Can Architects Save Libraries from the Internet?

theodp writes "Slate has an interesting photo essay exploring the question of how to build a public library in the age of Google, Wikipedia, and Kindle. The grand old reading rooms and stacks of past civic monuments are giving way to a new library-as-urban-hangout concept, as evidenced by Seattle's Starbucks-meets-mega-bookstore central library and Salt Lake City's shop-lined education mall. Without some dramatic changes, The Extinction Timeline predicts libraries will R.I.P. in 2019."

Comments

The better question is: should they?

[blind biker]

Since I started my studies, I spent exactly 0 hours and 0 minutes in the university libraries. I access all the scientific material online, and even the books. Those very few books that I could not find in electronic form online (and by online I mean in our university's electronic library) and I could not do without, I bought them. But the idea of walking into the library, borrow a book and then return in in one week, it just feels impractical at this point, to me.

For antique books, sure, libraries will always exist, but even there I'd prefer to see them as conservation points where they are transferred into electronic format(s) made available online. Being an antique book collector myself, I would hate to know that precious antique books are being touched by people who don't wash their hands, or worse.

So basically, I don't think libraries have much reason to exist in their current form. Perhaps something like a public study-and-discussion place, with refreshments and internet access?

Re:The better question is: should they?

[mdd4696]

I am a Computer Engineering student graduating this spring and I have spent many hours in the library. Many books I use are available electronically but I prefer to have the actual paper version because I find them easier to read and easier to search through. Also they do not have the multitude of distractions (IM, games, websites) that are on my laptop, which is very nice when I'm studying.

I like going to the library just to browse and to see what I can find. I would be quite sad if libraries were to disappear.

Re:The better question is: should they?

[Naughty Bob]

I don't think you can get a better question than 'Can Architects Save Libraries from the Internet?', only different ones:

Can jealousy save biscuits from a motorbike?

Can mice protect oscilloscopes from Scientology?

Should tardigrades steal tarte-tatin from the middle-eight of Lynyrd Skynyrd's Freebird?

Tune in next week, same bat-time etc. etc....

Re:The better question is: should they?

[mollymoo]

Your argument seems to be that because you don't have much need for them they don't need to exist. Well, I hate to break it to you, but the world doesn't revolve around you and most people aren't in your situation.

Like most people, I'm not at university (any more), so libraries are the only access I have to a wide range of textbooks, scientific journals etc. I do buy books and the odd journal, but I couldn't hope to afford a collection even remotely close to what is on offer even at the public library, let alone the local university libraries (which the public can enter for free and join for a modest fee).

There are a hell of a lot of people for whom libraries are the only form of access to high-quality information. The internet hasn't changed that very much, because most of the best information still costs money.

Re:The better question is: should they?

[Rogue Haggis Landing]

Since I started my studies, I spent exactly 0 hours and 0 minutes in the university libraries. I access all the scientific material online, and even the books.

FWIW, your experience is not entirely typical right now, because the sciences are well ahead of the other fields of study in terms of online material. A lot of this is because there is so little use in most sciences for older material (i.e., an paper on Shakespeare from 1950 might still be relevant, a biology study from then almost definitely won't be). So if there are only the last 10 years online that's just great, especially to someone like a medical student who won't (or shouldn't) look at much with a copyright date more than 5 years old. Another factor is that science publishing has become extremely centralized, especially journals. So when Elsevier went online, a huge percentage of medical journals are suddenly electronic. Finally, the article really talks about public libraries, which don't really have the same function as a university library, and certainly don't have the same resources. A university library can pay licensing fees for it's 10-50,000 students and employees; the Chicago Public Library probably has less funding and potentially millions of people who could use it, making licenses much more difficult.

For antique books, sure, libraries will always exist, but even there I'd prefer to see them as conservation points where they are transferred into electronic format(s) made available online. Being an antique book collector myself, I would hate to know that precious antique books are being touched by people who don't wash their hands, or worse.

Ha! I work at an archive cataloging American books published between 1750 and 1920. I wash my hands regularly after handling them, but it's more to get me clean than the books, because 19th century texts, especially if they were bound in leather, just shed crap all over everything. As for storage and transfer, that clearly is the future. A lot of libraries will go from being what are called "dim" archives (with things physically accessible, but closely controlled) to being "dark" archives (things stored offsite, or at least away from patrons and accessible in a matter of days and not minutes), at least for older/rarer/valuable material.

BUT, and this is a big but, librarians will tell you that there is not yet a tried-and-true method for electronic storage. The world is full of old storage media that are basically unreadable. What can we put things on that will still be good in a few hundred years? Or will there be some sort of reliable upgrade method? And are we really going to trust someone like Google to effectively be the repository of the world's knowledge?

Another issue is that of storing physical things. Libraries work right now as basically distributed storage. No library is encyclopedic, but if you can look at all of them (through something like OCLC's WorldCat) then you can find most everything. If, as we assume, the number of libraries storing physical things goes down, then it becomes more likely that the last remaining copies of a lot of texts are going to disappear. We can argue if this is a bad thing or not, but it definitely needs to be considered.

Re:The better question is: should they?

[Selanit]

Hi, I'm a librarian.[1] I appreciate your response, and I'm glad you find us useful. I'd just like to elaborate on one of your points. You wrote "I like going to the library just to browse and to see what I can find." (Emphasis added). This is one point where physical libraries still have a distinct advantage over the Internet.

People who are trying to retrieve information have three basic types of queries.

1. They know exactly what they're looking for. (A "known item" search, e.g. "I want a transcript of the Obama-Clinton debate from Austin last week", which results in one document).
2. They know roughly what they're looking for. (A "known class" search, e.g. "I want to read essays on Kierkegaard's philosophy", which results in a reasonably well-defined group of documents).
3. They don't have a clear idea what they're looking for. (Called "browsing," e.g., "I'd like to learn about world history.", which results in a vastly huge set of documents that might potentially meet the need).

The Internet is pretty good for known-item searches. Especially if the item has indexable text in it. Other types of information are harder. Quick! Using Google Images, find me a picture of a sheep facing left at sunset.

The Internet is less good at delivering focused results for a known class search. It can retrieve relevant documents, but there's a good chance that it will also retrieve lots of unrelated or only tangentially related things. Which means you have to spend ages sorting through a giant list of search results to find what you really want. Specialized databases tend to produce much more focused results, of course, but most of those aren't freely available.

And lastly, the Internet is lousy for browsing. Browsing is about finding out what's available within a very broad class of stuff. Search engines can tell you that documents share keywords; they can't tell you for certain that the documents are actually about similar things. And within the search results, they're organized according to (roughly) how popular they are, as measured by how many sites link to them. They're not organized based on their similarities to or differences from one another. Compare to a library, where you can start at the beginning of a shelf and scan the titles. Because librarians have invested a TON of time and effort into classifying the books, you can count on finding many documents about the same topic stored in the same location. There've been efforts to classify the web, but so far nothing really good has popped up. Wikipedia helps in some ways, but it still relies heavily on searches. The contextual navigation from one article to another helps a little, but a lot of the time the articles are linked to one another simply based on the words appearing in the article rather than on whether the articles are strongly related to one another. It does promote serendipitous discovery of information, but it's not so good for finding out a comprehensive list of what's available.

We aren't going away any time soon. Plenty of change a' comin', I reckon, but we're going to be around for a while yet.

[1] Well, technically, I'm a librarian-in-training. Close enough, though.

Re:The better question is: should they?

[ortholattice]

None of the responses to the parent have brought up the following point. A library serves as a filter in a very important way: the material there was "good enough", in some way, to get published. It has filtered out untold volumes of manuscripts that weren't accepted by a publisher (other than self-published material, which is rare in a library). In addition, the library itself has filtered yet again by selecting the material (recommended by professors etc.) that it holds.

The web OTOH has the garbage as well as the "good stuff", and many cases only the garbage since the good stuff (book contents) is usually copyrighted and not placed on the web. (Yes, Google Books can help you find some things, but you can't browse through the book.) The web has its place - a very important place - but it serves a different kind of need. Like Wikipedia, the web as a whole can be good for getting an idea of the subject matter of interest, but once you get in-depth and serious, the library becomes almost indispensable, for me at least.

For specialized scientific and mathematical work, virtually everything I do is based on peer-reviewed publications, and I don't have expensive access to the online versions. Sometimes I can find preprints on arxiv.org, but I need the real thing for referencing in my own work, and much of it is from the 70s/80s before arxiv.org existed. And even arxiv.org is a dangerous place with crackpot theories unless you know exactly what authors/articles to look for. So yes, I spend many hours in the university library to get authoritative and reliable material that I can trust.

Extinction Timeline

[Dr. Eggman]

The Extinction Timeline is total garbage. "Mending things" and repair shops are going to be extinct in 2009? Laughable. Secrets and text based searching, and the computer mouse by 2020?

Is it a bad thing?

[palegray.net]

Quoting the summary:

The grand old reading rooms and stacks of past civic monuments are giving way to a new library-as-urban-hangout concept I'm not the youngest guy here, although I'm certainly not the oldest, either :). I still love the first whiff of paper I get when walking into a library; it brings back wonderful memories of days spent reading as a child. However, I also remember the excitement I felt when my city's library (City of Decatur, GA at the time) got computer stations installed to aid in searching for materials stored on CD-ROM stacks. It was a logical extension of the library concept, and was immensely useful compared to their existing "green screen" (actually amber) lookup system or the tried-and-true card catalog system.

I also remember the first time I dialed into a BBS and discovered volumes of reading material I could freely download... next came my first exposure to the Internet through USENET and later the WWW. My excitement grew with each new advance in information sharing. These technologies were all logical stepping stone extensions to what came before them, and enabled me to access worlds of information that simply weren't attainable before.

Would I mourn the death of physical libraries where I can walk up and down the aisles? Yes, but for largely sentimental reasons. While the dreams a "paperless society" have largely been unfulfilled to date, the time is rapidly coming when many of the core concepts will be a reality. I'm an optimist in that I like to focus on learning about new ways to share information.

Books reading off a computer screen

[vajaradakini]

Yes, I get a lot of articles for my work from online journals, but sometimes (especially with older articles) they aren't scanned in and I have actually gone through stacks of old journals and dug up an article and photocopied it. Aside from this, whenever I do find an article online, I print it off if it's important and relevant enough for me to read it and then I highlight it to hell and put notes everywhere. You can't do that with pdfs (well, if you want to save it anyways) and I can't curl up on the couch, lie on my back and hold my laptop above my face for an hour while reading an article either.

It would be terrible if we lost libraries and books. I can't imagine a generation of kids downloading books and printing them out or staring at a computer screen all day reading one. I know that when I was a kid I couldn't afford to get my own books and my parents seldom bought them for me (well, once I grew out of books they liked me to read) so the library was my salvation. I never would have gotten into a great number of authors and subjects if not for libraries.

Re:Not holding breath

[amccaf1]

Libraries will be RIP when you can browse any book / periodical / reasearch paper etc online.

And I mean any periodical, the microfilm of a 1972 NY times to a book thats been out of print for 20 years.

To expand on your point, it's good to remember that just because something is available on the Internet, it does not necessarily follow that it is automatically better/easier to view than something that it available at your library.

For example, most (if not all) of the New York Times archives are available on-line... but for a fee. The New York Times charges $3.95 for a single archive or $15.95 for a ten-pack of articles. Compare this to a archive of the newspaper in a bricks-n-mortar library which will allow you to look through their records for free as long as your willing to work the microfilm reader.

If, for example, you're a sports writer who is researching contemporary coverage of the 1972 Mets, you'd end up paying quite a lot more to do your research over the Internet as things stand now.

libraries are never going to go extinct

[circletimessquare]

their reason for being will simply evolve

this is even hinted at in the story summary

we still have colisseums, we don't feed christians to lions in them. we still have public squares, we don't have gallows in them

true, we don't really have forts with cannons and we don't have stables, but we do have military installations, and we do have garages

so its not like the need for a public place for information storage and retrieval will go ever go away, just how it is accessed will change and evolve

why not provide some improvements

[irtza]

As another who has spent a considerable amount of time in a library, I do find that there is room for improvement. I don't think that they will be gone anytime soon, but I think that a large part of the problem has to do with financing. My university library (undergrad) was only a place for me to study. I NEVER USED IT TO DO RESEARCH. Furthermore, in medical school, the library served the exact same purpose. On the flip side, as a medical resident, I used the hospital library extensively. Why? I am not going to pay to get access to articles my library can get me. That is the only reason I used it. I was doing research and it required me to get access to things I couldn't otherwise pay for.

Growing up, I used the library to be able to freely read books.

I think this remains the fundamental and most important role of a library. Equalizing access to information that the public could not otherwise get to. Sure, as a professional, I can afford to pay for things, but it seems that costs are proportional. The specialized texts I want now are considerably more expensive than the texts I had wanted earlier.

As long as there is an underclass, the role of a library will remain important. Given trends in society, the underclass is growing and the divide between those with access to information will only further it. Granted most people with access to resources don't use it, but every now and then it will make a huge difference.

Furthermore, one has to consider the library in question. A community library serves a very different purpose than a university library. I think that a community library would be better off avoiding trying to provide large amounts of space towards computers. Should they have them? Yes, its important to provide a complete set of services for those who may not otherwise be able to have them.

What needs to be done to ensure the relevance of libraries? How about longer hours? With changing work schedules, knowing that the library will be open would be useful. I hate having to leave an hour after arrival because the place is going to close. How about an in library mirror of the Gutenberg free text collection to ensure availability despite loss of internet connectivity. Libraries have been known as warehouses of information; just because the data is digital, this should not change.

Printing services for this information. How about being able to select a text from the Gutenberg (or other) online collection and paying X dollars to have a copy printed and bound in some fashion for pickup. This can be both a revenue generating and role preserving improvement to a library.

A coffee shop. I think that Barnes n' Noble have done more to "hurt" libraries than any other place. They're open longer and I can drink some coffee.... Its a huge improvement.

Club meetings - chess, reading - local competitions for the kids. There are many services that can be provided through a library that many libraries have already adopted.

My main request would be that they mirror important literary texts locally. Given the questionable and temporary quality of electronic media, its important to have as many copies distributed as widely as possible.

done ranting... need to find another task to avoid reading.

Re:why not provide some improvements

[SacredByte]

I agree on public libraries needing longer hours. The hours of my local library are as follows:

Monday - Thursday 9:30 AM - 9:00 PM

Friday 9:30 AM - 6:00 PM

Saturday 9:30 AM- 5:00 PM

Sunday 1:00 - 5:00 PM

These hours absolutely suck for me. I don't generally go to the library at any time other than late evenings/weekends. I can fully understand not having all departments open at all times -- All I really need is to be able to check out books. That takes maybe (tops) five library staff members (paid or otherwise). I can fully understand not having sufficent funds to operate all departments at 100% at all hours, but this doesn't mean you can't operate some departments without operating other departments....

Honestly, the library would be a much more practical place to study if they were open until 23:00 on Friday-Sunday. They don't need to staff the A/V department, they don't need to staff the reference department, they don't need to staff their computer center (they have public 802.11G) -- they just need to have a guard and a few people to handle checkouts.

Just my $0.02 USD.

Re:why not provide some improvements

[ThousandStars]

I agree with much of your comment and made similar points here. And I think the distinction you make between community vs university libraries is important because the two serve different functions, but at least in my field (English), many research resources are still in print and not available online. It's not clear if or when University Presses will start making criticism online en masse, and even if they do, so much of the twentieth century's critical output will remain in dead tree form that, at least for some, the library isn't going anywhere.

Re:The problem

[psychodelicacy]

"This I agree with, although I can't see why they couldn't function electronically as well."

You don't mean entirely electronically, do you?

I'm an academic working in the field of medieval culture. While I can access facsimiles (print and electronic) of medieval manuscripts, it's sometimes essential to look at the originals. You can't rely on a facsimile to tell you whether pages have been removed, or whether two texts were originally bound together or created separately. A facsimile won't always show up erasures from the text.

What I'm trying to get at is that there are two ways of treating books (and other sources of printed information). The first is to see them as simple repositories of information, whose content can be translated into electronic form without any loss of meaning. The second is to see them as objects of study or artefacts in themselves. Some books can be treated in the first way without any problems; others must be treated in the second unless we're prepared to lose a lot in understanding them. For me, this second category of book is one reason why libraries will never entirely disappear.

800% ROI isn't so bad for a public library.

[mschuyler]

I believe I've written that myself, but I don't believe it. All public libraries do is get busier and busier. When they put terminals in place for the public they get mobbed. The terminals are busy all-day-long. There are never enough. Free WiFi is also busy all day long. these aren't all the 'information disenfranchised' who don't have computer at home either. Whether they have to compete with siblings at home, or find the library more convenient, or enjoy greater bandwidth (The local lib has fiber optic) I don't know. I just know they are busy.

Someone said the online resources are never used and are there to make administrators feel good?? How ignorant! Statistics show double digit increased use every year, from live homework help to academic magazine indexes, you can't get that at home without a subscription. Instead, the library pools its resources and buys subscriptions for the entire community. That's what government SHOULD do, leverage your taxes rather than simply tell you what to do. The average Return on Investment of a public library is over 800%, i.e.: If you had to purchase the information that a library gives out every year year and compare the purchase cost to the library budget (paid by taxes), you'd pay 8 times as much for the same thing. In my state the average cost to a homeowner for their local public library is about 25 cents per thousand dollars of value. In other words, a $400,000 house costs you $100 per year for the public library, less than $10 a month. What's that? Three lattes? It's not like the library breaks your taxpaying back. Look to the public schools for that. The library is flat out the best deal the taxpayer has, period.

Someone once described the Internet as a library with all the books dumped at random in the middle of the floor. What makes the library different is an organized body of knowledge with people assigned to help you. The people in public libraries generally have a Master's degree in Librarianship, and in academic libraries a second masters degree in their subject area. These folks are more familiar with your subject than you are and they've been doing database searches since well before you were born.

If you're one of these people who believe 'well-educated' means being able to search Google, read a blog, and search Wikipedia, then may God have mercy on your soul.

Libraries are important.

[gnutoo]

should public money be used for this? Can't it go to feed the homeless instead?

No! Public libraries can and must continue their roll as repositories of verifiable information. Copyright law in it's current form makes this impossible and must be changed. It is not good enough for us to trust primary historical documents such as newspapers to their original publisher. We must allow libraries verbatim copy, and distribution. If we don't, what we will have is an Orwellian memory hole instead of a library. The same kinds of things can be said about all periodicals, journals and even books. We as a whole must never allow private interests to control information. Information must remain free and it will have to be truly liberated if it's going to be that way. DRM and dissapearning media have no place in free societies. Don't worry, if publishers don't want to play ball authors will. Universities are full of people working on "labor of love" textbooks and other material they expect no financial return on. B and N can keep their paper and coffee shop megaplexes, the rest of us want knowledge. Free societies require it.

The good news is that libraries of the future will be cheaper than those of the present. When you liberate yourself from paper you eliminate most of the costs of libraries - shelving, circulation and all that. The difference will be put to good use and free economies tend to minimize financial ruin.