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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."
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?
Demented But Determined.
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.
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.
When all else fails, try.
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.
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.
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.
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.