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2010 (4)
 
14 Jul 2010
July 14th, 10:54am 1 comment

Maintaining a list of arguments against libraries

I was looking at this really interesting post Libraries are Dying (And That’s A Good Thing)  and one thing struck me. Libraries are constantly under pressure to justify their existence, whether it is from government sanctioned reports to cut budgets(i.e KPMG report on public spending on UK Public Libraries ) or from newspaper editorals questioning the necessity of libraries given the existence of the internet (here's a recent US example) .

Libraries are Dying (And That’s A Good Thing) is somewhat unusual as it is supposedly from a librarian and doesn't seem to be making any claims that are clearly demonstratively wrong, though one can quibble with the interpretion and prediction of future trends.

That said even the arguments there are not that original (I had similar thoughts), and I wonder if somewhere, somone is maintaining a list of such arguments against libraries, and of course responses to these arguments. There can't be more than a dozen or so arguments right?

This would be similar to how there is a well known FAQ at talkorgins.org  defending evolution against doubters. Perhaps we need two lists, one for public libraries, one of academic libraries?

Does such a faq, or list exist anywhere?

Just a wild thought .

 

 

 

 


Posted
 
6 Jul 2010
July 6th, 9:47am 2 comments

Do you expect more from librarians?

Fun fact: in the classic 1985 Time Travel Movie "Back to the future", Dr Brown set his time travelling car to a far future date, namely July 5, 2010.  This cute little piece of trivia was duly tweeted and retweeted on July 5 2010. It even began to trend on Twitter. One problem. It was a hoax! (Actually it was initially a honest mistake followed by a photoshopped picture see here for full story) 

@Daveyp on Twitter remarked (probably jokingly) that he was surprised by the number of librarians who retweeted it without checking first. 

Obviously I'm not here to point fingers , I could have easily retweeted it myself. Besides this is a relative harmless piece of news with nothing much at stake so to criticise even a serious minded librarian who teaches classes on how to evaluate information properly for a living for not doing so in this case seems overly strict.

What I think is interesting is the implication here that in general more is expected from librarians. In a world given where Journalists from mainstream media have just trusted news posted on Twitter without any fact checking this seems a pretty high expectation. 

What other professionals can this be said of? Teachers? Lawyers? Scientists? Priests? 

To the librarians reading this, do you feel the pressure to be more accurate and better at evaluating facts than others? More importantly I wonder if that's how the general public perceives librarians. 

What do you think?

 

 

 

 

 

 


Posted
 
27 Jun 2010
June 27th, 8:22am 0 comments

The future of academic libraries

The recently released 2010 top ten trends in academic libraries by ACRL basically holds no surprises. 

To me the basic trend is clear, the shift from print to electronic/online resources is slowly but surely beginning to tell (Yes, I know this has being predicted many times in the past). 

 
In the domain of journals, the battle has long being settled on the side of online journals. Even skimirches like Nature Publishing Group versus University of California are unlikely to change this but might instead further push us towards Open access.

On the ebooks front, things are more murky. On top of uncertainties about formats, DRM etc, more importantly as pointed out by many including Tim Spalding of LibraryThing, ebooks are bad for libraries because libraries lose the right of First-sale Doctrine, they have to pay for each use of the ebook as opposed to buying only one physical copy and having it used multiple times.


That said, I have no doubt that eventually (where eventually could mean 10-20 years), the shift for books will occur as well.

In any case, despite strong opposition from professors and users, many libraries such as Syracuse U. Library and Standford library are preparing for a bookless library, where books are stored in a remote location but can be quickly displayed to the user on demand.

Combined with recent trends toward mobile computing, demands for impact accounting and shrinking budget, the old bugbear about the fate of "physical libraries" rears its head again. Why should we retain expensive and prime space for a library when everything will soon be online and users don't have to come here anyway?

In a world where users don't need to access library resources from the physical library, is there any reason for physical libraires to exist?

 
The Chronicle's provocatively titled article, If Libraries Remove Computers, Will Anyone Come? in April, highlights a blog post by The Ubiquitous Librarian (Brian Mathews)  perfectly captures the fear.
 
Underlying this question is also the elephant in the room, if there are no physical libraries, do we need librarians?

As I see it, libraries are responding in 3 ways.
 
1. Radically change the library space to entice users to visit the library for other reasons even though they can access the information resources anywhere (Library as a collaborative learning space)
 
2. Move physically to where our users are to serve them (Embedded librarians movement)
 
3. Move virtually to where our users are to serve them (Library 2.0/ digital or virtual outreach/reference)
 
 
Library as a collaborative learning space
 
Firstly as pointed out by the blog post, pointed to in the Chronicle's article, libraries can try to entice users to come by adding computers or creating collaborative spaces. 

" Our response was The (________) Commons. Fill in the blank with one of these terms: Learning, Information, Scholarly, Library, Computer, Technology, or Intellectual. Essentially we saw an infusion of computers (with productivity software) and cafes (big picture, buildings allowing food, drink, and conversation) along with a mix of casual, quiet, and collaborative workspaces that led to a boom for academic libraries."
 
I''m not familiar with the literature in this area, but I believe this school of thought which began circa 1995 and is still going strong basically, tries to entice users to visit the library by changing the library into a place that is conductive for studying/learning/research with specially designed furnitures, smartboards or recently supporting tablets or even more advanced gadgets like augmented reality enhanced projectors etc.
 

Embedded librarians movement
 
Another school of thought, basically goes under the heading of "embedded librarians" (the earliest paper I can find so far is 2005), which basically advocates librarians leaving the library and be "embedded" in academic departments. Typically they co-teach classes, have offices in the academic departments, and/or are valued team members in research teams. 
 
Brought to it's logical conclusion, we have the following stated goal at the Welch Medical Library 

 "By 2012 we do expect to be out of the building." 
 
The idea here seems to be , why fight the change? Let the physical library disappear, instead let's go to where the users are and sat up shop there!
 
Of course, "Library has collaborative spaces" and "embedded librarians" are not necessarily mutually exclusive (except in the case of the extreme version of the later) , so libraries can do both.
 
 
 
Digital/Virtual Outreach or Reference
 
It strikes me that the current trend towards library 2.0, at least the outreach part - where librarians tries to be where our users are in virtual space (via Instant Messenging, Twitter, Facebook etc) , will put us in good stead in the future where users no longer visit the physical library.
 
Already, in some libraries, the number of questions via digital reference already outstrips physical questions. 
 
It's no coincidence that some of the best practitioners of library 2.0 such as Meredith Farkas served in libraries which have a large number of distance learning students.  

In the future if users no longer physically visit the library, they are effectively distance learning students anyway, so outreach and services has to be provided virtually including guidance.
 
 
 
Skills needed to survive, nay thrive!
 
Assuming my analysis above is close to correct, it points to skill sets needed for librarians.
 
The first requires a fairly unique skill set, i doubt few librarians will be called upon to redesign the library space more than once or twice in their careers and most probably will not be involved.
 
The second requires subject knowledge, knowledge of research methodology etc.
 
The third requires knowledge & familiarity with new channels of communications, familiarity with where the users are online and how to communicate effectively on those channels.
 
 

Posted
 
27 Jun 2010
June 27th, 2:18am 0 comments

Why another blog?

Dear readers.

Why another blog? I've being blogged at http://musingsaboutlibrarianship.blogspot.com/ for over a year now, and while I haven't yet achieved "blog star" status, I have developed a blogging style which involves long rambling posts, practical tips on innovative use of new tools for libraires and above all large amounts of research to produce mini surveys about the state of art use of new tools/services by libraries over the world. Such posts are fairly popular but are extremely time consuming to produce, so I can produce at most one post a week. They  also tend to be heavily biased towards factual type posts as opposed to "opinion based" posts that aim to share insights or provoke discussion 

Beyond that, I want to experiment with different blogging styles, to adopt a more relaxed style. Rather than drastically changing  the tone at http://musingsaboutlibrarianship.blogspot.com/ , I will blog here instead.

http://musingsaboutlibrarianship.blogspot.com/ will continue of course. The major differences between the two blogs will be

  • Posts here will be shorter (Posterous itself ensures it, I'm aiming for max of 1,000 words)
  • Material will be heavily biased towards librarianship but as befits a more relaxed style will spot the occasion non-library related post
  • Posts here will usually be more reflective rather than useful in a practical sense  (e.g How to use hot tool X,Y,Z for your library!).

I'm not sure if anyone will be interested (probably not), but then again I wasn't sure anyone would be interested in the original blog. One thing i have learned about blogging is that you never know what others might feel interesting. Some of the posts I was proudest of, was mostly ignored, while some others which I thought were fairly trivial was retweeted by some of the most respected movers and shakers of the library world. 

So there. That's why this blog exists. Hope to see you around.

Aaron

Posted