Category: Future of libraries

My colleague Phil Doty just pointed me to an interesting article in the Financial Times describing the new public library built in Birmingham, England, one of many such new libraries popping up in major cities around the globe. One important aspect that is discussed here is the willingness of municipalities to invest heavily in such constructions even as the basic public library infrastructure of a nation is crumbling. Britain has made a wave of cuts to their library system in recent years and the data suggest visits and circulation are in decline. The language is telling. New construction is justified in terms of the value of safe public space, education, and related important values of investing in a community even as the ironwork facing for this new architectural wonder, intended to celebrate the city’s traditional skills, has been outsourced to Germany.

One of the leaders in this new project speaks eloquently of the need to move libraries on from a transaction function of finding information and borrowing books to one of education. “The transactional function is withering as there are now so many more media than just the book” he says. Wonderful as that sounds, it tends to jar a little with reality and with the expenditure on new buildings in other cities which seem to emphasize a role for the library in cultural records management more than education, though of course these boundaries are blurred. One wonders if the building program is a boon to architects and the construction industry more than the outcome of any real effort at improving cultural life.

It is worth comparing this articule with “How Low can our book budgets go?” in this month’s LJ by Steve Coffman. The data he presents from the US are quite telling: Public libraries spend 11.4% of their funds on their collection, the lowest level seen on record. And this at a time when book sales in general have been increasing. Public libraries account for only 1.31% of the market in new books, which renders the threats often made to publishers to pay attention to libraries seem hollow. He also points out that despite the growth in the book sales, public library circulation rates are declining, countered only by an increasing usage of DVDs, audiobooks, and games (31% of all checkouts were for videos of one form or another in 2010). Coffman argues that we have real problem (OK, Steve writes provocative pieces all the time but he makes good points), and that diverting money from primary collection building means that libraries are less able to deliver on their primary mission, which might or might not be education but it sure ain’t competing with Netflix.

This is an important topic and one that is not helped by rhetorical flourishes about paradigm shifts from transactions to transformations. Even as the ALA Annual Reports encourage us to believe that more and more people visit libraries regularly, their own data points suggest there has been a significant drop in recent years (in 2008, 76% of respondents claimed to have visited a library in the past year, but in the most recent survey last year, this rate had dropped to 53%, and this leaves out the worry that any question of this kind carries a certain social desirability bias that inflates the answers). Perhaps we are moving to a period of libraries now being great statements of municipal pride, with elaborate new buildings and plentiful architectural awards but little real effort being placed on funding the kind of services that led to the creation of the public library in the first instance. Perhaps the only new part of this is the belief in creating the great statement, so one might be grateful.

For reasons I cannot easily explain, I found myself browsing the archive of poll results on Library Journal’s site this week. I also found myself fighting the irritating pop-up ads for AARP which cover the data and cannot be easily dismissed but that’s another matter. If there is a more negative set of responses out there on the future of libraries, I’ve not had the misfortune to find it. These polls are weekly snapshots of readers’ responses to rather pointed questions (and one might argue that the very framing of the questions reveals their bias but a that’s also another matter). Try these results:

The Future is bleak:
93% believe the next 10 years look less promising than before for the profession of librarian.
70% believe their libraries’ commitment to intellectual freedom is diminishing even when 81% believe the need for public libraries to protect intellectual freedom is increasing.
55% believe more fee-based services are in their future, 44% believe the library’s place in the market is eroding.

Who’s to blame? Round up the usual suspects:

Prime suspects: the LIS educators! 93% think that LIS schools are focusing on the wrong things (I won’t rest until we get that up to 100% 🙂

But it’s not just LIS schools’ fault, it’s those incompetent administrators and and stuffy old boards:

86% believe the staff are more concerned with the future than the administration
87% believe the library trustees fail to raise the visibility of the library in the community, and have no political clout, even as 71.4% of respondents believe their library board is becoming older and more political! 57% feel there is no common understanding between staff and boards on the library’s direction anyhow.

But wait, what about the public? Surely they still love and respect us?
Yes, it’s just turning the love into dollars that is a problem. 57% believe voter support for libraries is increasing even if 48% feel public support for libraries is eroding. I suppose the public is not always the same as the voters, must be all those super delegates that love libraries.

Could it be that libraries are not addressing community problems? 77% believe this is a real problem. No wonder since 40% think the library does not even understand the community agenda, despite those old politicos on the boards.

Fear not though, 52% believe their library does measure its impact on the community. What exactly is being measured or learned from this is hard to guess if one doesn’t understand the community’s agenda but hey, impact is impact right?

Will it change? Libraries are failing to groom new leaders according to 65% of respondents and the majority feel there are not enough staff recognition award programs (see a trend here?) but there is a bright spot: 65% report that their libraries are beginning to promote extroverts! Since extroverts supposedly suffer less depression than introverts, this sounds like a winning strategy — give the person who came up with this idea an award!

Of course, none of the survey items ask if these respondents are the cause or the recipients of the problem, but what do you expect when those terrible LIS programs never taught anyone about good survey design. Pass the happy juice.

Wall St. Journal Online edition presented an interesting exchange this week between wikipedia founder Jummy Wales and Britannica’s editor in chief, Dale Hoiberg (http://tinyurl.com/jxe33). Since Nature published a study indicating that the accuracy of entries on Wikipedia was comparable to Britannica, traditionalists have been quick to find fault with the study or point to clear errors in Wikipedia, but this is no simple argument. The reported discussion certainly paints Wikipedia as the brave new entrant come to break the monopoly on ‘facts’ and some of Hoiberg’s comments are a little defensive but I think most of us agree we don’t want a mass of inaccurate and biased entries passed off as reliable (we get enough of that on TV). The Nature study asked experts to judge various entries without knowing from which source they came, and the results indicated an average of 4 errors per entry in Wikipedia to 3 errors per entry in Brittanica. The main point here is these rates are so comparable, though without looking at the type of errors found you might be forgiven for wondering why Britannica is so respected if each entry has that many errors. Nature released data showing the type of errors found and these include judgements of ‘overstatement’ or ‘too short’ as well as lack of clarity, failure to include certain works in a bibliography, and a mispelling of a place name (using an ‘e’ instead of an ‘a’). In fact, Nature concluded there were only 8 serious errors reported, and these were equally divided, four each in Wikipedia and Britannica.

A key argument made by Wales is that Wikipedia really builds on the openness principle: all can contribute through entries or corrections, and the result is likely to be more representative than the invitation-only contributions of Britannica. Since entrants to Wikipedia have to be motivated to contribute (have you?) there is certainly potential for mischief but Wales talks of moving to semi-protected and even editable ‘ nonvandalized’ versions to improve quality. And the proof is in the pudding, as they say. He likens publishing entries that are still being edited to Britannica’s revealing the in-draft versions of new entries which they won’t do of course (though there’s probably a collector somewhere who would pay for those).

In sum, arguments that authority must be maintained or chaos will ensue in the information world seem to be far less convincing than they once were. Maybe a little authority goes a long way. Stay tuned.