As part of my piece on the end of cyberspace-- a project that I hope comes to an end before cyberspace itself does-- I've been doing some reading on predictions of the death of the library, and arguments about why it's continued to survive. It turns out that worries that the library would disappear under the impact of computerization and automation have been part of the library world since at least the 1960s, but it's only in the last twenty years or so-- and especially since the late 1980s-- that they broke out of the world of library schools and professional journals.
Anyway, the survival of the library as a physical place and institution tells us something about how information isn't just a bunch of zeroes and ones that can be pulled off of pages and poured into great big databases, disconnected from places, and separated from people. Good libraries aren't just warehouses of obsolete media: they're places where people find each other, where librarians and users collaborate to create new knowledge (even if users don't recognize the contributions of librarians in the process)-- and of course, where readers find and read stuff.
So I was intrigued when I came across an abstract for a talk by Peter Brantley, director of technology at the California Digital Library (now that's gotta be a cool job), on service-oriented architectures, social software, and the future of libraries:
Deploying services, not libraries: Staying out of the Middle of the Road (3.9 mb ppt)
After years of simple automation of existing and easily understood practices, libraries must reconceptualize their roles within their host environments. Refactoring requires the development of new services that are directly accessible by users, that are capable of recombination, and permit the removal of overt mediation for content discovery and delivery. A services oriented architecture enables libraries to evolve into stronger organizations, even as their presence diffuses into the users experience of the network. It encourages libraries to use and enhance open-source services contributed by others, rather than owning and manipulating services to meet baroque needs. Finally, libraries become incentivized to enhance collaboration with a wider set of actors, including traditional content publishers and commercial firms in the information retrieval, management, and presentation market. A futuristic example of services defined around large collection of digitized monographs will demonstrate some of these points.
In essence, much of the automation that's taken place in libraries has (as the director of the Penn libraries once put it) happened behind the librarian's desk-- meaning, it's involved automating things like card catalogs, interlibrary loan borrowing systems, and other information resources or work processes that mainly involve librarians, not users. Until the spread of laptops, and later of Wifi, the main experience users had with computers in the library was the computerized card catalog system, CDs or online databases like OCLC, and more recently online publishing systems like JSTOR.
What Brantley is arguing, if I read his piece right, is that we're entering a new, Web 2.0-like phase in the intersection of libraries and IT, in which success is going to be defined by how well libraries and librarians can provide services, create (or let users create) tools for collective content creation and remixing, and gently disintermediate themselves (at least to the degree that users aren't particularly aware of their presence or contributions to the enterprise of knowledge-creation and -sharing). It's a very interesting vision.
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