We will now turn to a discussion of "the library of the future." Lee Jaffe has graciously accepted our invitation to be the guest editor for this topic. Lee suggested this topic in volume 6, number 3, of the CRISTAL-ED LISTSERV.
Lee is a graduate of SLIS at Drexel University. He has held positions at the University of California, Berkeley, and University of Southern California. He is currently in charge of Microcomputer & Network Services at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The URL for Lee's WWW home page is http://sapphire.cse.ucsc.edu/mb/people/Spring.95/lee.jaffe
Thanks, Lee, for assuming editorship of the CRISTAL-ED LISTSERV for this two-week discussion of "the library of the future." We anticipate an interesting discussion.
I have two reasons for posing this exercise. First, much of the argument that libraries will be relevant in the future depends on the notion that electronic media won't completely replace print. (Alternatively, some argue that e-media will replace print and libraries will therefore be irrelevant.)
Can we envision a possible or probable or desireable library that is all electronic? (YES/NO responses won't be accepted. You have to say what such a library would 'look' like and how it would work.)
If not, if electronic media are going to be simply added to the mix of available information formats, then that is a very potent argument for the success of libraries of the future.
If so (and this is the more interesting leg of the debate for me), is such a service still a library? How? And to what extent are librarian skills relevant to its operation? And what changes would we need to make in order for them to be more so?
My second reason for posing these questions is that a lot of the debate about such resources has focused on the means, not the ends. I'd like to see some thoughtful consideration of whether this future is a desireable one. Can we paint a positive picture of a 'brave new' library? If we can determine that there is something worth working towards, then we can start thinking seriously about strategies for moving in that direction.
It's my view that before we can begin to discuss what the future library will be like it would be good to make some assumptions about the society of the future and work from there. Your present posture is that the technology will direct this question. This may be so, but in the final analysis I will be uncomfortable with this premise without the understanding that I am suggesting.
For one thing, any such discussion will not be serious unless we state very carefully our time-frame: an infinite future? the length of an average work-life of present LIS graduates? the length of an average first job for them? Is it really either relevant or possible to make any firm predictions about our society or technological developments for longer than 10 to 20 years? Is it sensible to extrapolate from selected technological trends today to any more than 5 to 10 years? Just look back at the Bold New World predictions of Lancaster and Licklieder about the proximate (20 years hence) paperless society and the demise of books written in the 1960s and 1970s. Then laugh at the whole "blue sky" game as another escapist joke that wears a propeller hat.
>It's my view that before we can begin to discuss what the future library will be like it would be good to make some assumptions about the society of the future and work from there. Your present posture is that the technology will direct this question...
I must concur with Debons' comment. Why not begin first with "information users" -- in this case it seems appropriate to refer to them as people. :)
I have just read Carolyn Kuhlthau's Seeking Meaning: A Process Approach to Library and Information Services. Kuhlthau, Dervin, Hale, and others remind those of us who care about "library services" that we must ask "How do we intervene in the information seeking process?" To accomplish such an intervention has always offered challenges. For decades we (library service providers) insisted that information seekers come to us. It is no surprise to any of us that information seekers now have increased alternatives (some of them are even substantive, quality alternatives) to satisfy their info needs without ever placing a foot in our buildings.
Perhaps, then, we should begin our wondering with the question, "How do we (information mediators/counselors) intervene in the information seeking process in a "non-library" of the future?
I like the blue sky approach. It should suffice to set your own parameters for the future. We will need to communicate what we as establish as our own parameters. We could categorize them later if needed.
Also, we must already begin to think beyond humans as our customer base. By becoming more knowledgeable of web-crawling robots and their capabilities, perhaps we will be able to provide the world with guidelines for organizing their information with retrieval in mind.
We'll all bring our own paradigms to light in our individual visions. However, if we come to some kind of consensus on the rules of a future library, I'm afraid the end result will be tunnel vision.
As a practicing librarian, I've followed this discussion with interest. I appreciate all your work in providing us with the best graduates available.
>predictions about our society or technological developments for longer than 10 to 20 years? Is it sensible to extrapolate from selected technological trends today to any more than 5 to 10 years. Just look back at the Bold New World predictions of Lancaster and Licklieder about the proximate (20 years hence), paperless society and the demise of books written in the 1960s and 1970s. Then laugh at the whole "blue sky" game as another escapist joke that wears a propeller hat.
On the other hand, it is quite amazing to look back at Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think" written in 1945. Fifty years later it appears to be quite prescient. A copy of it may be found at:
http://www.csi.uottawa.ca/~dduchier/misc/vbush/as-we-may-think.html
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Perhaps a relevant question is how has social change and technology affected the communities that we serve. The library is not seen as a relevant information source for many of the technical questions which my agency gets on a daily basis, but I function much as a ready reference person for topics peripheral to what we do. I don't sense a pending demise of an institution so much as a marked change in the nature of the information which we collect and access. Our users are more knowledgeable about basic matters so the level of what they seek goes up. So, will this trend continue and how do we house the sources? Is it by databases, locations on the WWW which require better electronic connections or having a physical environment which facilitates more variety of uses.
Trends toward condos and small apartments may make a library an inviting alternative to noise and congestion.If it is conveniently located in areas where the majority of its users live, it will be a viable entity. Dial-up access is popular but many people do not and will not have computers in their homes for a long time to come so how can this be handled fairly?
In metro areas where large numbers of people must commute to their jobs, how is information access going to be handled if their community was laid out in the era of the streetcar but they can live as far away as fifty miles?
In rural areas, will CNN and satellite dishes become part of a communication link which can be used to distribute information? In northern regions of North America, libraries cope with brutal conditions and as many as six time zones to deliver information and materials to distant individuals. Can their experiences offer a clue as to what people in the lower 40 may have to do?
People have kept predicting some really advanced uses of technology by the year 2000 but the really major change in communication that I have noticed come down to two innovations: The fax machine and the cellular telephone. In libraries it is CD-ROM and the On-Line services.
Certainly a research library, but almost any kind of library, has to make some kind of commitment to keeping the information and guaranteeing its availability over an extended period of time. It is this that distinguishes libraries from bookstores, publishers, and much of what exists on the network in electronic form.
Many corollaries flow from this, including implications for cataloging, implications for authentication and integrity, implications for long-term staffing and funding and implications for parent institutions considering what it means to fund a library in the electronic environment.
I develop this at more length in an article scheduled I believe for the July issue of C&RL, "Requirements for the Digital Research Library." The text is available now at URL:http://aultnis.rutgers.edu/texts/drc.html.
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Publishers, booksellers, subscription agents and libraries exist the way they do because of the nature of print. They exist to make print on paper work as a communication medium. The form in which they exist is because books are static artifacts that cost a lot in comparison with an individual's appetite to use them and require expertise and expense to produce.
In a networked world the support organizations which make networked communication workable will be quite different. The question we should ask is what these groupings might be. Certainly they may be quite different.
I was thinking in far more concrete terms when I originally proposed this topic. For example, not far down the road from where I work, they are proposing to build a new California State University campus on the site of the former Fort Ord. In the process there have been some very provocative statements made about plans not to include a library building because of an assumption that electronic media will make libraries as places obsolete. (The problems with this plan have been already discussed at length and I'm definitely not inviting comments on these points in this forum.) As short-sighted as the proposal was, it posed some interesting questions that were the seeds of my suggestion for this discussion.
I found myself debating colleagues who gave what I thought were formulaic answers about what it would take to start a new library today. It seemed to me that if you were going to be starting with a clean slate, the library based upon current tools and perhaps a different understanding of the direction library services would be taking should look at least somewhat different than one designed 50, 30, or 10 years ago.
How far could we go with readily available technology? How much of the needed information is already out there and how available is the technology for getting the rest?
I suppose you could see this as a technology driven proposition (as someone put forward), unless you made a couple of reasonable assumptions. The first and foremost thrust of this proposition would be to improve service. There are users, an increasingly vocal and influential set, who can make more effective use of resources online than of those in print. The second assumption is that currently we don't do a very good job of delivering information in print. We're long familiar with the problems of print as a retrieval and delivery mechanism. In libraries, we spend a lot of time explaining those problems to our users in the hope that they will accept them. But there are a lot of things that we don't do well, or don't do at all, right now, that we could do if we moved more services to electronic media.
The second issue that the CSU proposal made very clear to me was that, if librarians were acutely aware of the complexities of the question and the subsequent need to study the points and to not make any moves before careful plans could be formulated, the rest of the world was not. In other words, if librarians aren't ready, we're going to be left behind. I was amused by the comment about needing a timeframe for this discussion. My answer is, "It was yesterday. We may already be too late."
I think librarians are already in the position of having to do a lot of running to get in front of the pack of people who are trying to shape the next generation of information services. If we wait much longer -- "Let's have a meeting to discuss the possibility of creating a task force to plan the planning meeting..." -- we'll miss the van completely. We need to be active and involved and we cannot afford to be seen as reactive or unimaginative as this momentum builds.
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