Library roles in 2020

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Library roles in 2020

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PLN Challenge, April 2008

edited by Walt Crawford, published April 22, 2008

Eric Lease Morgan's "Future catalogs: food for thought" inspired the April 2008 PLN Challenge--one where we'd particularly like to have your responses, either added to this article or as separate linked articles. Here's the challenge as posed to the PLN Challenge Panel:

  • Read Eric Lease Morgan's "Future catalogs: food for thought"
  • You might also want to read some or all of the linked articles at the bottom.
  • Think about the extent to which you expect that your library and your patrons will really have instant, free access to all the resources they want (without needing the physical library) in, say, 12 years (2020), and what that means in terms of the library's role. I suspect (and believe) that the answer will be considerably different for public libraries, for college libraries and for research-university libraries.

Here's the challenge:

  1. Will your library still play a major role as a physical source for resources your patrons want in 2020? (Note that I'm saying "resources," not just "information.")
  2. Based on that answer, what would you expect the primary roles of your library to be in 2020?

Two panelists provide very different and thought-provoking responses to kick off a discussion that needs to continue.

Pamela Snelson, Franklin & Marshall College

My library, serving a residential college dedicated to excellence in undergraduate education, will still play a major role as a physical source for resources in 2020. My answer is colored by what I see in newly tenured and tenure-track faculty at the college. They demand that students to use scholarly material for research projects and some even encourage browsing in the stacks. And while I fully expect all current journal information to be online by 2020, for books and back runs of all journals, I'm not so sure.

Can we use our past experience to help guide future expectations about the primary roles of the library in 2020? Think about library services in 1996--for some it will be hard to believe that was 12 years ago--how much has fundamentally changed about the role of the library? In 1996 I was an Assistant Director for Automation and Public Services at another liberal arts college. The main areas I supervised are still represented in my current library albeit with difference emphases. We spend less time with print reserves and more time discussing the role of fair use in course management systems with faculty. Reference services have added instant messaging and chat to the repertoire of research assistance. The internet has made teaching the skills of information evaluation more critical than the ability to amass long lists of citations. The ILS is now web-based but still serves as a gateway to library collections - both physical and online. New roles have been additive rather than substituting for or replacing former roles. I do believe that the role of the college library to provide faculty and students with the information they need for research and study will still be primary in 2020. How, where and in what form we provide the information will evolve.

Some of you have heard me tell this story before but the lesson in it bears repeating. Isaac Asimov, in a New York Times editorial, talked about how many of the elements of the moon landing were predicted in science fiction writings--space suits, for example. But no one ever expected that when humans finally landed on the moon we'd all be watching it at home on our televisions. So we can't predict how something like the Internet will affect our role but I do think we can be confident that the role of the library as place for information will be needed.

David Schappert: Libraries in 20[/]20: An Academic Library Vision

Let us stipulate right away that describing our libraries in 2020 is indulging in science fiction. John Carpenter’s 1981 film Escape from New York depicts Manhattan Island as a maximum-security prison, cut off from the rest of the United States by a fifty-foot wall. That prison was purported to have been built in 1988. H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, published in 1898, described events, according to its first page, “in the early twentieth century.”

If you don’t read much science fiction, you have to realize that it succeeds by getting almost all of the little things wrong, but a few of the big things right (and what’s right is not necessarily technological at all, but maybe just human nature, ethical dilemmas, or a sense of alienation transferable to more “realistic” realms). Even when pop culture gets technological innovation right, it might be for the wrong reasons. After all, is Dick Tracy’s 2-way wrist radio really about expected advances in communication technology (our ubiquitous cell phones) or a device in support of narrative economy (no trundling back to the police station or a phone booth or a car every time Tracy needs more information)?

Of course, you can only get the big things right if you first figure out what the big things are. So the challenge for us, in theory and in practice, is to identify the big things, what overarching themes inform our success in the future. Rather than define our primary role in 2020, I’ll briefly focus on just three of the big problems we will still need to confront.

Tools and tool users

Consider the tools that we build, purchase, and promote. Some, like citation management software, have at their core the ability to eliminate routine repetition and drudgery, freeing up our time to so that we can concentrate on more sophisticated tasks. They do not, however, guarantee that time saved is used productively. Just as replacing the wringer washer with an automatic may just have opened more time for “As the World Turns” or “One Life to Live,” citation management software may just enable that Worlds of Warcraft addiction.

Similarly, federated search software can enable us to perform comprehensive searches and illuminate interdisciplinary relationships. It may also support an unthinking adisciplinarity, making it possible to look for sources without much idea of what you are looking for or where you are looking (Used this way, it is Google that at least points to licensed and pre-selected content if you are an optimist. It is Google without backlinks for relevance if you are a pessimist.)

Folksonomies may help us to develop personal contexts for the information we confront. We may learn important lessons from observing how others tag information. Folksonomies, even bad ones, require some thought. But folksonomies are only better than controlled vocabularies when they are better, and doesn’t knowing the difference take some sophistication?

What we are building, buying and promoting are good tools. These tools will continue to change, often even improve. What we as librarians are selling to the faculty must be the need for good implementations of good tools to achieve the best possible educational outcomes. What we are selling to the students is assistance in meeting those needs as articulated and required by the classroom faculty.

Could we start some Slow Research paradigm, conceptually parallel to the Slow Food movement? Probably not, as the time pressures on students are only getting worse. But we can continue to clarify the distinction between timesaving and efficiency. Doing bad work faster is only more efficient if bad work is the goal. And we can always try to find a better balance between modeling the research behavior of our students and reflecting the research behavior of our students. The right tools will help.

Rights management

Proximity to information has always been a necessary condition in how information is used, but the internet and digital collections have revolutionized what is proximate and what it not. My computer is right here. My bookshelves are in different rooms. Our physical collections will never be as close to our students as their laptops are. Even for items not in digital format, RapidILL may be faster than a trip to the campus library.

A less obvious determinant is copyright. Copyright has always been a factor in what we purchase. Now it is becoming increasingly important in what our students retrieve in their Google searches, as in, “You are not currently authorized to access this article,” even when they would be authorized if they found the item through our database and authentication services. Copyright is becoming critically important in how students use and produce information, particularly as their use of multi-media leads them to more restricted sources.

I would like to see our students move from a cut-and-paste culture to a mash-up culture (given my assumption that the second takes more thought than the first). We can help them do this. But even as we admire the creativity of DJ Danger Mouse’s (illegal) The Grey Album, we are bound to teach the ethical use of information. That operational obligation is not so tough, at least not as tough as figuring out our professional obligation not simply to teach fair use, but to figure out what it is, and help drive it to what it might be. Open Source, Open Access, Creative Commons are partial solutions with momenta of their own. But, as lengthy snippets of copyrighted popular culture become the Montessori manipulatives of the early 21st century, and no real momentum for copyrighted information wanting to be free, I expect we’ll be dealing with rights management, in matters large and small, in 2020 and beyond.

Our local, global library

Providing our students with some diverse, global perspectives is not nearly as difficult (or expensive) as it used to be. It is as easy to access online the Japan Times as the New York Times. Thanks to Babel Fish, students can translate from one language to another almost as quickly as one can accurately type: Le renard brun rapide a sauté par-dessus le chien paresseux. We will leave aside the issues of how you instruct students to critically examine these materials, how to place them in context, even how to make sure they use them in the first place. When it comes to global perspectives, more is better.

We also make our libraries global by conforming to national and international standards and protocols. But, at the same time, we want to customize based on individual circumstances. It is this drive that makes WorldCat Local a product rather than an oxymoron. Other products will help us globalize while we customize, and all we will need to move forward is money.

The tougher challenge, actually the more expensive challenge, is how we capture and disseminate local knowledge. Local customization takes time and expertise. The Second Life Library is not going to have any information about the expectations of a particular professor, unless we, or she, put it there. More than likely, it will reside in her Blackboard page, transparent to the students and opaque to us. Some local knowledge, like University archives, will only be broadly available if we digitize and organize it. Other local information will only be available if we produce it and embed it into our collections (local oral histories, for instance).

Just as students could use the time they save finding sources to spend more time thinking and writing, the time and expense we save with consortial arrangements, shared systems, and so forth, might be used (if we can hold on to the time and resources we save), to support our institutional mission in more local and targeted ways. We could make the library a more vibrant physical and virtual intellectual space, to both highlight and support the teaching and learning that goes on at the campus and to reach out more effectively to our local special populations (honors students, living-learning communities, students involved in service learning, etc.) and to respond to, or participate in, local curriculum development.

In a sense, the library in aggregate is a toolbox, or a tool, and it takes both local and global manifestations to make it the right tool for the right job. The right global/local mix will continue to be a moving target.

Related articles

Your turn: Talk about it

What do you foresee for library roles in 2020?

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