A call for OpenLibrarianship

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A call for OpenLibrarianship

Originally appeared in somewhat different form as a March 16, 2008 post at Thoughts from Carl Grant.

by Carl Grant, published March 20, 2008

In my local paper today (Roanoke Times, Sunday, March 16, 2008) was an editorial about a library program that concluded with the statement “They should continue to do (the program), but not…in its current form.” That is a telling statement that could be made about a lot of librarianship today.

Maurice Line, in his article "Librarianship as it is practiced: a failure of intellect, imagination and initiative" says:

Unless we can see our future in a far broader context, we may not have a future. Our territory is being lost while we think we are defending it, because we are defending the form and not the substance, and the substance is changing.

It seems to me one way that could be done is for libraries to realize that the same forces that are creating open source--interoperability, collaboration, flexibility, sustainability, and service for the customer--are forces that could also have an interesting result if applied to librarianship. The result of the combination of these forces is community. It is power through collaboration. It builds on the fact that the cost of communication today is so near to zero that we have a tightly interlinked global society that can share, enhance and implement ideas quickly. It means that whoever can do something does it. It means that everyone quickly benefits in the result (not just the producer). User needs are more quickly communicated, understood and acted upon. Bottom line--the community of users has become the community of doers. How can we apply that to librarianship?

Let’s start with the question: What is librarianship? The “classic” definition of librarianship from Wikipedia is:

A librarian is an information professional trained in library and information science, which is, simply stated, the organization and management of information services or materials for those with information needs.

However, let me restate the obvious here and point out that librarians are increasingly not the owners of information any more. Just like companies supporting open source do not own the software they distribute or host, the same is true of libraries. Information is everywhere and in abundance. I’m frequently puzzled when I hear librarians express concern that their materials budgets are being cut and they can’t add as many resources as they did in the previous year. Really? Librarians actually have access to more information resources than they’ve ever had and most of it is free. All they have to do is use it. It can still be supplemented with the licensed and held information that does sit in their libraries.

Librarians still organize physical information, but as we all know, digital content is growing fast and is the form in which most information is now created, or migrating, and will continue to exist well into the future. The problem is that librarians aren’t organizing nearly enough of that information. In addition, their processes won’t scale to handle the amount of digital content that we have. One way that it might be possible is if librarians adopted the principles of open source and engaged the community of users in these processes (more on this in a moment).

It’s also important to remember that, in most cases, as librarians you’re physically not going to be where the users are when they come into contact with information. That will only happen when you can be there virtually.

Just like what is happening with Open Source Software and what you’re seeing with companies like Index Data, Equinox, LibLime and CARE Affiliates, librarianship needs to become a set of premium services, only based on information instead of software.

Given that, I continue to be amazed that what is built at OCLC and by many proprietary vendors are products and services for librarians when what we should be building are primarily products and services for users.

Is that harsh? Let’s look at a couple of examples:

  1. Reference Services. If a user has a question, they have numerous options for getting an answer today. As we all know, Google is likely the first stop for many people. According to OCLC’s surveys, some very small percentage of users will start at a library website. In between is a wide range of services, ranging from Amazon’s Askville to ChaCha’s Guided Search Service to OCLC’s QuestionPoint that will provide answers to a user's question. I would encourage the reader to look at and compare each of these services as it is terribly useful in understanding what I’m describing. Askville and ChaCha both use community in helping people get answers to their questions. QuestionPoint uses only librarians. Which do you think will be more successful?
  2. Interlibrary Loan. Look at what LibraryThing and OpenLibrary or Google Books are doing. They all put the emphasis on access to the item. If you can wait, you can get it for free if your local library has it, or if you want it quickly, sometimes for a cost, it can potentially be delivered to you wherever you are. Which might mean downloading the PDF, or printing it, printing on demand for a cost or buying a publisher copy for a fee. However, you get the item. Now compare that with our traditional ILL processes which are typically mediated, slow and often involve “deflection” policies to bounce the request around to other places in order to get it filled. However it’s done, it is normally not nearly as fast as these competing services.

I could go on, but you get the point. Our libraries of today, their organizations, associations and proprietary vendors seem only to want to crack the doors, not open them! Its time we create OpenLibrarianship, a new model of librarianship that embraces the power of community, the ideas of Web 2.0 and the ideas that have created open source for the benefit of all. Here is just a quick list of starter ideas for consideration:

  1. Why don’t we, as library professionals, set up community sites and ask communities of online users what they want their library to do for them? Let’s draft some of the best and the brightest people in the field to start the conversations. Let’s get a conversation going.
  2. Why not allow your library users to enter their book/serials collections in your catalog (like LibraryThing or maybe in conjunction with LibraryThing) and for those who agree, let them loan those items to others using your ILS?
  3. Open up the doors of your library and allow anyone who wants to use your library and its resources to do so. If they’re not a resident or a student, use a credit card as the basis for service.
  4. For those that haven’t already, offer repository services and allow anyone who wants to enter objects into it (as long as it meets certain basic policy guidelines) to do so. Encourage them to enter their family histories, local history, and genealogy--anything unique to your community that would be of interest to others. We tend to make repositories very difficult to get things in--open them up!
  5. Put librarians where users have information needs, for instance in local bookstores. Maybe it’s a real person; maybe it’s a chat service on the bookstore PC. Cut a deal with the bookstores and have any sale that results from the librarian’s advice, result in your library getting a small percentage of the sale to cover the cost of the person offering that service. Bookstores are libraries without librarians. Fix that.
  6. Organize the digital information on the Web. Apply your skills to building subject portals and/or search tools that do the same. Look at the Hiking Outpost website as a partial example of what libraries could be doing.
  7. Allow users to send you a copy of their self-published books and create catalog records for them. Put them in WorldCat. There are many websites for self-publishing. Cut deals with those operations, as [some of] you have with Amazon, where you get a percentage of any sale that results from the user finding the item as a result of the metadata records you’ve created.
  8. Rethink ILL. Get out of the way of the users and let them handle the service themselves! Yes, there are costs involved, let your users decide if it is worthwhile and if it is, let them enter their credit card to cover those costs. The only acceptable result is to get your user the information they need, in some usable form, in “x” days”. I don’t care if it’s a PDF, the physical item, or some other digital form. Get it to them. “Deflection policies” are not a way to increase your fill rates, not really...
  9. Open up your acquisitions selection and approval process. Make it web-based and let representative users vote on what gets added to your library and what doesn’t. Get them involved.
  10. Get your library catalog plugged into every e-learning system in your area! It is anathema to me that, from within online courses, I can’t search and access library resources. If your system doesn’t support this, begin the process of replacing your system!
  11. Why not offer extensive metadata for items to Ebay (start with the books)? Why not help [patrons] sell their book, video and related collections by making them more findable using all this metadata you’ve spent years and fortunes in creating? Again, a deal with Ebay could result in revenue.
  12. Enhance user supplied metadata. Users are now tagging their own digital objects. Offer a service where they can have that metadata reviewed, enhanced, authority services applied, etc. Tagging clouds are a first step and the ability for librarians to enhance their value by the addition of their skills to that data is waiting. Note that is not to say you control it, but you enhance it!

The Web represents the largest library ever known to mankind. It’s global, multilingual and accessible from virtually everywhere and contains all types of content. If you want to be a librarian, then you must understand--that is your collection and that is what you must build your services on if you want to have an increasing role in the future of users.

Now, I know these few ideas obviously ignore political realities, funding issues and some of them might even be plain bad ideas for a host of reasons I’m not even thinking about. That’s really not the point. The point is to think about all those forces that are bringing you open solutions, open services and yes, open source. They are: choice, collaboration, use of global talent, responsiveness, competition, reduced costs, and returning to the community. Take those forces and use them in conjunction with this starter set of ideas. Improve, delete, contribute, implement, revise them and send them back to the profession of librarianship. It will serve as a good start on using the power of community to start creating OpenLibrarianship.

Carl Grant is president of CARE Affiliates and a long-time participant in library automation. Used by permission.

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