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Re: Fwd: Seth Godin : The future of the library

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Eric Charles

Re: Fwd: Seth Godin : The future of the library

Nice article,
We at Altoona are looking for a new head librarian. For the past three days, I have attended talks by candidates. The consensus seems to be that he university library of the future will be a "knowledge commons". It is a awkward term, and not one speaker started out by explaining what a "commons" is. The idea seems to be a technology equipped student-union type study space, with help desks. The one redeeming notion was a shift of resources from acquisitions to human capital. This, because students still need help to lean about what resources to use, how to use, etc., plus a full range of technology help. Thus the library has no future (if a library is seen as a place where libres are stored), but the librarian might well have a very good future (with a very antiquated job title). One example was about how incredibly easy it is to get free newspaper content in real time, but how hard it is to research a newspaper story from 5 months ago. There were also some good ideas about integrating librarians into classroom instruction as new tech became available and methods of use needed to be taught to both students and professors.

Eric

On Mon, May 16, 2011 10:37 AM, Victoria Hughes <[hidden email]> wrote:

Interesting perspective on the role of the librarian versus collection of print books.

<a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/%7Er/typepad/sethsmainblog/%7E3/9_9r8XmwMTU/the-future-of-the-library.html" style="text-decoration: none; " onclick="window.open('http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/typepad/sethsmainblog/~3/9_9r8XmwMTU/the-future-of-the-library.html');return false;">The future of the library

What is a public library for?

First, how we got here:

Before Gutenberg, a book cost about as much as a small house. As a result, only kings and bishops could afford to own a book of their own.

This naturally led to the creation of shared books, of libraries where scholars (everyone else was too busy not starving) could come to read books that they didn't have to own. The library as warehouse for books worth sharing.

Only after that did we invent the librarian.

The librarian isn't a clerk who happens to work at a library. A librarian is a data hound, a guide, a sherpa and a teacher. The librarian is the interface between reams of data and the untrained but motivated user.

After Gutenberg, books got a lot cheaper. More individuals built their own collections. At the same time, though, the number of titles exploded, and the demand for libraries did as well. We definitely needed a warehouse to store all this bounty, and more than ever we needed a librarian to help us find what we needed. The library is a house for the librarian.

Industrialists (particularly Andrew Carnegie) funded the modern American library. The idea was that in a pre-electronic media age, the working man needed to be both entertained and slightly educated. Work all day and become a more civilized member of society by reading at night.

And your kids? Your kids need a place with shared encyclopedias and plenty of fun books, hopefully inculcating a lifelong love of reading, because reading makes all of us more thoughtful, better informed and more productive members of a civil society.

Which was all great, until now.

Want to watch a movie? Netflix is a better librarian, with a better library, than any library in the country. The Netflix librarian knows about every movie, knows what you've seen and what you're likely to want to see. If the goal is to connect viewers with movies, Netflix wins.

This goes further than a mere sideline that most librarians resented anyway. Wikipedia and the huge databanks of information have basically eliminated the library as the best resource for anyone doing amateur research (grade school, middle school, even undergrad). Is there any doubt that online resources will get better and cheaper as the years go by? Kids don't shlep to the library to use an out of date encyclopedia to do a report on FDR. You might want them to, but they won't unless coerced.

They need a librarian more than ever (to figure out creative ways to find and use data). They need a library not at all.

When kids go to the mall instead of the library, it's not that the mall won, it's that the library lost.

And then we need to consider the rise of the Kindle. An ebook costs about $1.60 in 1962 dollars. A thousand ebooks can fit on one device, easily. Easy to store, easy to sort, easy to hand to your neighbor. Five years from now, readers will be as expensive as Gillette razors, and ebooks will cost less than the blades.

Librarians that are arguing and lobbying for clever ebook lending solutions are completely missing the point. They are defending library as warehouse as opposed to fighting for the future, which is librarian as producer, concierge, connector, teacher and impresario.

Post-Gutenberg, books are finally abundant, hardly scarce, hardly expensive, hardly worth warehousing. Post-Gutenberg, the scarce resource is knowledge and insight, not access to data.

The library is no longer a warehouse for dead books. Just in time for the information economy, the library ought to be the local nerve center for information. (Please don't say I'm anti-book! I think through my actions and career choices, I've demonstrated my pro-book chops. I'm not saying I wantpaper to go away, I'm merely describing what's inevitably occurring). We all love the vision of the underprivileged kid bootstrapping himself out of poverty with books, but now, (most of the time) the insight and leverage is going to come from being and fast and smart with online resources, not from hiding in the stacks.

The next library is a place, still. A place where people come together to do co-working and coordinate and invent projects worth working on together. Aided by a librarian who understands the <a href="http://meshing.it/book" target="" style="text-decoration: none; " onclick="window.open('http://meshing.it/book');return false;">Mesh, a librarian who can bring domain knowledge and people knowledge and access to information to bear.

The next library is a house for the librarian with the guts to invite kids in to teach them how to get better grades while doing less grunt work. And to teach them how to use a soldering iron or take apart something with no user servicable parts inside. And even to challenge them to teach classes on their passions, merely because it's fun. This librarian takes responsibility/blame for any kid who manages to graduate from school without being a first-rate data shark.

The next library is filled with so many web terminals there's always at least one empty. And the people who run this library don't view the combination of access to data and connections to peers as a sidelight--it's the entire point.

Wouldn't you want to live and work and pay taxes in a town that had a library like that? The vibe of the best Brooklyn coffee shop combined with a passionate raconteur of information? There are one thousands things that could be done in a place like this, all built around one mission: take the world of data, combine it with the people in this community and create value.

We need librarians more than we ever did. What we don't need are mere clerks who guard dead paper. Librarians are too important to be a dwindling voice in our culture. For the right librarian, this is the chance of a lifetime.

<a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/%7Eff/typepad/sethsmainblog?a=9_9r8XmwMTU:tc6d6jGRxI8:yIl2AUoC8zA" style="text-decoration: none; " onclick="window.open('http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/typepad/sethsmainblog?a=9_9r8XmwMTU:tc6d6jGRxI8:yIl2AUoC8zA');return false;"> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/%7Eff/typepad/sethsmainblog?a=9_9r8XmwMTU:tc6d6jGRxI8:qj6IDK7rITs" style="text-decoration: none; " onclick="window.open('http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/typepad/sethsmainblog?a=9_9r8XmwMTU:tc6d6jGRxI8:qj6IDK7rITs');return false;"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/%7Eff/typepad/sethsmain! blog?d=qj6IDK7rITs" style="border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; " border="0">
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

Eric Charles

Professional Student and
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Penn State University
Altoona, PA 16601

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

Nick Thompson

Re: Fwd: Seth Godin : The future of the library

FWIW, a few years ago, my university library gutted its down floor, put in a coffee bar and IT stuff, and called itself the “academic commons.” Seems like a fad in Library Land.

Nick

From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of ERIC P. CHARLES
Sent: Monday, May 16, 2011 9:43 AM
To: Victoria Hughes
Cc: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: Seth Godin : The future of the library

Interesting perspective on the role of the librarian versus collection of print books.

The future of the library

What is a public library for?

First, how we got here:

Before Gutenberg, a book cost about as much as a small house. As a result, only kings and bishops could afford to own a book of their own.

This naturally led to the creation of shared books, of libraries where scholars (everyone else was too busy not starving) could come to read books that they didn't have to own. The library as warehouse for books worth sharing.

Only after that did we invent the librarian.

The librarian isn't a clerk who happens to work at a library. A librarian is a data hound, a guide, a sherpa and a teacher. The librarian is the interface between reams of data and the untrained but motivated user.

After Gutenberg, books got a lot cheaper. More individuals built their own collections. At the same time, though, the number of titles exploded, and the demand for libraries did as well. We definitely needed a warehouse to store all this bounty, and more than ever we needed a librarian to help us find what we needed. The library is a house for the librarian.

Industrialists (particularly Andrew Carnegie) funded the modern American library. The idea was that in a pre-electronic media age, the working man needed to be both entertained and slightly educated. Work all day and become a more civilized member of society by reading at night.

And your kids? Your kids need a place with shared encyclopedias and plenty of fun books, hopefully inculcating a lifelong love of reading, because reading makes all of us more thoughtful, better informed and more productive members of a civil society.

Which was all great, until now.

Want to watch a movie? Netflix is a better librarian, with a better library, than any library in the country. The Netflix librarian knows about every movie, knows what you've seen and what you're likely to want to see. If the goal is to connect viewers with movies, Netflix wins.

This goes further than a mere sideline that most librarians resented anyway. Wikipedia and the huge databanks of information have basically eliminated the library as the best resource for anyone doing amateur research (grade school, middle school, even undergrad). Is there any doubt that online resources will get better and cheaper as the years go by? Kids don't shlep to the library to use an out of date encyclopedia to do a report on FDR. You might want them to, but they won't unless coerced.

They need a librarian more than ever (to figure out creative ways to find and use data). They need a library not at all.

When kids go to the mall instead of the library, it's not that the mall won, it's that the library lost.

And then we need to consider the rise of the Kindle. An ebook costs about $1.60 in 1962 dollars. A thousand ebooks can fit on one device, easily. Easy to store, easy to sort, easy to hand to your neighbor. Five years from now, readers will be as expensive as Gillette razors, and ebooks will cost less than the blades.

Librarians that are arguing and lobbying for clever ebook lending solutions are completely missing the point. They are defending library as warehouse as opposed to fighting for the future, which is librarian as producer, concierge, connector, teacher and impresario.

Post-Gutenberg, books are finally abundant, hardly scarce, hardly expensive, hardly worth warehousing. Post-Gutenberg, the scarce resource is knowledge and insight, not access to data.

The library is no longer a warehouse for dead books. Just in time for the information economy, the library ought to be the local nerve center for information. (Please don't say I'm anti-book! I think through my actions and career choices, I've demonstrated my pro-book chops. I'm not saying I wantpaper to go away, I'm merely describing what's inevitably occurring). We all love the vision of the underprivileged kid bootstrapping himself out of poverty with books, but now, (most of the time) the insight and leverage is going to come from being and fast and smart with online resources, not from hiding in the stacks.

The next library is a place, still. A place where people come together to do co-working and coordinate and invent projects worth working on together. Aided by a librarian who understands the Mesh, a librarian who can bring domain knowledge and people knowledge and access to information to bear.

The next library is a house for the librarian with the guts to invite kids in to teach them how to get better grades while doing less grunt work. And to teach them how to use a soldering iron or take apart something with no user servicable parts inside. And even to challenge them to teach classes on their passions, merely because it's fun. This librarian takes responsibility/blame for any kid who manages to graduate from school without being a first-rate data shark.

The next library is filled with so many web terminals there's always at least one empty. And the people who run this library don't view the combination of access to data and connections to peers as a sidelight--it's the entire point.

Wouldn't you want to live and work and pay taxes in a town that had a library like that? The vibe of the best Brooklyn coffee shop combined with a passionate raconteur of information? There are one thousands things that could be done in a place like this, all built around one mission: take the world of data, combine it with the people in this community and create value.

We need librarians more than we ever did. What we don't need are mere clerks who guard dead paper. Librarians are too important to be a dwindling voice in our culture. For the right librarian, this is the chance of a lifetime.

============================================================

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv

Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College

lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

Eric Charles

Professional Student and
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Penn State University
Altoona, PA 16601

Eric Charles

Re: Fwd: Seth Godin : The future of the library

In reply to this post by Eric Charles

Nick,
I'm not sure it is a fad, so much as a desperate plea for relevance. The libraries at Penn State are, perhaps, the one part of the University that is honestly one thing, spread over many campuses. (One of our mottos is "One university, geographically distributed", but it is a lie in most cases.) Our library has subscriptions to two print journals, two, and they are removing the rest of the print journals this summer, all of them. The single area with books in it is smaller than my house, and serves 4,500 students. Instead, all the journals are available online, as are a good number of the books. Any other book you need can be sent from any library in the system to here in about 3 days. They are even implementing a system where books will stay wherever they are returned to, until someone requests it somewhere else. As a result, much of our campus library's physical collection will rotate! If you just returned all books to the central collection, or digitized more quickly, then you could easily imagine the administration moving to replace the entire campus library with a help desk, a medium-sized computer lab, and a small room to hold books on their way in or out.

I think that at Clark University similar changes were an attempt to make the library more cool and trendy. I think globally, or at least for us, it is an attempt to justify still having a building labeled "library," and staff called "librarians." I repeatedly asked the prospective head librarians if these trends were virtuous, i.e., if it was not the function of a library to be a place where people had to do things more slowly and search for information, the unanimous answer was something along the lines of "There's no stopping the future." All admitted that the primary virtue of the "knowledge commons" model was that it got students into the library. They also all admitted that there needed to be something there that kept it academically serious and library-like, but I never figured out exactly how that last part happened (aside from deference students might give to the label on the building and the job-titles of the staff).

Eric

On Mon, May 16, 2011 04:29 PM, "Nicholas Thompson" <[hidden email]> wrote:

FWIW, a few years ago, my university library gutted its down floor, put in a coffee bar and IT stuff, and called itself the “academic commons.” Seems like a fad in Library Land.

Nick

From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of ERIC P. CHARLES
Sent: Monday, May 16, 2011 9:43 AM
To: Victoria Hughes
Cc: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: Seth Godin : The future of the library

Nice article,
We at Altoona are looking for a new head librarian. For the past three days, I have attended talks by candidates. The consensus seems to be that he university library of the future will be a "knowledge commons". It is a awkward term, and not one speaker started out by explaining what a "commons" is. The idea seems to be a technology equipped student-union type study space, with help desks. The one redeeming notion was a shift of resources from acquisitions to human capital. This, because students still need help to lean about what resources to use, how to use, etc., plus a full range of technology help. Thus the library has no future (if a library is seen as a place where libres are stored), but the librarian might well have a very good future (with a very antiquated job title). One example was about how incredibly easy it is to get free newspaper content in real time, but how hard it is to research a newspaper story from 5 months ago. There were also some good ideas about integrating librarians into classroom instruction as new tech became available and methods of use needed to be taught to both students and professors.

Eric

On Mon, May 16, 2011 10:37 AM, Victoria Hughes <victoria@...> wrote:

Interesting perspective on the role of the librarian versus collection of print books.

<a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/%7Er/typepad/sethsmainblog/%7E3/9_9r8XmwMTU/the-future-of-the-library.html" onclick="window.open('http://feedproxy.google.com/%7Er/typepad/sethsmainblog/%7E3/9_9r8XmwMTU/the-future-of-the-library.html');return false;">The future of the library

What is a public library for?

First, how we got here:

Before Gutenberg, a book cost about as much as a small house. As a result, only kings and bishops could afford to own a book of their own.

This naturally led to the creation of shared books, of libraries where scholars (everyone else was too busy not starving) could come to read books that they didn't have to own. The library as warehouse for books worth sharing.

Only after that did we invent the librarian.

The librarian isn't a clerk who happens to work at a library. A librarian is a data hound, a guide, a sherpa and a teacher. The librarian is the interface between reams of data and the untrained but motivated user.

After Gutenberg, books got a lot cheaper. More individuals built their own collections. At the same time, though, the number of titles exploded, and the demand for libraries did as well. We definitely needed a warehouse to store all this bounty, and more than ever we needed a librarian to help us find what we needed. The library is a house for the librarian.

Industrialists (particularly Andrew Carnegie) funded the modern American library. The idea was that in a pre-electronic media age, the working man needed to be both entertained and slightly educated. Work all day and become a more civilized member of society by reading at night.

And your kids? Your kids need a place with shared encyclopedias and plenty of fun books, hopefully inculcating a lifelong love of reading, because reading makes all of us more thoughtful, better informed and more productive members of a civil society.

Which was all great, until now.

Want to watch a movie? Netflix is a better librarian, with a better library, than any library in the country. The Netflix librarian knows about every movie, knows what you've seen and what you're likely to want to see. If the goal is to connect viewers with movies, Netflix wins.

This goes further than a mere sideline that most librarians resented anyway. Wikipedia and the huge databanks of information have basically eliminated the library as the best resource for anyone doing amateur research (grade school, middle school, even undergrad). Is there any doubt that online resources will get better and cheaper as the years go by? Kids don't shlep to the library to use an out of date encyclopedia to do a report on FDR. You might want them to, but they won't unless coerced.

They need a librarian more than ever (to figure out creative ways to find and use data). They need a library not at all.

When kids go to the mall instead of the library, it's not that the mall won, it's that the library lost.

And then we need to consider the rise of the Kindle. An ebook costs about $1.60 in 1962 dollars. A thousand ebooks can fit on one device, easily. Easy to store, easy to sort, easy to hand to your neighbor. Five years from now, readers will be as expensive as Gillette razors, and ebooks will cost less than the blades.

Librarians that are arguing and lobbying for clever ebook lending solutions are completely missing the point. They are defending library as warehouse as opposed to fighting for the future, which is librarian as producer, concierge, connector, teacher and impresario.

Post-Gutenberg, books are finally abundant, hardly scarce, hardly expensive, hardly worth warehousing. Post-Gutenberg, the scarce resource is knowledge and insight, not access to data.

The library is no longer a warehouse for dead books. Just in time for the information economy, the library ought to be the local nerve center for information. (Please don't say I'm anti-book! I think through my actions and career choices, I've demonstrated my pro-book chops. I'm not saying I wantpaper to go away, I'm merely describing what's inevitably occurring). We all love the vision of the underprivileged kid bootstrapping himself out of poverty with books, but now, (most of the time) the insight and leverage is going to come from being and fast and smart with online resources, not from hiding in the stacks.

The next library is a place, still. A place where people come together to do co-working and coordinate and invent projects worth working on together. Aided by a librarian who understands the <a href="http://meshing.it/book" onclick="window.open('http://meshing.it/book');return false;">Mesh, a librarian who can bring domain knowledge and people knowledge and access to information to bear.

The next library is a house for the librarian with the guts to invite kids in to teach them how to get better grades while doing less grunt work. And to teach them how to use a soldering iron or take apart something with no user servicable parts inside. And even to challenge them to teach classes on their passions, merely because it's fun. This librarian takes responsibility/blame for any kid who manages to graduate from school without being a first-rate data shark.

The next library is filled with so many web terminals there's always at least one empty. And the people who run this library don't view the combination of access to data and connections to peers as a sidelight--it's the entire point.

Wouldn't you want to live and work and pay taxes in a town that had a library like that? The vibe of the best Brooklyn coffee shop combined with a passionate raconteur of information? There are one thousands things that could be done in a place like this, all built around one mission: take the world of data, combine it with the people in this community and create value.

We need librarians more than we ever did. What we don't need are mere clerks who guard dead paper. Librarians are too important to be a dwindling voice in our culture. For the right librarian, this is the chance of a lifetime.

<a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/%7Eff/typepad/sethsmainblog?a=9_9r8XmwMTU:tc6d6jGRxI8:yIl2AUoC8zA" onclick="window.open('http://feeds.feedburner.com/%7Eff/typepad/sethsmainblog?a=9_9r8XmwMTU:tc6d6jGRxI8:yIl2AUoC8zA');return false;"> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/%7Eff/typepad/sethsmainblog?a=9_9r8XmwMTU:tc6d6jGRxI8:qj6IDK7rITs" onclick="window.open('http://feeds.feedburner.com/%7Eff/typepad/sethsmainblog?a=9_9r8XmwMTU:tc6d6jGRxI8:qj6IDK7rITs');return false;">

============================================================

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv

Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College

lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at <a href="http://www.friam.org" onclick="window.open('http://www.friam.org');return false;">http://www.friam.org

Eric Charles

Professional Student and
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Penn State University
Altoona, PA 16601
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

Eric Charles

Professional Student and
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Penn State University
Altoona, PA 16601

Pamela McCorduck

Re: Fwd: Seth Godin : The future of the library

There's a serious problem with on-line research, and it's this: librarians have had many years, nay, centuries, to set up standards for what counts as a good source. This is happening with on-line resources, but very slowly. You surely want a reference librarian around just to identify what's garbage, and what's plausible.

On May 16, 2011, at 5:05 PM, ERIC P. CHARLES wrote:

Nick,
I'm not sure it is a fad, so much as a desperate plea for relevance. The libraries at Penn State are, perhaps, the one part of the University that is honestly one thing, spread over many campuses. (One of our mottos is "One university, geographically distributed", but it is a lie in most cases.) Our library has subscriptions to two print journals, two, and they are removing the rest of the print journals this summer, all of them. The single area with books in it is smaller than my house, and serves 4,500 students. Instead, all the journals are available online, as are a good number of the books. Any other book you need can be sent from any library in the system to here in about 3 days. They are even implementing a system where books will stay wherever they are returned to, until someone requests it somewhere else. As a result, much of our campus library's physical collection will rotate! If you just returned all books to the central collection, or digitized more quickly, then you could easily imagine the administration moving to replace the entire campus library with a help desk, a medium-sized computer lab, and a small room to hold books on their way in or out.

I think that at Clark University similar changes were an attempt to make the library more cool and trendy. I think globally, or at least for us, it is an attempt to justify still having a building labeled "library," and staff called "librarians." I repeatedly asked the prospective head librarians if these trends were virtuous, i.e., if it was not the function of a library to be a place where people had to do things more slowly and search for information, the unanimous answer was something along the lines of "There's no stopping the future." All admitted that the primary virtue of the "knowledge commons" model was that it got students into the library. They also all admitted that there needed to be something there that kept it academically serious and library-like, but I never figured out exactly how that last part happened (aside from deference students might give to the label on the building and the job-titles of the staff).

Eric

On Mon, May 16, 2011 04:29 PM, "Nicholas Thompson" <[hidden email]> wrote:
FWIW, a few years ago, my university library gutted its down floor, put in a coffee bar and IT stuff, and called itself the “academic commons.” Seems like a fad in Library Land.

Nick

From: [hidden email] [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of ERIC P. CHARLES
Sent: Monday, May 16, 2011 9:43 AM
To: Victoria Hughes
Cc: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: Seth Godin : The future of the library

Nice article,
We at Altoona are looking for a new head librarian. For the past three days, I have attended talks by candidates. The consensus seems to be that he university library of the future will be a "knowledge commons". It is a awkward term, and not one speaker started out by explaining what a "commons" is. The idea seems to be a technology equipped student-union type study space, with help desks. The one redeeming notion was a shift of resources from acquisitions to human capital. This, because students still need help to lean about what resources to use, how to use, etc., plus a full range of technology help. Thus the library has no future (if a library is seen as a place where libres are stored), but the librarian might well have a very good future (with a very antiquated job title). One example was about how incredibly easy it is to get free newspaper content in real time, but how hard it is to research a newspaper story from 5 months ago. There were also some good ideas about integrating librarians into classroom instruction as new tech became available and methods of use needed to be taught to both students and professors.

Eric

On Mon, May 16, 2011 10:37 AM, Victoria Hughes <victoria@...> wrote:

Interesting perspective on the role of the librarian versus collection of print books.

<a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/%7Er/typepad/sethsmainblog/%7E3/9_9r8XmwMTU/the-future-of-the-library.html" onclick="window.open('http://feedproxy.google.com/%7Er/typepad/sethsmainblog/%7E3/9_9r8XmwMTU/the-future-of-the-library.html');return false;">The future of the library

What is a public library for?

First, how we got here:

Before Gutenberg, a book cost about as much as a small house. As a result, only kings and bishops could afford to own a book of their own.

This naturally led to the creation of shared books, of libraries where scholars (everyone else was too busy not starving) could come to read books that they didn't have to own. The library as warehouse for books worth sharing.

Only after that did we invent the librarian.

The librarian isn't a clerk who happens to work at a library. A librarian is a data hound, a guide, a sherpa and a teacher. The librarian is the interface between reams of data and the untrained but motivated user.

After Gutenberg, books got a lot cheaper. More individuals built their own collections. At the same time, though, the number of titles exploded, and the demand for libraries did as well. We definitely needed a warehouse to store all this bounty, and more than ever we needed a librarian to help us find what we needed. The library is a house for the librarian.

Industrialists (particularly Andrew Carnegie) funded the modern American library. The idea was that in a pre-electronic media age, the working man needed to be both entertained and slightly educated. Work all day and become a more civilized member of society by reading at night.

And your kids? Your kids need a place with shared encyclopedias and plenty of fun books, hopefully inculcating a lifelong love of reading, because reading makes all of us more thoughtful, better informed and more productive members of a civil society.

Which was all great, until now.

Want to watch a movie? Netflix is a better librarian, with a better library, than any library in the country. The Netflix librarian knows about every movie, knows what you've seen and what you're likely to want to see. If the goal is to connect viewers with movies, Netflix wins.

This goes further than a mere sideline that most librarians resented anyway. Wikipedia and the huge databanks of information have basically eliminated the library as the best resource for anyone doing amateur research (grade school, middle school, even undergrad). Is there any doubt that online resources will get better and cheaper as the years go by? Kids don't shlep to the library to use an out of date encyclopedia to do a report on FDR. You might want them to, but they won't unless coerced.

They need a librarian more than ever (to figure out creative ways to find and use data). They need a library not at all.

When kids go to the mall instead of the library, it's not that the mall won, it's that the library lost.

And then we need to consider the rise of the Kindle. An ebook costs about $1.60 in 1962 dollars. A thousand ebooks can fit on one device, easily. Easy to store, easy to sort, easy to hand to your neighbor. Five years from now, readers will be as expensive as Gillette razors, and ebooks will cost less than the blades.

Librarians that are arguing and lobbying for clever ebook lending solutions are completely missing the point. They are defending library as warehouse as opposed to fighting for the future, which is librarian as producer, concierge, connector, teacher and impresario.

Post-Gutenberg, books are finally abundant, hardly scarce, hardly expensive, hardly worth warehousing. Post-Gutenberg, the scarce resource is knowledge and insight, not access to data.

The library is no longer a warehouse for dead books. Just in time for the information economy, the library ought to be the local nerve center for information. (Please don't say I'm anti-book! I think through my actions and career choices, I've demonstrated my pro-book chops. I'm not saying I wantpaper to go away, I'm merely describing what's inevitably occurring). We all love the vision of the underprivileged kid bootstrapping himself out of poverty with books, but now, (most of the time) the insight and leverage is going to come from being and fast and smart with online resources, not from hiding in the stacks.

The next library is a place, still. A place where people come together to do co-working and coordinate and invent projects worth working on together. Aided by a librarian who understands the <a href="http://meshing.it/book" onclick="window.open('http://meshing.it/book');return false;">Mesh, a librarian who can bring domain knowledge and people knowledge and access to information to bear.

The next library is a house for the librarian with the guts to invite kids in to teach them how to get better grades while doing less grunt work. And to teach them how to use a soldering iron or take apart something with no user servicable parts inside. And even to challenge them to teach classes on their passions, merely because it's fun. This librarian takes responsibility/blame for any kid who manages to graduate from school without being a first-rate data shark.

The next library is filled with so many web terminals there's always at least one empty. And the people who run this library don't view the combination of access to data and connections to peers as a sidelight--it's the entire point.

Wouldn't you want to live and work and pay taxes in a town that had a library like that? The vibe of the best Brooklyn coffee shop combined with a passionate raconteur of information? There are one thousands things that could be done in a place like this, all built around one mission: take the world of data, combine it with the people in this community and create value.

We need librarians more than we ever did. What we don't need are mere clerks who guard dead paper. Librarians are too important to be a dwindling voice in our culture. For the right librarian, this is the chance of a lifetime.

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FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv

Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College

lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at <a href="http://www.friam.org" onclick="window.open('http://www.friam.org');return false;">http://www.friam.org

Eric Charles

Professional Student and
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Penn State University
Altoona, PA 16601
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Eric Charles

Professional Student and
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Penn State University
Altoona, PA 16601
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

"Her passage through her early years was a negotiation between her unruliness and society's tamings."

			Molly Peacock