I’ve been thinking about writing a post on Open Access for a while. The recent tragic death of Aaron Swartz seems like an appropriate time to do so.
I didn’t know a lot about Aaron Swartz before his death. I’d read about him ‘stealing’ millions of JSTOR articles, but hadn’t remembered his name. Now that I’ve read more about him, one thing has become clear: whilst Aaron Swartz will be remembered as a hacker, he should be considered a librarian hero. Continue reading
My title this week is a little provocative. I’m unconvinced of the imminent, or even eventual, complete death of all ‘dead tree’ publishing. Much, however, will move to electronic and just as we in wealthy nations say we live in a ‘post industrial’ economy even though there is plenty of industry happening in our countries, so too we will soon enough move to a ‘post paper’ publishing norm.
I find myself reading and talking a lot about ebooks lately. Librarians have been struggling to work out how to move from a system based on lending and storing physical information items (books, magazines, compact discs etc) to one based on lending electronic files (ebooks, audiobooks, music, video). The biggest problem we face is that treating an electronic file the same as a physical item is inherently nonsensical.
As I have noted previously, the physics of electronic files and modern computing means that every time you move a file you make a copy, and every copy is a perfect copy. If you can make hundreds, thousands or millions of perfect copies for a marginal cost of zero, then lending someone a copy doesn’t make any sense. It’s rather like sitting in a boat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and offering to lend someone a cup of sea water.
This is an ‘inconvenient truth’ for authors, the publishing industry and particularly copyright lawyers. When making a copy is as easy as clicking a mouse, and distributing something electronically without making a copy is physically impossible, any system for encouraging creativity and the dissemination of ideas which is based on restricting copying is ….well, let’s be polite and say it’s unsustainable.
What does this mean for libraries? At the moment, it means a big fight with publishers. Publishers recognise that treating electronic files as if they are physical items is ridiculous, but they also recognise that it is the only way they can maintain the status quo in publishing and, for many of them, it may be the only way they can stay in business at all. The biggest fear for publishers is that because ebooks are so easy to copy and distribute, essentially for no cost, if they allow anyone except key partners like Amazon and Apple to distribute their books then they will soon find themselves bankrupt. As Fast Company reported recently, even using Amazon itself is enough of a problem. Publishers have been extremely reluctant to allow libraries to do anything with ebooks other than treat them just like physical books, with virtually none of the advantages of ebooks being allowed. The demands of publishers are ridiculous. The problem is that they are also highly rational.
Is this all just a distraction from our real mission? I’m beginning to think so. Confused by the past necessity to store and organise physical paper objects, and fearful of being ‘left behind’, librarians have allowed ourselves to become distracted. We should forget about storage and lending for a few moments, and think about what it means to freed from their grasp.
When people talk about what they love about libraries or why they value them, they are almost never talking about the ability to search and retrieve information. The slippery slope we are now upon began when librarians misconceived their role as search and retrieval experts and then freaked out when Google arrived. We were never particularly good at search and retrieval. I recall going to the State Library of Victoria a few years ago and requesting a particular government report from several decades earlier. The State Library of Victoria is a closed stack reference library, so I didn’t question whether the report would be where the catalogue said it would be. Alas, the staff couldn’t find either of their two copies. If the SLV can’t perfect it, what chance does your library have?
What libraries really excel at, and what has always excited people about them, is their browse and discovery service. This is what librarians should be concentrating on in new, exciting and uncertain times. It is the ability to discover and make connections between information and ideas that lies at the heart of public libraries. This is where the value really lies – and it doesn’t require you to even necessarily have a collection. What it does require is more than just a computer and a search engine. Google might be able to organise the world’s information, but we still need librarians to help us make connections between the various things we are reading, watching, noticing and saying.
A good illustration of how past practice is blinkering librarians is the way we consider blogs as part of the library’s collection of resources. Generally speaking, we don’t. But why? Why are we so obsessed with post-paper idea packages in the form of ‘ebooks’, yet we ignore post-paper idea packages in the form of ‘blogs’? Whilst we wrestle with magazine subscription agencies and journal database vendors to work out ways to make their content available to our patrons, we ignore what’s under our noses and available for free. A blog is often no different to a journal – you can even search the ‘back issues’.
In 2010 Pew research released a paper, widely reported, that claimed the rise of Facebook means blogging is over. Far from ending, however, the Age of the Blog may well just be starting. Just last month The Economist ran an article about how Economics blogs have influenced the actions and discussions of central bankers, professors and economists, and will continue to do so. Economics blogs are taking on the role formerly played by journals – but with a wider range of views available, and much faster publication time.
What we’re really seeing here is not the beginning of the end for blogs, but rather a slow change in focus. Whilst ‘personal’ blogs were originally prevalent, the serious, considered (and longer) posts are now becoming more popular. As these resources grow, librarians need to be alert to opportunities to make their patrons aware of the riches available. Simply Googling some keywords won’t necessarily find you the blog, or the collection of blogs, that you are looking for. More importantly, you might be looking for a journal or book, not realising that what you want is actually located in a series of blogs.
The genius of the blog as an invention, and its likely longevity, is borne out by the fact that some people are currently trying to re-invent it.
Todd Sattersten is busily experimenting with Every book is a startup. This project is supposed to be an attempt to find a new publishing model in the electronic age. Sattersen explains in a post at World Media Trend.
The project is meant to poke at the boundaries of traditional publishing. The book was created around the idea that new material will be released over time, culminating in a finished work early in 2012. Readers are encouraged to constantly give feedback about the material.
New material released over time, with readers encouraged to give constant feedback. Sound familiar?
Elsewhere, the focus has been not on books, but rather on scientific journals. The great discussion in scholarly publishing at the moment is around ‘open access’ publishing and how science can be rescued from the Bizarro-World of commercial scientific journals, where scientists pay the journal to be published, then provide their services for free to review other articles, before paying a hefty fee to access the articles after publication.
Once you start to question the model, however, inevitable questions arise, like why some journals are still published in physical form only, why it all takes so long, and even whether articles need to be published together with others in a regular journal edition when they could be posted online as they become ready for publication/sharing.
Some have provided long explanations of what is wrong and what scientists are looking for, some have explained why scholarly publishing doesn’t work any more and how Google doesn’t really help, and some have suggested new tools like Twitter may be the solution. There are even academic papers written about it. All complain about how long it takes for articles to be published, retracted and amended. I would suggest that what these authors are looking for is simply a robust online publication environment, and a bunch of good librarians to help them make connections and find new information. What they’re really wanting is peer-reviewed blog posts, but they’re trying to complicate matters.
These are simple examples of what librarians could do in a post-paper word – there are plenty more. In ignoring the rich information world of blogging, librarians miss an opportunity to provide guidance, connections and new ways of seeing.
The future for public libraries is not collection but curation of information sources – not in the simplistic manner of a Scoop.it account, but in a robust and personalised way. When our members ask for recommendations or assistance we should be able and willing to direct them to a range of publications from physical books and traditional journals to whole blogs, individual posts and even perhaps Twitter accounts and the like. Just because ‘its all online’ doesn’t mean people won’t need help to find it or know about it. The need to organise information in a meaningful way doesn’t diminish in a post-paper environment, and neither does the desire to discover new ideas. Curation and assisted discovery will take new forms as we bring together speakers, hands-on learning, online information and interactive storytelling. Librarians who ignore these opportunities are unlikely to have a future. Those who embrace them now should expect an exciting one.
Recently I had a bit of a run-in with the bureaucracy running Melbourne’s new(ish) public transport ticketing system, Myki. It got me thinking about introducing new technology into libraries and how many of the lessons that apply to new technology in public transport ticketing also apply to libraries. Both of us are in the business of providing public goods to the whole spectrum of society. Here are six lessons we can learn from the mistakes and occasional triumphs of public transport ticketing around the world.
With any new technology – whether it’s a new social media platform, a new metadata standard or a new way of tracking items in your database – the first question you should answer is “what problem is this going to solve?” If you can’t think of one, it’s worth reconsidering whether you are just sating your techno-lust rather than providing productivity increases or genuine new services to your patrons.
The Myki smartcard system in Victoria has cost AUD $1.35 billion to implement, with ongoing cost of several hundreds of thousands more. Bemused passengers have continued to ask what was wrong with the old system. While the Metcard system using cardboard cards with magnetic strips had problems, the enormous cost of the Myki system doesn’t appear to have come with an equivalent increase in functionality. The system should provide useful data on travel patterns and does enable passengers to casually travel through tiketing ‘zones’ without having to worry about buying a second or special ticket, but these advantages have been marketed poorly and there is little indication as to what the primary advantage of the new system is over the old one.
Policies – whether on how many items can be loaned at once or how much a ticket from A to B costs – should be determined by what is fair and reasonable within the budget available. When you start making policy based on the restrictions of the technology you have chosen, alarm bells should ring. The should ring even louder if your policy is based on the restrictions of a technology you are no longer using.
Myki and e-books display both sides of this common problem. Under the Metcard system Melbourne was divided into three public transport zones, with the ticket price increasing when passengers crossed a zone boundary. The principle was that passengers travelling further should pay more, but the inner zone cost twice as much as the two outer zones, reflecting the more frequent and available services in the inner city. When Myki was introduced, instead of just validating your ticket on entry, there became a requirement to ‘touch off’ to ensure the lowest fair. The new technology had difficulty working out where it was, however, and eventually the government decided to effectively remove zoning on tram and bus trips travelling between zones. This policy change was not based on any philosophical change, but rather a reaction to a new technology that could not do the job.
In libraries, we see the other side of the coin when it comes to e-book lending. As I’ve argued before, lending e-books in the same way as we lend physical books is inherently ridiculous. E-book technology allows unlimited perfect copies to be made simultaneously available. E-book ‘lending’ should, at the very least, allow anyone who wants to ‘borrow’ the book to access it without having to wait for someone to ‘return’ it. But publishers have forced libraries to treat electrons the same way we treat atoms – and librarians have agreed, because our patrons are demanding access to ebooks and aren’t interested in the broader ramifications. These ebook lending practices are based on a legacy technology – paper books, rather than utilising the functionality of the new ebook technology.
Just as it is important to ask ‘what problem is this solving’ it is also important to ask ‘is this the best way to solve the problem?’ There were several problems with Melbourne’s transit ticketing system in 2001. Were there $1.35B worth of problems? Possibly not. Indeed, Myki demonstrates how it is possible to simultaneously both over-engineer and under-engineer a solution. The cost was mostly due to the fact the Victoria’s government decided to start building the new system from scratch, instead of starting with an ‘off the shelf’ solution. Melbourne’s ticketing system and transport routes were deemed more complicated than other systems using smartcards and thus we needed our own bespoke tickets. But this complex and costly system has been plagued by poor design and hardware that is simply not up to the job. The most famous recent example is the short battery life of the machines ticket inspectors use to check the validity of tickets. These machines have batteries that go flat a few hours before the inspectors’ shift is over, meaning they can’t do their job for a large portion of their shift.
In libraries, its always good to consider whether the technology you are about to introduce will provide a great service to the public, or will simply confuse and frustrate them because it is less than fully formed. Early adopters of ebook technology made this mistake and now have drawers full of clunky e-readers to show for it. Likewise, you don’t want to pay for a Rolls Royce with a Toyota Corolla will do the job just fine. You could spend a lot of money building a Fab Lab or an ‘Experimedia’ multimedia workshop – but if your community only requires a tool library or a copy of Photoshop on one PC then you have just wasted a lot of money and space.
Recently Victoria’s new government announced that they were pulping millions of dollars worth of one-use Myki cards and would remove ticket machines from trams. This move, in addition to a previous decision to discontinue ‘short trip’ tickets – means the cost for a tourist to travel a 500 metres in central Melbourne jumps from around $2.00 to a minimum of $13.80 ($10 for the card plus $3.80 for a two hour ticket). In addition, tourists will first have to find a Myki card retailer to actually buy a ticket, as they won’t be able to buy one on board. Helpfully, if all this is too much hassle for you while you’re in town for a few days, if you are caught without a ticket in this Bizarro World system you get slugged with a $180 fine. Welcome to Melbourne.
Libraries are often associated in peoples minds with arbitrary rules and regulations. Some of these are necessary to ensure we provide equal access to our collections or to minimise stock loss, but some are simply petty, inefficient or unnecessary. It’s also worth looking at your processes and what technology and services you provide. How easy is it for a tourist to pop in and send an email home? Do you provide quick access to daily newspapers and local street directories? Do your staff know where the nearest post office, bank or public phone is located? These things matter when you are a stranger in town.
Sometimes, even when you have ensured the new technology is solving a problem and the policies are right, you still find yourself creating new barriers just as your replace the old ones. Metcard had a barrier to infrequent travel between zones for those with periodic tickets in only one – you had to buy a second ticket for the extra zone to supplement your periodic ticket. Myki overcomes this barrier by automatically calculating the fare, but the new system creates a new barrier by removing on-board ticket purchasing options.
Libraries should be mindful that we are not creating new problems at the same time we solve the old ones. Will your RFID-enabled auto-return system have unforeseen ramifications? Will your new virtual desktops cause USB stick incompatibilities? (Hint: yes, they will). It’s important to be able to answer these questions before you commit.
Finally, whatever you do has to be supported by consistently excellent customer service. That means staff who are not only enthusiastic and knowledgeable about the new technology, but also empowered to find solutions when things don’t happen as expected. The experience that prompted this post was an example of rigidly enforced rules, poorly trained staff and a culture of buck-passing and the ‘customer is always wrong’. The problem was a card which got lost in the mail, but rather than enthusiastically trying to solve the problem, using the features of the system (ie the ability to wipe the original card remotely), or even apologising, I was told bluntly that I would have go pay an ‘administration fee’ for the privilege of actually getting the service I had already paid for. Whilst eventually it was sorted out, it took intervention from another angle and a Myki staffer defining it as a ‘defective card’ – their system seems to have no allowance for cards being lost in the mail.
Does your library offer excellent customer service? Consistently? Really? Some ‘secret shopper’ tests might surprise you.
To sum up, what you should be aiming for is an experience akin to catching a train in Tokyo. An experience where a customer who can’t speak the local language can still easily find the train they need to catch, buy a ticket quickly and easily, know the train will be perfectly on time, validate their card through the gates knowing there is no ‘wrong way around’ or ‘upside down’ way to insert the ticket, and then pay the difference between the ticket they mistakenly bought and the ticket they should have bought when they alight. That is, a system that is easy to understand, easy to use, forgiving of mistakes, and friendly and unintimidating. If you can do that, you’re on the way to a world-class library.
Today aspiring book restoration librarian @hanmunn alerted me to a back and forth in the LA Times about libraries, librarians and whether one can survive without the other. These two opinion pieces fairly neatly sum up a larger series of skirmishes that have been occuring on the margins across at least the English speaking world, but particularly in the UK and US as their governments seek ways to cut spending in economic recession.
The original piece by Regina Powers complains that politicians keen to cut spending on libraries but wary of the political ramifications of closing libraries have chosen to cut professional staff (staffing being the largest cost in most library services). Thus the service level is compromised, but the buildings stay open. Dan Terzian counters that now that we have Google and the internet librarians are outdated and libraries should just hire liberal arts undergraduates.
In my view they are both a little right but in the medium to long term both wrong. Powers is right to point out that a library without librarians is ‘like a hospital without doctors’, but Terzian is right when he says that libraries need to change in the digital era. Strangely, however, Terzian’s example of why librarians are no longer needed (the success of the New York Public Library) is a long list of projects best planned and implemented by librarians – whose training and experience is directed exactly towards such things as “e-publications, crowdsourcing projects and a user-friendly online library catalog”. These are indeed the sort of thing that libraries should now be concentrating on, and the best people to lead and implement such projects are librarians.
There are two basic flaws with the argument that libraries no longer need librarians because we have search engines and the internet:
Firstly there is the issue of bias, echo chambers and what has come to be known as ‘the filter bubble’. Exclusively relying on computers and, in particular, the same search engine/s to seek information can trap people within one particular view of the world or at the least obscure relevant information. Relying on automated ‘spiders’ to categorise information does indeed help us to answer simple questions quickly; but if the purpose of libraries is to ‘spread knowledge’ as Terzian claims, or to ‘expand minds’ as I wrote in my last post, then the abilities of Google, DuckDuckGo or any other search engine to find ‘facts’ quickly is not nearly as relevant as one might first imagine.
Secondly, there is the question of what librarians do ‘behind the scenes’ and where search engines and other discovery tools find their content in the first place. Google’s project of digitising thousands of books could never take place without the prior thousands upon thousands of librarian-hours spent organising, cataloguing and storing the books in the first place. Database products like ABI/Inform or General Onefile need information professionals to compile them. “Crowdsourcing projects” need professionals to direct and lead them. User friendly library catalogues need professional information organisation and retrieval experts to design them. The problem with the argument that the internet is an adequate replacement for librarians is its myopically arrogant assumption that we are living in the end of history – or at least the end of the history of information. As if no new work is necessary to record, store and organise information, culture or history. As if somehow the birth of Google was ‘Year Zero’ for information management.
Terzian and others seem to think that library science students are still just taught the Dewey Decimal system and Library of Congress cataloguing rules. I went to library school eight years ago and learned neither. Instead, we were taught XML and Dublin Core, along with theories of information management and access. These days students are being taught Java. What Terzian (without realising it) is really demanding is better librarians and better librarianship. The traditional ways of providing library services are indeed mostly doomed. It does not naturally follow that librarianship is irrelevant, however. Professor Dave Lankes makes this point in a recent vlog post. Continuing the doctor analogy, he points out that in the nineteenth century medical doctors’ traditional practices were increasingly becoming irrelevant. Rather than disappearing, however, they embraced the new technology and became associated with the new ways to doing things rather than bleedings and questionable tonics. We can take this idea a little further – should we really be exploring a future with fewer libraries, but just as many librarians? Is it the case that rather than sacking librarians and keeping libraries, we should close libraries and keep the librarians? Doctors aren’t just found in hospitals. They do home visits in densely settled areas of the world, travel with the troops on battlefields and in Australia we have long had the Royal Flying Doctor Service operating in remote areas to fly a doctor to the patient rather than moving the patient to a hospital. In a digital, online context, all these could be models for future librarianship.
This is not about librarians simply wanting to keep their jobs. This argument is really about who controls access to information under what circumstances. Are we going to invest in a citizen-based human information design and management structure, or are we going to hand control over to private companies, legally bound to maximise profit? It’s about librarians better articulating what they do, and doing it better. It’s about arguing and displaying the value (in both monetary and intrinsic terms) of libraries, librarians and citizen-centred knowledge. When it comes to keeping, organising and disseminating information and knowledge, the key has always been evolution. In this field we should always be wary of revolutionary theories – they always lead to loss of information, knowledge and culture.
In my previous post post I finished by writing that librarians need to become more pro-active. Today’s post attempts to expand on how we might go about this and why it is needed.
The traditional approach to librarianship might be called the gatekeeper on the mountain – waiting for people make the trek to ask you for information, then deciding where they can look. It’s an approach that insisted that children only have access to particular parts of the collection, that library patrons must ask for permission before being granted access to special or restricted collections and that preservation of the physical stock and its organisation was the most important thing – patrons really just get in the way.
Librarians were some of the first people to recognise the potential of both the early internet and the world wide web, and enthusiastically got on board. Strangely, however, the huge disruption caused by the rise of the internet and the world wide web has still only had a marginal effect on the way we actually do our jobs.
For many librarians this may seem like an outrageous thing to write. After all, aren’t we all skilled in using online databases to find journal articles? Aren’t we teaching patrons how to use tools like Ancestry.com, Proquest and our own ‘Online Public Access Catalogues’? We can code HTML! We digitised our local history! We talk about ‘the interwebs’! Ironically!
Well, yes, that’s all positive and nice, but the currently prevailing ‘new’ approach to libraries tends toward being pro-active within the library – no longer a gatekeeper, but still on the mountain. So we have ‘roving librarians’, face-out displays and shelf-markers with QR codes. We’re getting in patrons’ faces a bit more and marketing the collection – as long as people are already engaging with the library, preferably by being inside the building.
The most important effect of the world wide web on librarianship is yet to be addressed – how do we most effectively do our job when library users don’t need to come into the building to use the library? How do we steer patrons/customers/students to interesting and relevant information or cultural artifacts when we can’t see them and they can’t see us? Up until now our response to the rise of worldwide, wireless and electronic information transfer mechanisms has been evolutionary. That’s not going to cut it. The profound change in the management of information and cultural artifacts caused by the rise of the internet and the world wide web cannot possibly be overstated. Tim Berners-Lee is a revolutionary figure at the level of a Napoleon, Henry Ford or Qin Shi Huang. Just as there was an Industrial Revolution, we are still in the throes of an Information Revolution – and a revolution needs revolutionaries.
The job of a librarian is not merely to develop a nice collection of reading and other cultural material. If you want to sit at a desk, recording what crosses it and waiting for somebody to ask you for it, become an archivist. Being a librarian means actively helping people to find information and recreational culture. In a post-internet world, it means pro-actively doing it. For goodness sake people, it’s not about the books! Your job is to help people make sense of the world – a world overloaded with both information and misinformation. Our future approach needs to be proactive outside the library – we need to get off the mountain and become a real ‘street corner university’. Libraries often boast that with 3G mobile computing, phone apps and websites, the library can be anywhere. When libraries can be anywhere, librarians need to be everywhere.
If public librarians really believe that ‘libraries change lives’ they’re going to have to start providing contextual pro-active service. Luckily, we already have some models for how this might work.
The National Library of Australia’s online collection tool,Trove, is actively marketed through a Twitter feed with links to interesting digitised newspaper articles, artworks, ephemera and other items from the collections of the National Library and other associated cultural collecting institutions. Tweets are often relevant to things that are in the news, or in season. This service is a good way of marketing the existence of Trove, but also pro-actively pushes out information without Australians (or indeed, anyone) having to think to go to Trove and look it up. The State Library of Victoria provides a similar service.
First Bank provided a model for libraries to follow when they devised a clever strategy for getting passengers at Denver Airport to visit their website. Advertising signs displayed pictures of various public-domain books, with a QR code to enable passengers to download the book to their smartphone for free, via First Bank’s website. For a really useful service libraries could simply omit the website and allow immediate downloads, or provide links to the relevant place on an e-lending service such as Overdrive.
The New York Public Library ran a program in 2008 called ‘Design by the book’, teaming with Design Sponge to let five design students loose in their archives to search for inspiration. By turning the experience into a series of online videos, the library not only pro-actively made use of their collection, they also brought these treasures to a wider audience.
In the last post we discussed the research papers produced by the Australian Parliamentary Library and the Commons Library in the UK. Recently I discovered the Colorado State Library does something similar, but with a specific focus on libraries themselves, with their Library Research Service.
Information is beautiful is another, even less conventional example that libraries should consider. At informationisbeautiful.net the infographic has been elevated to an artform as the team there look for new and interesting ways to make complex information easily understandable in one image. Their most famous project is probably the Billion Dollar Gram, but there are many others. Imagine your public library producing something similar for your local government area or state at budget time.
Finally, we come to a concept that really got me thinking about this topic in the first place – Radical Reference. Radical Reference started at the 2004 Republican National Conference in New York City. In its original conception it was designed as a way for a group of professional librarians to use their skills to assist people demonstrating outside the conference. Radical Reference librarians arrived armed with 3G smartphones, maps of the area, information about the legal rights of protesters and a big sign advertising their service. Whilst Radical Reference claims they are a-political, and they do assist anyone who asks for help, their focus has been on providing reference services at protest events. In 2008 an IFLA paper was written about their service model.
The exciting thing about Radical Reference is that it is an excellent example of pro-active contextual service delivery. Radical Reference put together a kit of answers to the questions they think are most likely to be asked, but they also are prepared for anything. Support is provided by librarians ‘back at base’ either over the phone or online, but the service delivery point is literally on the streets. Using this sort of model, libraries could provide regular in-context information services where people actually are – in the park, at the farmers’ market, outside the football game and so on. Another way of thinking about this, particularly for libraries like mine that operate in reasonably dense inner-city areas, is as a twenty-first century version of the mobile library services we used to offer. Instead of a bookmobile, however, you can now serve citizens outside the library building with just the librarian and a laptop or tablet computer. The Mobile Librarian doesn’t need a truck license – she can simply set up in the cafe, market or train station. Combined with a version of the new fashion for microlibraries you could combine this flexible service with a small hardcopy collection.
Once you start thinking about ways to pro-actively provide information and use the resources we have, it’s easy to come up with new ideas. Australian Rules football games often have an associated Twitter hashtag (eg #aflcatshawks). Proactive libraries might take the opportunity to tweet links to historical records they hold for one of the teams, or information gleaned from the biography of one of the coaches, using the hashtag. Local libraries could develop apps that don’t just allow them to search, reserve and renew physical items and ‘borrow’ ebooks from the collection but also act as a community information and news portal – something like a combination of Flipboard, Overdrive and Worldcat, delivering content to members before they’ve even asked for it.
And so on.
So step away from the reference desk and right out of the library. The Information Revolution needs revolutionaries -follow Che’s lead and come down off your mountain and into the streets. When it comes to the war on ignorance, as Rage Against the Machine once told us, the front line is everywhere.
I’ve been thinking recently about what libraries look like when they’re about information retrieval and dissemination rather than information storage. Public libraries already do a fair bit of this, but for some of the staff it seems to be something they think of as ‘not really my job’ – and some patrons seem to agree, given the apologetic way they ask for assistance.
One of the advantages of being a public librarian is that I get paid to practice my natural tendency to be a know-it-all. Often this just entails correcting the name of a book title, or explaining that Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone is simply the American name for Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (a great example of how senior Editors in publishing houses ‘add value’). Sometimes I get to help people with more interesting questions which require me to find things well outside of our own hardcopy collection or database products. Questions like “what visa do we need to apply for to get my sick aunt to be allowed to stay in Australia?”, or “what’s the phone number for this hotel in New York?”, or “how do I apply to be on the electoral roll for local elections if I am a non-citizen owner-occupier?”
There are official places patrons could have gone for help with this. The Immigration department, the local Council or electoral commission and so on. Then again, if you want to know the population of Belize you can also go somewhere other than your local library. The point is that people feel both comfortable and confident going to the library – comfortable asking for information (because they know they won’t be belittled for asking and the librarian will take their request seriously) and confident in the answer (because they trust the librarian to give them correct, unbiased information). Libraries strive to be, and be seen to be, objective and open to everyone. Other government services don’t necessarily have the same reputation – talk to any Australian who has had to deal with Centrelink, the Department of Immigration and Citizenship, or even Australia Post.
So far, so obvious. Where this gets interesting is when you start to think about what this means in a future that, whilst not likely to be “paperless”, is certainly going to see a larger proportion of our information and recreational reading material produced and distributed electronically and online. This means a big change for public libraries at some unclear point in the future, but for others the wave has already hit. Australian journalists woke to another set of horror numbers late last week. Whilst editors talked up alleged growth in app and online readership, the truth is that more people reading your free online content doesn’t pay the bills. What was supposed to pay the bills was online advertising, but the ‘rivers of gold’ from print advertising earlier this century have dried up. The problem for news sites is that their readership – or lack thereof – can be tracked article by article and page by page. This has lead to the phenomenon of ‘content marketing’ and ‘link baiting’, where sites pay bottom dollar for staff to slap together a quick piece plagiarising the news gathered by actual journalists, then add a link to something vaguely related. An excellent critique of this phenomenon can be found at Baekdal.com.
It gets worse than this for newspapers and journalism, however. Where once columnists were an exclusive club who could fulminate from their newspapers without any competition or interaction, the rise of the blog and online comments is changing this dynamic. Snide comments about the worth of bloggers, and the vindictive outing of anonymous bloggers who do a better job in their spare time are all opinion columnists have been able to come up with to fight back. News sites post stories about Paris Hilton to increase screen hits, advertisers flee to more useful outlets and citizens read things that are ‘newsy’ rather than actual informative, objective news.
Essentially, modern journalism has been caught with its pants down.
I read recently of an intriguing discussion about the crisis in journalism, and the connection with libraries, at the Beyond Books: News, Literacy, Democracy, and America’s Libraries conference in April this year. It sounds, as far as I can make out, like this was seen by participants as a way for two professions sharing similar threats to work together to overcome them. I’m not sure I see it that way, however. The articles in American Libraries talked about social media and blogs being a threat to both librarians and journalists. This is a little bizarre. Journalists create content. Librarians assist people to access content. How does more content threaten those who assist people to access and understand it? Call me cynical, but this appears to be a desperate ploy by journalists to get librarians to do their work for them. To this, I say bring it on. We’ll do your work and you can all find something else to do. Because we’re doing it already.
Consider the Australian Parliamentary Library. The library’s main role is to assist members of Parliament with any information enquiries they may have, but one of the lesser-known but, in some ways, more important roles is the Library’s publication of Research Papers on topics the library’s staff feel are of immediate interest in national public discourse. This sort of thing is also done by the New South Wales Parliamentary Libary and the Commons Library in the UK. These libraries are publishing thoroughly researched, independent briefing papers on matter of immediate national or state importance, to inform both decision makers and the broader public. These papers are generally succinct but thorough, easy to read and sometimes surprising. They are, in other words, exactly what people bemoaning the death (and/or dearth) of long-form public interest journalism are looking for.
The idea of the daily newspaper being the gold standard of public discourse, objective analysis and ‘holding government to account’ was never really true, and is certainly not true now. Anonymous bloggers, whatever their charms, can not fulfil these roles on their own. The sort of factual dispassionate analysis that we desperately need and many people are looking for is ideally suited to the skills modern librarians have. The necessary respect as an open and objective source of unbiased information is already ours. When we cease having to spend so much of our time in physical transactions and fighting the entropy of physical storage systems, we’ll have more time to roll out the Research Papers model through every publicly funded library.
It’s time for librarians to become more pro-active in our roles. Waiting in a room full of books for people to ask for assistance is a professional model which should remain firmly in the past. Modern librarianship will, increasingly, be about refusing to wait. It will be about infographics and research papers. It will be about suggested reads at train stations and daily Twitter streams. It will be about giving life to the information and stories we hold and have access to. But this post is in danger of becoming too long, so you’ll have to wait for me to expand upon all that later. For the moment, I’ll leave you to ponder this:
Are librarians the new journalists?
My last post somehow found itself on the front page of both the Vex News and Quadrant websites as recommended reading. Disconcerted, I’ve been wondering how to retrieve my reputation as a Big Government loving bureaucrat. Luckily, Twitter presented me with this article today,
For those who can’t be bothered reading the whole thing, it’s a Forbes India interview with Sunder Rajan, the founder of a private company called Just Books. Just Books is a lending library …except it’s a private lending library – entirely funded, run and founded by Rajan and his private company, which works on a franchise model. In the article one of the franchisees says that he makes Rs 2500 per month off the average customer borrowing two books and a magazine, but this appears to be a typo in the article – the annual subscription cost is Rs 2500 – the monthly fee is Rs. 250. Just as well – Rs. 2500 works out at around $50 Australian, which would be a ridiculously high fee even here.
I had a number of questions when I read this article – What’s so special about a library that uses RFID and moves books between branches? (Pretty much every public library in Australia will have done this, or at least planned for it, by 2015) Don’t India’s public libraries already do similar things? How do ordinary Indians afford to pay to borrow books? How much is Rs 250 to the average Indian? Why is there a market for a private library service in Bangalore?
The last question is probably the most important, and the most useful. Private library services have been tried in richer countries like Australia, and failed. Victoria has a particularly interesting history when it comes to subscription libraries and an attempt at privatisation. The Mechanics Institute buildings that litter Victoria were once vibrant and full, usually including a circulating subscription library. Only one Mechanic’s Institute library remains (in Prahran) – no longer a subscription library but maintained with funds from the State Government, essentially a relic kept open because of its historical link to the past and extensive local history collection. The Athenaeum Library is the only other surviving subscription library of note, operating out of the Athenaeum Theatre building in Melbourne.
Public libraries run and funded by local governments have replaced the Mechanics Institutes and other subscription library services – generally offering superior service and a wider range at a more efficient cost. When the Kennett Government forced local governments to put a large percentage of their services out to tender under Compulsory Competitive Tendering legislation, public library staff found themselves having to write tender documents in order to keep their jobs. Ultimately, they were the only ones tendering – there were no expressions of interest from the public sector.
That’s not to say they couldn’t. Some public libraries in the United State and, more recently, the UK, are now being run on contract by Library Systems Services (LSSI). Such outsourcing arrangements have not been without controversy, but the reality is that LSSI is able to provide broadly the same services these libraries traditionally provided, at a lower cost (even if there are arguments about whether, long term, this is the best model for a really high quality service).
Outsourcing to a company providing library services to all citizens, however, is quite a different thing to the Just Books model. Just Books doesn’t really provide a public library service – they provide a book hire service. The terms and conditions explicitly state that they can reject anyone’s membership for any reason, and that only the person who has joined may read the books, unless by prior agreement with them. This is very much the Blockbuster or Video Ezy model, rather than the outsourced public library model.
The crux of the problem seems to be that India’s public library system, including in Bangalore, has been under-resourced and undervalued for many years. Yes, I get that India is still a very poor country, but I’m surprised that, from what I can gather, India’s public library service is quite bad, with old and damaged stock and a severe shortage of locations and material. It appears that my assumption that India would have a widespread and well-resourced public library system – with its long literary and learning tradition, it’s famous public service, seemingly endless supply of educated engineers & IT specialists and its British colonial history – was well wide of the mark.
As far as I can ascertain, (not having taken a trip to India), Bangalore has just 5 government-run library locations. This in a city of 9.6 million people, a city that is known as the ‘Silicon Valley of India’. Contrast this with the City of Boroondara Library Service, which also has 5 locations – serving a population of 165,000.
What we see in Bangalore is a strange inverse of market failure. Non-economists have become familiar with the concept of market failure with recent public discourse in relation to climate change (with the famous statement in the Stern report) and more recently, the ‘Global Financial Crisis’, or GFC as it has become known in Australia. Market failure happens when the market fails to solve a problem efficiently, or sometimes, at all.
In the case of public library services in Bangalore, however, we see an example of Passive Government Failure. The whole point of public libraries is that they are the most efficient and effective way of ensuring a literate and informed citizenry with access to the shared stories and concepts that one needs to understand to participate fully in society. This can only be done in the most optimised manner by running a library service available to everyone. It is, in fact, itself a response to market failure. So the case of Just Books actually highlights a market attempt to a Government failure to effectively solve a market failure.
Except it doesn’t solve it. Just Books is more than a snappy brand name – they mean it literally. At a Just Books franchise you walk in, pay your Rs. 250 and get to borrow a couple of books. You don’t get help to find resources for your school assignment. You don’t get assistance finding and completing a government form from a Department you’ve never heard of. You don’t get storytime for the kids, followed by professional advice on which parenting books are the best for when your child isn’t coping with their new sibling being around. You certainly don’t get to just hang out in the air conditioned comfort for a while leafing through magazines before you walk to the bridge you sleep underneath. If you’ve read the name of this blog you may have an understanding of whether I think simply loaning books to people constitutes a public library service.
Just Books isn’t even good value. For Rs 2500 per year you get to borrow three books a month. That’s about $52 in Australian currency. Government-run public libraries in Victoria spend about $36 per person annually and allow members to borrow as many items as they like – even those that have borrowing limits only apply these to simultaneous loans – if you’re a fast reader you can still borrow as many items as you like, as long as you return the last batch you had.
But it gets worse – While in Victoria we’re getting a modern, RFID-enabled library service for $36 per annum, in Bangalore they’re paying Just Books $52 to loan books on Indian incomes. The average Bangalore resident is paid about Rs. 75,000 (bearing in mind that the average doesn’t necessarily mean the most common income). This makes Rs. 2500 3.33% of an ‘average’ Bangalore worker’s annual income.
Using the same crude measure (Gross income per capita), the average Australian earns around $51,000 and, if paying an equivalent portion of her income, would shell out $1,700 for the privilege of borrowing three books a month. You might like to remember that next time you hear someone complaining about paying their Council rates.
I explored this model because on reading the Forbes article I had an uneasy feeling about the concept, but couldn’t quite put my finger on why. Thinking it through, it becomes clear that Just Books is actually the Cash Converters of lending libraries – an over-priced, bottom-feeding solution that only gets business because the poor have run out of options. Companies like Just Books only appear when the market or the government have failed to provide adequate options for those who excluded from the market. In the case of Bangalore, middle-class Indians can afford to pay 3% of their income to borrow books, and are forced to do so because they can’t afford to buy all the books they want to read and their government-run library service simply doesn’t provide an adequate service. Those who can’t afford Rs. 2500 a year – well, they’re stuck with the mouldy books in Bangalore Central City Library I guess.
I don’t blame Just Books for the situation. They’re not forcing anyone to join, after all – Sunder Rajan just saw a gap in the market. I don’t necessarily even blame the Government of Karnataka – they may have the ‘Silicon Valley of India’ in their state, but they’re still responsible for millions of desperately poor people who need food, houses, roads and sewers. It’s worth pondering, however, a few lessons from the Just Books story.
Firstly, when the Small Government wagon next pulls into your town, consider what it is that particular government-funded services actually do. The politicians who are slashing library budgets in the USA and UK are generally the same people who insist that the unemployed and poor need to be more self-reliant and take responsibility for improving their skills and opportunities. What they don’t seem to realise is that when the poor, unemployed, desperate and troubled do try to turn their lives around, often the first place they go is to the public library. Pedro Munoz, a recovering drug addict in New York, says the New York Public Library literally saved his life. After Hurrican Katrina, it was public libraries to which most people turned when they needed assistance contacting families, getting news and information, accessing Government payments and just generally re-connecting with the world. Book vending machines can’t help you fill out a form, or teach you to read, or just give you the friendly human contact you crave. Privatised services may outwardly appear to do the job, but it is often difficult to quantify the value of social services. If a company like Just Books is making a profit, it’s a sign the government is not doing its job.
Secondly, just because a business is offering a service, and people are paying for it, that doesn’t mean it’s the best, most efficient or most optimised way of providing the service. Aside from the uneasy feeling I had about the inequitable nature of Just Books, it reminded me of something else a little closer to home. The Just Books model: a paid subscription at an extortionate price, giving you access to a limited number of books, which you are not allowed to lend or otherwise transfer to a friend or relative and which can be taken back at the whim of the company providing them, is rather similar to the current situation with eBooks – even when you’ve “bought” them.
The current eBook market is currently controlled by an extraordinarily small number of companies who tell their customers what they can buy, at what price and under what conditions. They control your use of their products well after the time of purchase, including the ability to edit or remove eBooks from your reading device and to stop you lending the product to another person. The price gouging and behaviour-control of eBook providers is really no different to Just Books, it’s just that Just Books does it with physical books. If you’ve been wondering why public libraries have generally been a little slow on eBooks, this is the real reason – we’re not about to just lie back and get screwed by multinationals, especially when their ideas about controlling information are so opposed to our values of sharing information.
But that sounds like a different post altogether.
