Missy Higgins and the slow death of libraries

This morning I was checking my blog stats and found that someone had used a search engine query with the words “the slow death of libraries” to arrive here. It reminded me of some posts I made earlier about libraries and librarians and a comment made by Missy Higgins at her concert here in Canberra last weekend.

Missy had spent the day doing touristy-things before her concert on Saturday night. She even went to visit the National Library of Australia. When she arrived she thought “Wow! I bet really smart people go in there”. She then proceeded to go around the side of the building and use the climbing wall. Later during the concert, Missy also made a comment about the difference between people who would see a building like that and want to climb over it, rather than go inside it.

It doesn’t surprise me that people associate libraries with really smart people. It also doesn’t surprise me that Missy didn’t go inside. Most people still consider libraries as places where you find books, or go to find some journals to do some academic research. For the most part, I think most of us go to google when we’re looking for information, rather than getting in the car and driving to the local library. For me, Google gives me access to so much information! My local library in Belconnen has a few collections of outdated encyclopedia books, subscribes to some magazines that have the best pages ripped out of, and has the daily newspaper out of which the best news items have been taken away. Sure, the Belconnen community library has free internet access - so long as I book a block of 30 minutes and ensure that the sites I want to visit arn’t blocked.

I know libraries and librarians have been trying to break into the 21st century and become part of the knowledge economy. Unfortunately, here in Australia, the majority adhere to practices I can best describe as enterprise 1.0, rather than enterprise 2.0. It might be because of funding - the Federal Government cares little for the Library as a cultural institution. It might be because Australian culture lags behind when it comes to thinking on how such a precious resource a library can evolve to meet the demands of users. It might be because we’re all talking about the Social Web, and Web 2.0, and overlooking our own backyards that hold such rich treasure.

All I know is that in my time at the National Library I saw the politics of librarians - a want to align more closely to academics, and no wish to ‘do children or schools’. Sadly, it’s an unwritten polcy that extends to the states and even local councils. I studied the information literacy movement in the USA and saw policy in information literacy that was more about reinforcing librarians as gatekeepers of information, rather than enablers. I’ve been involved in projects, like Libraries Australia, that held such great promise, but have only resulted in interfaces designed for librarians and not Joe Citizen.

While Drucker tells us that the only way that knowledge can give you power is if you give it away, my Australian experience sees librarians attempting to reinforce their role as the community gatekeepers of knowledge and information. They’re still living in a knowledge worker 1.0 world, rather than, as Andrew Boyd so elegantly described it in his wikipedia entry, the knowledge worker 2.0 world.

…it’s no wonder that Missy didn’t go inside.

M

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