Thoughts and Questions on the Future of Libraries and Librarians

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

I've been considering the future of libraries for a while, and some email discussion with Paul Miller from Panlibus got me thinking more and more of what a library should be in an age where the internet should be connecting 20% of the world's population by next year. When Web 2.0 is being transcended and included into virtual worlds - something which some people are labeling as Web 3.0, though they certainly don't understand it yet. The libraries I grew up with and in are still around - almost negligible in proportion to the years that have passed, but they remain. Fresh paint and the same old books, most of the good ones borrowed and never returned. And yet, within SecondLife, there are a few libraries.

But - as I told Paul - I'm not sure what I expect of a library in this day and age, and more importantly, the future. And I think - from what I have heard - librarians are trying to sort it out themselves. I mean - we have Wikipedia. We have Google and other search engines, we have so much information out there - and a bit (indeterminate; could be a lot) of new content is becoming part of a semantic web. What's a librarian to do?

Better, what do we expect libraries and librarians to do?

The days of books certainly aren't over. But the future holds data in many different ways. It was no mistake that I sent Paul a quote:

The library connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries.
-- Carl Sagan

I think that Sagan, as he characteristically did, hit the nail on the head. The problem is - increasingly - navigating through everything we have. Traditionally, helping navigate through these things has been the role of librarians. Smarter software helps, but it's nowhere near what it should be for the average person. And even so - we're still only at around 20% global internet penetration.

Transitioning

As more people come online, more people will be using the tools available online. It's not going to happen overnight - there's a transition happening already. Some people have access to digital knowledge, some don't - and libraries are often used as places where the transition can be made. In developed nations, this is pretty common. In developing nations, this is not as common. In fact, the same library I grew up using here in San Fernando, Trinidad and Tobago still doesn't have a computer as of a few months ago.

There's another issue, though - some material available to libraries is made available through subscriptions to content. The average person may still have to wander into a library to access that information, which in a way supports the brick and mortar library.

One of the things I appreciate in a library, though, is the quiet. Crowded homes and dorms with noisy things happening all around still can get people using a physical library; it's built and designed for study and carries with it a culture which permits study.

Digital; Library 2.0 and Beyond

More and more content is being produced digitally, and that follows the increase with not only the 'market' or people using it - but with the people creating it as well. Some of the stuff created is good, some of it bad, and deciding which is good or bad becomes a problem. An unsubstantiated rumor can spin through the blogosphere and even the mainstream media, and through sheer presence be accepted as truth for readers. Actual facts can be ignored; in fact, actual facts are often ignored in a blogosphere which is rated by popularity.

Someone needs to keep track of facts. Is that a librarian's job? I'm sure I don't know, but keeping track of those facts can be difficult. We live in a world where instead of academic papers, we cite other websites - even sources in virtual worlds. But at the tail end of a ripple, it can be hard to find the facts. So very few people seem to try. Facts can be important, but then - some facts are subject to multiple perspectives. Consider this article on Wiki Wars, where Heteroglossia demonstrates a usefulness in this regard. While the writing of such accounts may not be the job of a librarian, perhaps being able to find such resources is. They aren't all in the Wikipedia.

In fact, many academic papers explore the same things in many ways - creating a need for heteroglossia instead of citing only one reading. Librarians assist with that. Perhaps that is part of the future of a 'library' and a librarian. Instead of books on shelves, maybe it's tagging information that is useful to mankind, or could be potentially useful to mankind. If there's anything that librarians are good at - in my experience - it's at pointing people in the right direction. To do that in this day and age, you have to be able to find the facts as best as they exist - and in as many permutations as possible.

The Future

The future is, of course, full of questions - questions that need answers. My questions are insufficient, maybe there are a few useful ideas and maybe not. That's not really the point of this entry; the point is to get people who are not librarians to consider the role of librarians, libraries, and how information is used in the future. Certainly, equal rights to access to technology are a large factor, but that's transparent when it comes to the real problem - matching people to the data which they need in a real context.

There's some librarians in SecondLife trying to make something useful. If you search for 'Library' under Places using the search button, the 'The Black Rose Inn and Dungeons' presently comes up first (umm. Don't go there if you're looking for books - Second Life Library is what you want) - so the SLurl is: Info Island 100, 145, 33. Check it out, see what you like and what you don't... and pause for a moment. What is it that you would look for? What would you expect?

Operating systems, data formats... all of that pales in comparison to what we're expecting from the future. We celebrate the now so often... Maybe we just haven't found the right questions yet.