BIBLIOTHEKE

From the NYTimes:

Up to now, librarians have taken the lead in developing information literacy standards and curriculums. There’s a certain paradox in that, because a lot of people assumed that the digital age would require neither libraries nor librarians. But today, students have only limited contact with librarians, particularly because they do most of their online information-seeking at home or in the dorm.

More important, leaving information literacy to librarians alone suggests a failure to understand the scope of the problem.

[…]

University librarians complain that students tend to confine their online research to Web searches, ignoring other resources that the libraries have access to, like old newspaper archives, map collections and census data.

But isn’t this largely the fault of libraries? It’s not a secret that the reason people go to Google first is because it’s simple to use, easy to get to and provides results quickly. Much too often, resources are excessively difficult to locate through online library tools and library tools are far too seperated from the rest of the ‘net.

This is right in line with something I feel very strongly about: libraries really need to recognize that the library of the future is largely a web application. In some ways this seems like an obvious point, but when I go to library web pages no one seems to be getting it. If libraries want to be relevant in the information age, they need to follow the Google model by encouraging innovation and experimentation by the staff. There also needs to be a strong culture of participation since it is highly likely that there will be staff members with technology skills far beyond their job descriptions, a natural consequence of these tools permeating all aspects of our lives.

Libraries and the wiki experiments seem to have a common struggle of balancing authority with open participation. Traditionally, libraries and librarians have depended on being authoritative sources of information, and they are trying to keep that role as information becomes distributed. Information has traditionally only been centralized relative to an area or community served by a library. Now it’s just going through another iteration. There are many folks who are great at finding and vetting info yet are not librarians, just like there are many library staff members who may know far more about online information than the librarians managing them.

To deal with this change, librarians who deal with technology need to step into the online world and recognize how the average info consumer has changed his consumption pattern. I was recently floored by a conversation involving multiple academic librarians discussing online resources for gov’t national security information. Not once were FAS, Steven Aftergood or GlobalSecurity.org mentioned. The omissions demonstrate a huge disconnect from the online world and a lack of awareness about what entities are filling the gap left by the absence of libraries online. All this doesn’t mean that the expertise of librarians is no longer needed. If anything, this article shows it’s needed now as much as ever. The problem is that librarians aren’t stepping up to the plate.

I spend a lot of time online and there seems to be a near-zero librarian presence outside of the areas that are hip for librarians to be around, which, these days, are primarily info sci blogs. If there’s no visible presence, how are folks supposed to know libraries and librarians are actually useful or needed in cyberspace? The best individual libraries can hope for is to be visible to the community they serve, but these days most library web projects are still stuck in making the user come to the website (which are largely designed as websites à la 1997 instead of web applications) and use a bunch of cumbersome tools that each behave differently from one another and Google. When given that kind of choice there is almost no question that a user will try Google Scholar first. If the trend continues, will it be any surprise that libraries will only be used as a last resort?

There are folks who get it and are developing tools that integrate libraries with the rest of the web, and we can all learn a lot from them. Efforts like theirs need to be actively encouraged and contributed to. Librarians also need to get smart about what they are getting from vendors. The whole Ariel fiasco is a perfect example of how librarians are not paying enough attention to companies we are dependent on, even when they are providing us with substandard tools. And since we can’t rely on these companies to do much innovative work, libraries should make sure they support a culture of innovation, as noted above.

In the end, what we really need to develop is a culture of technological innovation … outside of the IT departments.

This entry was posted by William J Melody @ 9:24 am and is filed under General, OSINT, Search, Library. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Note that there may be a delay when posting your comment because continued comment spam has forced me to turn on partial moderation.