Why Libraries?

It is evident that American public libraries are in the midst of an evolutionary moment, where they must reshape their mission or become less than they have been. A core competency of collecting and distributing information is coming to be done better in other ways. Yet this is not all that libraries provide, and to understand the evolutionary moment it is necessary to know what they have been—beginning with Andrew Carnegie’s offer to local communities and the founding of the institution. Carnegie, a 19th century industrialist, upon retiring made a radical philanthropic offer: he would build and stock a library for any community that vowed to maintain and operate it. Between 1881 and 1917 his foundation, investing the equivalent of $3 billion today, built 1800 public libraries, making them durable, useful, and appealing enough to allow many of them to still be in operation now.

From the start, the libraries’ mission was community self-support. Women often cast their first votes in library referendums. In an era of heavy immigration, patrons came to learn English and other work prerequisites and (in reading for pleasure) to exercise their imaginations. They found their materials via browsable shelves, card catalogs, and the mediation of librarians. Then program areas emerged, to provide thematic gateways into the library’s resources. Patrons now came also for children’s, youth, or retiree programs; to search for jobs or to access government data; or for a host of other programs and services. There begin to be classes, exhibits, and community meetings. The larger libraries even offered lectures and concerts. With time, library collections expanded beyond books and periodicals to include audio-visual materials and then computer terminals.

And now, at the moment of change, we find public libraries to be thriving. From 1991 to 2002 (the period when the Internet came into general use, and its conversational capabilities emerged), library visits increased by 27%, circulation by 41%, and reference transactions by 14%. The year 2004 saw 1.3 billion visits, 304 million reference transactions, 708 million check-outs of children’s materials (35% of total check-outs), 55 million sign-ups for children’s programs, and 170 thousand public use Internet terminals. In one study, 67% of respondents said libraries were very valuable to their community; 78% said something essential and valuable would be lost if their library closed. Operating costs were $9.1 billion, of which 81% came through local taxes: often grudgingly, but still in keeping with institutional history, where the Carnegie grants made localities fund operations.

These details only begin to sketch the public library as a community center and repository, with a solid base and a strong growth potential. To the sketch must be added the library that strives to be both a lifelong learning center and—today, with the nation more splintered by class than during its immigrant past—a concentrated resource for the disadvantaged. To it also must be added the 45,000 librarians (30,000 with master’s degrees) who—peering ahead, to envision these libraries joined in an ecosystem—form the basis for a national network.

Raising the questions:
Do you agree that the library’s core mission of collecting and distributing information is coming to be done better in other ways?

If so, what new roles has the library taken on in the digital age? And is this a sufficient mission to justify our collective, continued investment in libraries for the future?

Where do you see the balance between the library’s role vis-à-vis information, and vis-à-vis place? How would you balance these roles in the library of the future?

What would such a library look like?

Be sure to check back for the complete next draft of “Why Libraries,” incorporating your feedback!

Complementing efforts to reinvent libraries as public spaces, an ad hoc movement is trying to reinvent them as public networks. It gathers library professionals fluent in the Internet and the idea of an information commons, and is often called Library 2.0 or Librarian 2.0. Its mission is to create physical and online practices that can strengthen the networking abilities of libraries in their communities.

Working locally, the participants face the many issues standing between libraries and their reinvention. Equity, the digital divide, is an overriding moral issue, in that poorer communities often have less endowed libraries, with little money for technology and education; and there is a second digital divide among the generations. The movement also faces difficult infrastructure issues. The integrated library systems installed over past decades are inflexible and closed, and their vendors lack the market-size-driven scalability to quickly launch more open platforms. In addition, library services and policies are governed by pre-Internet rules regarding privacy and intellectual property; this hampers (as does, also, the lack of a supporting web services framework) the kinds of sharing, guiding, and collaborating introduced above.

Still, the Internet-influenced librarians are planting flags in this collaborative domain. They envision a local library framed more by user needs than organizational constraints. So they work to enable customizable online access, of the sort social networking sites allow. They also work to make users participatory, by (again, imitating social networking sites) letting them enrich catalog listings with ratings and comments. They push ahead, too, with other minimally funded efforts to make libraries more collaborative. Many have patron-facing blogs, and they experiment with user wikis and blogs, syndication, and other social software tools. Relatedly, they try to enrich the physical library as a conversation space by introducing new information-based programs and social events.

These beginning efforts to reinvent public libraries as physical, public spaces and local network hubs point to how, in a fully-connected Internet era, they may manifest as essential community institutions. The buildings would be flexible venues equally suited for collaboration and individual learning. As such, they would in their simplest definition be lifelong learning centers. In some communities sharing space with other civic or business entities, they would provide both an element of the commons and an intellectual-creative anchor. Their value would deepen as their online presence grew. As the hubs of participatory networks, they would be the local, public frameworks for the Internet. They would enlist network effects, first, by amplifying the resources of local government bodies, non-profit agencies, and library-centric volunteers. As participatory networks linked up regionally (Peachnet and Solinet are examples of current, closed regional networks) and then nationally, the infrastructure would strengthen further. The public library would be a living network, comprising information resources, communities of practice, and trained, often specialized librarians.

To see the public library as an active community hub is to change the discussion of its sustainability. Born to support the working class, it has been a natural bureaucracy, with a professional staff, an expensive archive, a funding model based on local taxes, and few opportunities for volunteerism. The Internet, however, points to a library that entails a far greater level of citizen involvement. This in itself extends and makes more perpetual the philanthropic impulse that put public libraries on the cultural map. It also suggests a funding conversation that will have many more local citizens looking for ways (sometimes creative, and perhaps tapping the network) to keep their libraries sustained.

Raising the questions:

How do you market the library to community members who might rather sit at home to work on a personal computer? Does it benefit the community if the library works to attract more patrons, for instance with coffee shops and appealing common spaces?

Does the library then become a public workspace, and nothing more? What do, or can, libraries add to user experiences with electronic media?

What if most patrons access the library website (with its databases, etc.) from home via the internet? How does this change the library’s mission, or does it?

Is the library the best of all possible public portals?

Next Wednesday: The Historical Library Model: Reconciling Current Successes and the Need for Change

Libraries for the Future is using this space to post six excerpts of a provocative new white paper in the hope that library supporters, advocates, and skeptics will read and comment, helping us to refine the arguments in it.

The Internet’s development and falling access costs—$300 PCs and $150/year broadband access, with prices still dropping—have begun to challenge public libraries. At a time when 45% of public libraries report flat or decreased funding, some voices now question their usefulness. Wouldn’t we better use our taxes, they ask, to bring the broadband Internet into the homes of our disadvantaged citizens?

That question, which may be asked more often as Internet services expand, drives the public library to self definition—beyond its accumulated goodwill, and beyond its multi-decade effort to graft new tools and usage models onto an infrastructure based on print. The public library must tease out its mission, which in part may be more implicit than expressed, and rebuild from there. That it has begun this effort is evident in the half-decade discussion that has been under way concerning the information commons.

This discussion originated not in library circles but in other conversations about community and the commons. Those concerning physical community were explored earlier in this paper. Those pertaining to the Internet and the most influential (with the closer ties to economic forces) grew out of the open source software movement. It was here that some dangers presented by the information revolution to the public good, and some responses, were first articulated. In software, private ownership was viewed as the danger: companies that by controlling their source code set barriers to usage and (more importantly, in this fast-changing milieu) kept users from improving their tools. Shouldn’t some source code, the movement asked, be in the public domain? Wasn’t open access and public participation the best route to good, efficiently made software? The resulting grassroots achievements—the Linux operating system is an example—became a major agent of change.

The public domain model—it was also called the commons model, in the sense that a park (including hunting rights in the park) can be held in a public commons—was extended by people concerned with the Internet as a publishing platform. Again, private ownership was the issue: large publishers bent on tightly controlling use of their content, and forcing small publishers to follow suit. The grassroots response was to develop a licensing commons, which enables publishers to choose among varying models (some more commercial, some more open to public participation) for how their creative works are used, edited, reproduced, and distributed.

These movements gave birth to the idea of the information commons, which reimagines, for the Internet era, the collection management aspects of the public library mission. It suggests a milieu in which all information (print and digital, commercial and public domain, fixed and editable, the many hybrids) resides in a commons where, as in public libraries, the whole is treated as a public cultural resource. Thus, access to almost all commercial information would be a public right—making the gaining of access, via various funding strategies, to any particular information resource a public access negotiation.

Public libraries would be an important steward of this commons. Practically, they would manage and distribute resources, while continuing to use their programming skills to engage and satisfy their patrons. As advocates for these patrons, they would continue to support positions and develop practices that (with regard to the free flow of ideas, equitable access, diversity, and other themes) serve the common good. And in their role as guides, they would grow adept at leading patrons to conversational networks, and would host some such networks.

The conceptual nature of these ideas suggests a need for models and testbeds. Yet, it also points to a second set of social issues, beyond the partial, perhaps majority migration from print to digital that the Internet creates. The Internet lets people follow their interests and communicate across physical distances. But it provides little support for local community—people in their physical settings, amid their local social networks. Thus, a set of models and testbeds would also address how the Internet can support—coevolve with—local communities.

Raising the questions:

If public money goes to the common good of information management, why libraries? Why not apply the money to, say, digitization?

Should everything be available to everyone? Where do we draw the line between public and private information? And who makes the call?

What incentive does any of us have to visit the library these days? Think about your most recent visit to your community library. Was it about:

- Finding information on your own
- Finding an item to borrow for entertainment purposes
- Finding someone to help you find information
- Visiting a free common space
- Meeting/seeing neighbors
- Participating in a program
- Donating books or time
- Getting out of the house

Where would you have gone if not the public library?
Next Wednesday: Libraries as Public Networks: Whither Library 2.0?

Libraries for the Future is using this space to post six excerpts of a provocative new white paper in the hope that library supporters, advocates, and skeptics will read and comment, helping us to refine the arguments in it.

Printed materials and local librarians have always been, and remain, at the core of the public library. Yet, the model has been in flux for decades, under the challenge of new media—audio and video recordings, PCs, then the Web. There has been a hard, successful effort to integrate these media and in so doing to offer better services. Yet, now the new medium begins to disrupt the core model. We have entered a media landscape in which most information may not reside in books, in which conversations may often replace narratives, and in which local librarians may often not be the best or most accessible guides to context. If there is the promise of a new kind of library with unmatched resources, there also is a danger that public libraries, unless reconceived, may come to be the “old bottles” that the “new wine” of the Internet cracks and then breaks.

What this all suggests is a platform revolution. Its first basic element is the digital library, as comprised both in the mass digitization projects underway (with private sector backing) at some major university libraries, and in the new publishing formats, like blogs and podcasts, that have emerged in the last decade. The digitization of library collections—an expensive prospect in the short-term—points to a time when most archived print materials will have digital copies, which can—with little or no added cost in the long-term—be duplicated, distributed, edited, excerpted, and linked to. The new publishing formats, on the other hand, point to an information landscape that will have many times more publishers than the print era sustained, and in which most of these publishers will distribute first and foremost to the Internet.

The revolution’s second basic element derives from the new publishing paradigm: some information will be better presented in a conversation than in a linear narrative. In print, narrative style has been the key to good presentation, for fiction but also non-fiction—say, a book about cocker spaniels. Yet the Internet provides, via blogs, wikis, discussion groups, narrative elements, and links, the opportunity for a richer conversation about this breed than a printed book can provide. Already, people with an interest in some kinds of materials that find their way into books, and so onto library shelves, have come to prefer using non-linear Internet resources.

The third basic element relates directly: the conversational Internet, which encourages readers to contribute to content creation, points to a milieu in which elements of context and guidance—what librarians have traditionally provided—are embedded within the content and easily accessible via links. The participatory networks that are gaining in popularity daily sketch a publishing platform that will provide context and guidance using wikis (a “spaniel” wiki for pet owners, another for third grade science students), expert blogs (a breeder’s journal), and interest group discussions. They will also make it easier to interact remotely with specialist librarians—since, presumably, all this information can still benefit from organization and interpretation by humans you can trust.

Raising the questions:

Do we still need librarians at all? If so, how has the role of the librarian changed – and become more or less vital – in the Internet age?

Libraries offer their patrons many expensive electronic resources that are not available on the free Internet (such as Lexis/Nexis, business databases, and specialized medical references). Is it worth the public expense? And who benefits?

The current push toward digitization is expensive. Who should pay? What if the bulk of the effort – and expense – were left to the free market?

Next Wednesday: Can Public Money Be Better Spent?: Thoughts on the Public Domain

“The standards of our behavior must be derived, not from the capability of technology, but from the nature of places and communities.”
– Wendell Berry, Life Is A Miracle

Libraries for the Future is using this space to post six excerpts of a provocative new white paper in the hope that library supporters, advocates, and skeptics will read and comment, helping us to refine the arguments in it.

An irony faces the creators of the Internet—its designers, coders, and business strategists—in that while they market to individuals, and focus on remote experiences, they report caring deeply about their own physical experiences, including their access to local, physical community. To be more exact, they make products that often help to wall people up from their local environments, but choose not to live in a walled-up way themselves.

That they do not is shown in studies of this “creative class” that have surfaced in recent years. Cultural creatives, the studies show, want a lively local scene—where they can meet different kinds of people, be near cultural venues, and have a street life to participate in. They start companies in places that offer these amenities. What they leave are industrial cities blighted by decay, and industrial suburbs blighted by strip malls and a lack of pedestrian access. Yet, they market the Internet as “virtual community” to people who, living in this industrial mainstream, lack the local, physical community that they themselves say they need.

At present, the value the Internet may bring to physical communities is unknown. But its reach into U.S. homes (two of three have broadband access today) is making local institutions rethink their roles. The notion of local, physical community is being reexamined in its civic, cultural, and archival capacities. Perhaps the most central of these institutions is the public library.

The public library has for two centuries been a trusted gateway to information and ideas. It has been a lifelong learning center. It has been a public place that welcomed all. It has been a community developer, marshalling resources needed for community, business, and non-profit growth. And it has been a civic integrator, helping newcomers but also documenting public memory and providing a neutral platform for the debate of public issues. It has provided, with its reading room conventions of quiet, solitary work, a limited and improvable kind of social space. It has also—with a tradition of tax-based funding—provided a limited and improvable model of itself as a community hub, a place that patrons might actively contribute to.

The abyss the high tech creative community faces is that information economy efficiencies may prove to be as harmful to local life as were industrial economy efficiencies. Selling to groups instead of individuals adds cost and complexity, thus a hallmark feature of the last decade has been information personalization, which helps individuals pursue online interests beyond their local life. This new capability, which Internet-related companies promote heavily, raises quality of life issues for people who want to live in a vibrant local community. It also raises issues of national economic vitality. Innovations are often born locally, as public libraries have always known. They may be as big as Silicon Valley, born around Palo Alto, or as modest as a local business that friends spot a need for. But their seeds are often in local knowledge and society. If, in the move from an industrial to an information economy, local relationships continue to lose their link to economic and cultural opportunity, a wellspring of innovation will be lost. For the information economy to be a truly vitalizing local force, it must have a local civic footprint of the sort that public libraries provide.

Raising the questions:

How has the new information economy affected the look and feel of your community? In what ways do people seem “walled up” and in what ways connected? What role does the library play in all this?

If we grant that the “creative class” share a common longing for physical community, what does the library add to quality of life that can’t be accomplished by parks and playgrounds?

Next Wednesday: Information Exchange: The New Medium Disrupts the Core Model

In the weeks to come, Libraries for the Future will use this space to post six excerpts of a provocative new white paper in the hope that library supporters, advocates, and skeptics will read and comment, helping us to refine the arguments in it. The paper, prepared with the help of L.D. Gussin, covers questions both philosophical and practical; your comments on both counts are welcome.

The paper asks, in a changing information landscape – and in an increasingly competitive field for public support, money, attention, and use – why libraries?

Public libraries—there are 16,500 of them in the U.S., outnumbering McDonald’s outlets—are a rooted, often treasured institution in our towns, suburbs, and urban neighborhoods. Most people who move somewhere new will early on visit, with a sense of goodwill, the local library. Inside, they will glance from the browsing shelves to the reference desk to the computer stations, and get their bearings by relating what they see to the libraries of their youth. The contained low hum and the different movement patterns of the generations will also be familiar. Because these newcomers are now, perhaps for the first time since their move, in a public cultural space, they may look around to get a better picture of their neighbors.

The nostalgic comforts of a 21^st century public library are juxtaposed with signs of recent revolution. As the nation’s premier source of free Internet access, libraries have both continued their role as upholder of democratic access and increased their own use considerably (between 1996-2001, coinciding with the rise of the Internet, library visits increased by 17%.). The recognition that local public libraries are playing pivotal roles in the Internet era has led to the seeds of a redesign movement that ties together two areas of thought. One reimagines the library in its role as a public place, drawing on a new urbanism that seeks to correct the problems of suburban sprawl. The other reimagines libraries as local, physical hubs, anchoring today’s growing information sprawl.

The movement to create more and better public places builds from the case that a fading industrial economy has isolated its people. Mostly traveling by car, new urbanists say, we go from work, where competition often fosters isolation, to media-saturated homes, or commercial places like malls, or individually-oriented places like fitness centers. We have few opportunities to share in meaningful activities with neighbors and friends—to interact socially in ways not heavily shadowed by commercial forces. What is needed, they say, are third places, beyond home and work (and whether in city, town, or suburb), which are shaped by public interest rather than by business interests.

Well-designed public spaces, they claim, create feelings of comfort, safety, pleasure, and belonging. They foster friendship, conversation, collaboration, and exposure to diverse cultures and ideas. In promoting local pride and volunteerism, they make communities more self-governing. And, in enhancing small business opportunities and real estate values in the surrounding areas, they build and support the local economy.

While the public places advocated here include parks, commercial areas under small-scale local governance, and other venues, the place that has always anchored local cultural exchange is the public library. Thus, recent years have seen efforts to redesign libraries—a notable result being the new Seattle Central Public Library, which the Gates Foundation helped to build. There, easy Internet access and areas for relaxing and conversing create new levels of flexibility and social opportunity.

This cause has also been taken up by William Mitchell, former dean of the MIT school of architecture, who now sees libraries—in their history and opportunity—as centers of knowledge and innovation, and so as enablers of communities of practice in science, business, and the arts. Thus, he foresees a future local public library that, as a lifelong learning center, would support a full cycle of knowledge activities, both cultural and economic. Its community of users would engage in cycles of information-based activities that variously included acquiring and sharing; creating, producing, and fabricating; and collaborating, mentoring, and incubating. As needed, they would be able to work or relax alone or in almost any social configuration. (Dr. Mitchell is collaborating with Libraries for the Future on a design charrette to design – well, libraries for the future.)

A community center that dynamic and flexible requires new physical and network infrastructures, and Dr. Mitchell anticipates building-wide intelligence and Internet access, as well as software and online content that better helps users. While the breadth of this imagined change points to the need for further discussion and testbeds, it is useful here to follow Mitchell a bit further in his thinking. He foresees a library that uses unobtrusive technology to enhance social collaboration. With a new willingness to learn from space developers and retail markets, it is a better public space with a more efficient substructure. In all, it reflects a deliberate decision to focus on the library as the natural center for civic life; as the common ground between information business and information users; and as the obvious “third place” for our communities of the future.

Raising the questions:

Why libraries? If not libraries, who else could serve this role of “third place”?

Or does the Internet indeed replace this need for a physical local center?

Next Wednesday: Even Tech Geeks Live in Towns: The Need for Local Community