Libraries in the new age

From PLN

Jump to: navigation, search

Libraries in the new age

Contents

Two somewhat related items from Leader's Digest May 2008, by Leslie Dillon.

The library in the new age

Robert Darnton, director of the Harvard University Library and an expert on the history of the book, has a fascinating article on books, information, and libraries in The New York Review of Books. It's long, but it's worth reading or even just skimming online.

After Darnton traces the history of books and information, he notes that each major technological change has "transformed the information landscape" and the speed-up seems "both unstoppable and incomprehensible."

Information "has never been stable," but in today's world, we need to think of information not as "firmly fixed documents" but "as messages that are constantly being reshaped in the process of transmission."

His defense of this definition of information takes us through the Folger Library's accumulation of many copies of the First Folio edition of Shakespeare and other examples of "textual instability" and leads into a discussion of the role of research libraries in the Internet age.

In the 1950s students viewed libraries as "citadels of learning" that contained all knowledge. While today's students still respect their libraries, to them "knowledge comes online, not from libraries."

Darnton believes Google Book Search will make book learning accessible worldwide and allow research "involving vast quantities of data." But instead of making research libraries obsolete, Google will make them "more important than ever." Why? Darnton's reasons:

  1. Even if Google were to digitize 90% of all the books in the U.S., the undigitized 10% would still be important. Only a few copies of certain lesser-known, but nonetheless significant, literary works and popular literature from the past may survive--usually in libraries.
  2. The combined holdings of the libraries in the Google Books Library Project still won't "come close to exhausting the stock of books in the United States...[because] there is little redundancy in the holdings." And Google hasn't yet ventured into worldwide literature or special collections.
  3. Copyright will continue to pose problems. The number of books published keeps increasing (291,920 in the U.S. in 2006). Google isn't likely to be able to keep up with current production while at the same time digitizing old books.
  4. Companies decline and/or disappear. Google could be eclipsed by another technology. "Research libraries last for centuries."
  5. "Google will make mistakes." In spite of Google's high quality-control standards, books will be overlooked, pages skipped, images blurred.
  6. There is "no guarantee that Google's copies will last." Digital texts "belong to an endangered species." Our "obsession with developing new media has inhibited efforts to preserve the old." Eighty percent of silent films and 50 percent of pre-World War II films have been lost.
  7. Google's plans include digitizing multiple versions of each book, but how will they be made accessible? (Hopefully Dr. Darnton's worry about Google's "lack of concern for bibliography" will be alleviated by Google's work with OCLC and links to MARC records.)
  8. Even accurate digitized images won't capture the "crucial aspects of a book": their feel, their special smells, their individual quirks. Darnton pleads guilty to romanticizing the book. He loves rare book rooms, which, while vital to research libraries, are inaccessible to Google Books.

Today's technologies allow scholars to mine vast amounts of data, while the old-fashioned book lets us enjoy "the magic of words as ink on paper." Meanwhile the Internet lets data be transformed into books and has "made print-on-demand a thriving industry."

Dr. Darnton closes by urging that libraries be "shored up"; think of them not as warehouses or museums, but as "nerve centers for transmitting electronic impulses." Long live Google, he says, "but don't count on it living long enough to replace" the venerable library. "As a citadel of learning and as a platform for adventure on the Internet, the research library still deserves to stand at the center of the campus, preserving the past and accumulating energy for the future."

(Robert Darnton, "The library in the new age," The New York Review of Books, June 12, 2008.)

Envisioning the future of libraries

The UK's JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee), whose mission is to provide world-class leadership in the innovative use of Information Technology to support education and research, has launched a Libraries of the Future program to explore the future of the academic and research library in "an information world in which Google apparently offers us everything."

The Web site includes a link to a JISC/SCONUL report evaluating current library management systems (ILS here in the U.S.). Take a look at the report if your library is currently in the market for an ILS system, or even just reviewing your contract. If you can't find the time to skim through the full report, check out Section 7, Making Decisions (A Guide for Librarians). One of the report's key messages is that libraries need to liberate their data, and that includes their metadata.

Speaking of metadata, the Future of Libraries site also links to a report from JISC's TechWatch that calls for libraries to adopt a "coherent approach to metadata." It stresses that "quality metadata frameworks are critical if libraries are to provide seamless searching and retrieval technologies."

(Bonita Wilson, "A new website devoted to envisioning the future of libraries," D-Lib Magazine, May/June 2008.)

Related articles

Your turn: Talk about it

Retrieved from "http://pln.palinet.org/wiki/index.php/Libraries_in_the_new_age"
Personal tools
Home