  Main Stacks Collections:

• Main stacks collections continue to be active and updated collections because commercial publishers don't see a financial benefit in publishing their books online.  Commercial publishers' success are determined by the number of sales.  The more they sell, the likeliness they will end up on a best-selling list and the more money they can make. 100,000 clicks does not make a best-seller...maybe 1 billioin clicks?  Were those clicks meaningful clicks or were they just look and see and then leave the site?
• Most people still want the tangible book.  They want to cuddle up to it, they want to feel turning the pages themselves, they want to form an emotional bond with it...a bond that makes them cry, laugh, chuckle, or scare them.
• The ability to come to it any time.  The words remain static on the page, they don't change.  You can retrieve the information over and over again. If the book was produced with good paper, it can last a very long time.
• Books are immovable unless someone decides to weed them out of the collection.  Once weeded out of the collection, they can be sold on ebay or Half-price.com or any other online sellers service;  they can acquire value and be considered rare; and they can even be sent to the recycling bin and become a brand new thing in its new life.
• Books have very nice and artistic dust jackets that help attract book lovers to buy them. 
• Books have varied topics from the latest celebrity biography to the secrets of the universe.  You can find more recreational reading in the main stacks than you can in a depository collection.
• Keeping up with the latest technology is not as big a priority insofar as access to books.

*  Depository Collections:

• Government publications focuses on free access as a result of an openly democratic philosophy.  The right to access publications paid by our tax dollars is fundamental to the system of checks and balances.  Though some government publications are available for sale, the cost is usually much less than commercial publications.  Some titles like the 9/11 Commission Report do very well commercially, this is usually not the norm.  Government is not (usually) in the business to make money.
• Documents, like commercial publications, have varied topics but most tend to be more utilitarian in nature.  You won't find a lot of recreational reading in gov. docs. collections and I don't know of many people who would actually cuddle up in bed or in front of the tv reading an environmental impact statement on Mount Rainier . 
• Government keeps up to date with technology to see if there is a way that will help them save money.  Creating publications online instead of tangible saves them a great deal of money.  Costs are passed on to the end-user.
• Online pubilcations are movable and even removable.  They are maintained by the government agency who published it and neither GPO or the depository coordinators have any control whatsoever.  If the agency decides to remove them one day, you are just out of luck unless you carry a big stick and knock them outside their heads to bring back the information.
• Online publications are even more susceptible to changes when the agency maintains it.  They can redact a document any time without the knowledge of most people unless you are one of the very few who sees the document on a daily basis and know what is right and what is wrong.  GPO is working on the authentication problem but it will be a very long time before authentication is included in every government publication.
• Government publications are viewed as biased and untrustworthy.  A veil of suspicion surrounds the credibility of government publications.  Citizen activists prefer to use sources they feel are above repproach  (nevermind they have their own biases as well).  Yet, the public cannot possibly avoid using government information.  Basic information like the census and health statistics are needed in order to facilitate the public's need for information.
• Now, though you are more likely to find information about unlocking the secrets of the universe via the myriad publications published by NASA and the U.S Naval Observatory, you certainly won't find a bio on Keanu Reeves unless he made an appearance before Congress like Michale J. Fox and Muhammad Ali did when they testified in favor of Parkinson's Disease Research funding.  The closest thing to recreational literature for the masses might be the countless hearings pertaining to scandal and national tragedy (JFK and MLK assassination hearings, ENRON, Watergate, President Clinton's impeachment, etc.).  This type of literature does gain a great deal of attention from the public.  But, even this type of reading can be very technical at times.
• Statistics for online publications are hard to determine.  Since most opac software publishers have not come up with a way to count the clicks you make on a link you've created on the online catalog, it is very hard to determine what is the usage for onlne titles.  GPO's PURL referrals are a step in the right direction, but it doesn't tell you which particular titles were being used.  Without any statistics on online publications, government documents depositories are in danger of disappearing.  Library administrators want numbers and if we don't have any to produce, you can say goodbye to the hard work you've put into the depository collection.

In the past few years or so, I have found myself downloading a lot of online government publications and placing them on our server for assured access to these titles.  I have also spent a lot of time digitizing some titles that are in danger of disappearing or are not available online at this time.  I also spend some time discarding paper versions that are now superseded by the online version.  A few months ago, I managed to get rid of a bunch of IRS publications because they were more current and easier to find online and because they were taking a lot of space on the shelves.

Shipment boxes get fewer and fewer each day.  Now that we have MARCIVE downloads, the way we process government documents has changed.  Of course that changes the work flow as well.  Now, instead of downloading the NETs and inputting those titles ourselves (though I will not miss having to go through pages circling those items that belong to our profile), it does mean having to download a list and see what is actually coming in and compare it to our profile. 

How can we reinvent ourselves?  How can we demonstrate to library administrators the usefulness of depository collection and their importance to an open government?

On the January 15, 2004 issue of Administrative Notes, there was an article on becoming a passport acceptance faclity.  The idea of providing such a service is definitely an interesting one since it does provide a service for people who may not be available during the normal 9 am - 5 pm slot.  The library receives a$ 30.00 commission for each application for providing the service.  Such a service does provide the opportunity to bring in new people to the library and to the depository collection.

Over a week ago or so, I found an article written by Thomas Frey from the DaVinci Institute who was thinking about the future of libraries.  He mentions a bit about the history of libraries and denotes some trends that is causing libraries to change due to technology.   One of the recommendations he made about libraries:

Trend #10 - Libraries will transition from a center of information to a center of culture

 With the emergence of distributed forms of information the central role of the library as a repository of facts and information is changing.  While it is still important to have this kind of resource, it has proven to be a diminishing draw in terms of library traffic.

 The notion of becoming a cultural center is an expansive role for the future library.  It will not only serve as an information resource, but much more, with the exact mission and goals evolving and changing over time.

 A culture-based library is one that taps into the spirit of the community, assessing priorities and providing resources to support the things deemed most important.  Modern day cultural centers include museums, theaters, parks, and educational institutions.  The library of the future could include all of these, but individual communities will be charged with developing an overall strategy that reflects the identity and personality of its own constituency.

One of Frey's reccommendations for libraries includes:

4)       Experiment with creative spaces so the future role of the library can define itself.  Since the role of the library 20 years from now is still a mystery, we recommend that libraries put together creative spaces so staff members, library users, and the community at large can experiment and determine what ideas are drawing attention and getting traction.  Some possible uses for these creative spaces include:

a.       Band practice rooms

b.       Podcasting stations

c.       Blogger stations

d.       Art studios

e.       Recording studios

f.        Video studios

g.       Imagination rooms

h.       Theater-drama practice rooms

We have come a long ways from the time of da Vinci and the time when books were chained to lecterns.  But we’ve only scratched the surface of many more changes to come.  Writing the definitive history of modern libraries is a work in progress.  Our best advice is to enjoy the journey and relish in the wonderment of what tomorrow may bring.

Of course Frey, as a computer engineer and designer does have a bias towards technology being the guiding force in replacing the functions of libraries.  Many libraries  with media services are already providing spaces like video studios or at the very least terminals with multimedia software and functions.  The idea of a library providing band practice rooms, art studios and theater-drama practice rooms is more of a fine arts function that many places already provide for the community.  Seems like Frey is trying to dilute the functions of libraries thinking that technology will do everything that a library does.

An interesting article popped up as a forward on my inbox today.  The article was about Oregon State University's Library providing short-term childcare space for children (from age 6 months to 10 years old) of students.  While mom and dad are trying to get some work done in the library, the kids participate in age appropriate programs. This is definitely an interesting idea since most young parents cannot find someone readily to look after their child or may not be able to afford it.  Campus daycare is only available during the daytime and may be quite full as it is.  Its hard for mom and dad to do their homework when the kids are vying for their attention.   Having short-term childcare in the library does provide a community service that could possibly increase the literacy rate if the programs include reading (I would hope so) and other library-related activities.  I would be curious to know if the literacy rate of children on the campus would go up as a result of the service.   I hope OSU will be able to provide data on the effects such a service to library patrons and its effect on literacy, cognitive skills, and schooling. 

I wonder what other new ideas are on the verge for the 21st century library?