The Changing Role of Libraries
A couple weeks ago, I attended a Rochester Regional Library Council workshop called “The Changing Role of Libraries: Designing the Library of the Future.” It was presented by David W. Lewis, Dean of the Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) University Libraries. The workshop was split into two parts: a lecture and group work.
He gave context to the current information revolution taking place. It’s not the first time things have changed so drastically. The invention of printing made scribes and the elite literate disappear. The Church could no longer control the distribution of information. After that, there was the industrialization of printing. Steam-powered printing allowed for mass circulation, greater literacy in the Western world, and the library as we know it today (with classification schemes, catalogs, and reference assistance).
Now, we’re in the age of the ‘net: an expansion of knowledge, threats to established content distribution (open access, Wikipedia), and tracking of user behavior to organize and find information (Google, mass tagging).
So Lewis offers a strategy:
- Complete the migration from print to electronic collections
- Retire legacy print collections
- Redevelop library space
- Reposition library and information tools, resources and expertise
- Migrate the focus of collections from purchasing materials to curating content
He says that special collections, the unique stuff, becomes most important in the library. Purchasing books will become less and less important, as books become easier to access digitally. Google Books, for example, will have digitalized every book in the United States in the next 2-3 years.
When new technologies emerge, they create disruptive change. New technologies tend to be easier, faster, and cheaper, but they are also usually unappealing to the previous technology’s high-end users because of limited functionality. Additionally, they’re usually more appealing to unsophisticated or new users. Lewis suggests that a new value proposition will allow quality and functionality to develop more quickly than old approaches, called exploratory project development:
- Learn by doing
- Save resources for second and third try
- Don’t ask users, watch them
After that, Lewis played a video: “Free! The Future of Business” by Wired‘s Editor in Chief Chris Anderson. In the video, Chris Anderson talks about how bandwidth, storage, and processing are becoming too cheap to meter, creating an expansion of a “gift economy” where businesses are becoming digital and giving away their services. He explains, “Every industry that becomes digital eventually becomes free.” This will make even more competition for libraries. How will we stay relevant if everything else becomes free?
In a CR&L News article, “Library Budgets, Open Access, and the Future of Scholarly Commication,” Lewis explains that scholarly journals have a monopoly and that “we need to capture that scholarly information or we will be exploited.”
One perpetuator of this problem is copyright. Fundamentally, it creates a monopoly to encourage the creative process. However, “copyright is counter to the ‘net.” What scholars really want is a reputation, not a monopoly. Open scholarly communication is the solution.
In order to move from scholarly journals to open scholarly communication, we need to learn from open source: using Creative Commons licenses (providing open access like the National Institute of Health and the Harvard mandate). Lewis explained, “Scholarship, like open source software, is not simply a nonrival (use does not diminish the good) — it is antirival (use enhances the value of the good).”
The consumer will increasingly be the creator, not the consumer, of knowledge. The library budget will be used to support creation of knowledge, which is then given away, rather than to purchase content.
In conclusion:
- Librarians should “make scholarly information free.”
- In doing so, “we will make much of our current practice obsolete, but will… create new roles for ourselves and the library as an institution.”
When the lecture was complete, we took a lunch break, and then formed groups to create our own library of the future, given a $10 million budget. In order to do so, Lewis provided us with an Excel document that contained formulas and prices for our choices, so all we had to enter was how many.
This task was incredibly difficult, and not just because we had to convince each other that what we were doing was right. There were many choices we had to make, and some of them meant we had to do away with other things. It was a very thought-provoking exercise.
Tags: Creative Commons, digitization, future of libraries, Open Access, RRLC, scholarly communication
March 7th, 2009 at 10:56 pm
Wow, that was an excellent overview! I heard good things about this workshop from other RITers… did you enjoy it? Sounds very thought-provoking and up out alley
March 7th, 2009 at 11:35 pm
I did like it, but it wasn’t what I was expecting. I thought there would be at least a little tie-in with other sorts of libraries, like public, but there wasn’t. I left with a lot of thoughts on how this change will affect public libraries, though, but I’ll save that for another post!
Also during the lecture, a fellow attendee complained about how it seems like a lot of new MLIS graduates don’t know a thing, that library schools accept too many too easily, and they’ll never get hired. Another blog post to follow relating to that and this LJ article: http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA527965.html . Probably!