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 My local library in Belconnen has a few collections of outdated encyclopedia books, subscribes to some magazines that have the best pages ripped out of, and has the daily newspaper out of which the best news items have been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

Libraries are dead

In writing a paper for my Masters of Knowledge Management a few years ago, I studied the concept of Information Literacy. I found a surprising number of references to librarians and libraries and an expression that it was important to teach people how to find things in the library (and other information stores) in order to equip them with life skills. These skills, allegedly, would help individuals to be life-learners. It all sounded very nice, but it didn’t sit right with me. Having been a teacher, I was wondering why libraries were teaching people skills outside of an actual applied learning task? Something was wrong with this picture and I think it has something to do with the death of libraries.

The American Library Association’s (ALA) Presidential Committee on Information Literacy suggests that, “to be information literate, a person must be able to recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information” (1989) [1].

I think this statement is great. I also think that because librarians are information specialists they have amazing skills and insight that they should be sharing what they know. Unfortunately, the research seems to indicate that a librarian’s view of information literacy is more about teaching secondary and tertiary school students to be mini-librarians and use libraries, and less about giving them skills that they can generalise to other situations that require them to find information. Furthermore, I think it reinforces the traditional librarian’s view that they are the gatekeepers of knowledge and you need to come to them in order to receive information-enlightenment.

One of my consultancy roles at SMS is as an information architect. In this role I help classify and structure information for clients so that other people can easily find it by themselves. Clients usually think that this is a good idea because we live in a self-service world and want to ensure that their information can be easily found, either through browsing or searching, instead of teaching people how to use a system that just isn’t intuitive. A colleague of mine recently said, “if you need to put out a guide on how to use your website, then the interface you’ve designed has failed it’s primary task - to be usable”.

From discussions with users people just don’t want to go to librarians to use them in their traditional role of information gatekeepers or information brokers because, particularly with the explosion of consumer-driven information sites, blogs, reviews, and wikis, a visit to the library to find information just isn’t convenient. People want instant gratification and so want the ability to search and browse til they find the information they’re after. While some authors continue to claim that information is not as easy to find as pressing a ’search’ button [4], the reality is that in 2007, with Google, Google Books or Google Scholar, people expect it to be. The last thing they want is to have to go to an individual, try to communicate to them what they’re looking for, and then wait til that person brings it back to them. Unfortunately, for me, this is stirs images of the grey haired, glasses wearing old lady - the local librarian - who wants to play the role of information broker.

When the National Library of Australia realised people weren’t coming to ask librarians to help them find information they decided to build an online service - Libraries Australia. In its last evolution, chief librarian and CEO, Jan Fullerton, was hailing to the press as Google for Libraries. Nothing could be further than the truth. They got a graphic designer to come up with a look and then squeezed an interface into it and claimed to those who looked at it that it was accessible and usable - but of course it wasn’t. When this new version was released about two years ago, it had three separate search screens, lots of check-boxes for options to search various databases. The search results were not collated as you would expect but separated by database on the first results page in groups of 10 with options to save records into big lists for later use. Google Books does it much better. Amazon has been successfully giving people easy access to books for a long time and have done a great job as well.

The usability workshops indicated that people just couldn’t use Libraries Australia. It was even tested with Vision Australia who reinforced what I already knew - it wasn’t usable by people who were vision impaired. When the findings were presented, the Powers That Bejust checked that they had done disability access testing and moved on…. …the list of horrors just goes on and on. It was a horror project and I hated working on it. In reality, they had not built a Google for libraries, they had just built another complex system for librarians so they could continue to play the role of gatekepper and information broker.

So does this make librarians and libraries irrelevant? Do we need librarians or libraries any more? Are libraries dead? Since this is just my blog, and just my opinion, I’ll take a leap, brave the flames to follow, and say, “yes, libraries are dead”.

In Australia, funding for the National Library decreases every year, while there is an expectation that they will continue to collect national treasures. Why? The government simple considers them of low priority because the community cares very little about the library. If librarians continue to make information tools that serve only themselves, if they continue to use complex taxonomies that require non-librarians to be trained to use it, then libraries will continue to be seen to be irrelevant by the general public.

If librarians continue to believe that information literacy is about them teaching people how to be researchers and mini-librarians and how to use libraries, then yes, I think libraries will continue to die a slow death. In a global society where information is being liberated and an age of true electronic democracy is dawning, so long as librarians continue to stay in the library, libraries will die.

So what will resurrect libraries?

Martin [2] says:

Libraries are social agencies. They exist to serve specific needs in our society. Changes in the environment in which libraries operate — in the technological infrastructure through which we deliver services, in the economic substrate that finances operations, in the social landscape that defines the communities that libraries serve — dictate corresponding changes in the way libraries [need to] structure and deliver services.

For me, the important statement Martin makes is that libraries need to exist to serve specific needs in our society, but that does that really mean for libraries in the 21st century?

Unfortunately, I don’t have the answer to this question.

At the moment I can only see the internet becomming the single port of call for people around the world to access information. People want access to information to be simple and social networking has begun to meet that challenge by providing a place where people can interact and inform others of their experiences (or even simply rate how valuable they found a piece of information). This interaction is filling a social need as well as an information need. How valuable would you find it to have a librarian make comments on the value of a particular book on Amazon over another? What about a librarian joining your MySpace community [3] to help where information is being shared or making blogs outside of the library/librarian space where other communities live? I’d find it invaluable!

Let the resurrection begin!

M

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[1] Wikipedia. Online at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_literacy, accessed on 19 January 2007

[2] Martin, R.S. 2004. Libraries and librarians in the 21st century: Fostering a learning society. C&RL News, December, 65, 11.

[3] It’s already happening … which is just way-cool. If only more librarians were like this! http://librarygarden.blogspot.com/2006/04/myspace-and-social-networking-sites.html, accessed on 19 January 2007.

[4] Webber, S. 2004. Myths and opportunities. Library Association Record, 103 (9), 548-549. Online at: http://dis.shef.ac.uk/literacy/lar0901.htm, accessed on 19 January 2007.