09DigitalBarbarians

Waiting for the (Digital) Barbarians

THE COMING OF AGE OF THE DIGITAL NATIVES WILL ADD TO CHALLENGES ALREADY FACING LIBRARIANS AND FORCE THEM TO ENGAGE INFORMATION USERS AND ADD VALUE TO THEIR ORGANIZATIONS.

BY DEREK LAW

Constantine Cavafy’s 1904 poem “Waiting for the Barbarians” provides a useful metaphor for where libraries now find themselves. Decked in our professional finery, we wait for the digital natives to arrive. The danger is that by waiting and not acting, we will, like Cavafy’s senators, find that the barbarians never come, because they have passed us by as being irrelevant.

It has been almost a decade since Marc Prensky first argued the then controversial case for digital natives. As with climate change, the growing weight of evidence is showing him to be correct. Recent figures from the Childwise study (2009) in the United Kingdom (which many will find depressing) reveal the following about 9-year-olds:

• 40 percent have Internet access in their room;

• They enjoy six hours of “screen time” each day, with 1.7 hours spent online;

• Only three-fourths of them read for pleasure, down from 84 percent two years ago;

• They are abandoning print and paper and communicating in a completely different way; and

• They multitask.

Pondering these findings, it is very easy to move into grumpy intergenerational mode and bemoan the fact that today’s kids don’t read and have a cellphone glued to their ears and a bottle of water to their hands. But if, like Prensky, we believe that this is not just a time of technological determinism but a time of real dysfunction, we need to respond appropriately.

These same kids who can’t add or spell are in fact fluent communicators — they just communicate differently. Much of the difference has to do with images. We are moving toward an image-based society and away from a text-based society, with the result that reading and writing as we have known them are becoming almost lifestyle choices rather than requirements of functioning members of society. The success of Flickr and YouTube and the near-ubiquitous use of cellphones as cameras demonstrate where we are heading.

The implications of the rise of digital natives are borne out by the deep log analysis conducted by the CIBER research group at University College in London (CIBER 2007; Nicholas 2009). They have spent eight years collecting the digital fingerprints of everyone from children to Nobel laureates, from all parts the world and in every discipline, and have come up with a number of findings. The good news is that the appetite for e-material seems inexhaustible (of course, this carries with it the growing danger of believing that if something is not on the Internet, it doesn’t exist). The bad news is that the digital natives are indeed barbarians— technically competent but lacking information skills, although they rarely recognize this themselves. They spend as much time navigating cyberspace as they do gathering information.

Another lesson from CIBER is that the shorter the piece of information, the more likely it will be read. Internet visitors don’t want to hang around—they want to move quickly in and out. Convenience trumps quality every time. If a piece is long, they either read the abstract or squirrel it away for a day when it might not be read (the electronic equivalent of the filing cabinet full of unread photocopies). People actually prefer abstracts much of the time, even when given the choice of the full document. They go online to avoid reading. The online model is one of browsing and grazing, with an average of four minutes spent on an e-article and eight minutes spent on an e-book. Only a couple of pages will be viewed.

The Librarians’ Response

While there are a few information professionals who understand and are taking steps to address these issues, our general professional response has been muddle-headed. It is very depressing to review the results of the OCLC user survey (2006) showing that user satisfaction decreases when librarians try to help. Online users are in a hurry to find the answer (or a shortcut to it), but what we offer is a choice between showing them how to conduct a proper search or not helping them at all. This has been described as the “Eat Spinach Syndrome” (eat your spinach, it’s good for you).

There are several reasons for our failure to drive and champion change. First, the technology works too well. Everything from licensing content to the application of metadata is invisible to users who sit down, log on, and find what they want (or so they think) with no visible intervention by a librarian. Second (and most importantly), there has been no extended professional debate (except among thinkers such as Cliff Lynch and Lorcan Dempsey) on developing an underpinning philosophy of e-librarianship. Once the twin arks of the professional covenant, cataloguing and classification, are gone, what is left that defines a distinctive and valuable profession with unique skills to offer? That question can be answered, but it requires a significant debate about future roles at a time when “library school” has virtually disappeared as a term and library departments are in steady decline.

A third reason is the rise of the managerial technocrat. Libraries have never been run better; however, I strongly believe that we have moved from a position of being partners in the corporate enterprise to being servants of the enterprise, with all the power and status of the Human Resources Department and rather smaller budgets than the Estates Office.

The fourth reason is complacency. It is very easy to fall unwittingly into a mindset that practically relishes the fact that we have survived every technological change of the last 4,000 years, from the tablets of stone in the Great Library of Ashurbanipal through papyrus, paper, manuscripts, printed books, film, audio and what we loosely call media. A 60-year-old technology like computing, where storage media have a life of less than three years, can hardly be a real threat to us, can it?

Finally, there has been a real failure to engage with e-resources. The growth in digitally created material is phenomenal; the need for its curation is inescapable. We have preferred, however, to engage in two displacement activities. First, we have spent huge amounts of time and effort creating, managing and investing in licensing consortia, which engage in replicating the same activity as all the other consortia on the planet. Second, we have invested considerable energy and money in digitizing the paper collections we already possess rather than creating some standards (never mind a philosophy) on how to deal with digitally created resources.

There can scarcely be an organization anywhere that knows how much digital material it creates in a year, much less has a strategy for selecting, retaining, archiving and curating it and policies in place to manage it. Institutional repositories begin to answer this, but they are not well populated and not always managed by libraries, and the movement has academics (such as Peter Suber and Stevan Harnad) as its archevangelists rather than librarians. Digital content activity within organizations tends to be diffuse and subject only to digital overlap strategy (keep your fingers crossed!). We have lost sight of helping our organizations as we struggle to promote the library.

Challenges Facing Libraries

In addition to these failures and the fact that we are facing a growing and fundamentally different user group, we face some very uncomfortable professional challenges. For one, we live in a world where information is increasingly ephemeral. It is estimated that 44 percent of Web sites disappear within a year. We are all familiar with the dreaded 404 Error message, which comes as often from Web sites of national libraries, universities and government agencies as from those of individuals.

Second, whether we like it or not, Wikipedia rather than Encyclopedia Britannica will become the norm. Quality arguments are irrelevant, because the single most important fact we have to accept is that the market will decide. Those of a certain age will remember the great video wars, when it was clear that Betamax was a superior technology to VHS. But VHS “won” the battle because it carried the richest content.

We also have to recognize that content will be created by a variety of users, not just experts. There is a growing, powerful group, sometimes described as citizen scientists, who can now deploy enough computing power at home or through grid computing to rival almost any university academic. Information thus becomes more democratic and less authoritative. On the one hand, users want just enough information to complete the task before them; on the other hand, they have, if they wish, the capacity and skill to test knowledge that interests them. This in itself is an interesting paradox. Science has always claimed that the reason for publication and peer review is that it allows experiments to be replicated. Information is then seen as authoritative. It is unexpected, then, to find that the democratization of information is effectively doing the same thing.

Another significant challenge, but one on which we can build, is that of trust metrics. Most of the marks of trust in the paper world simply do not apply to the Internet. If a book is published by, say, the Oxford University Press, we have a set of values associated with that in terms of the level of scholarship and authority. If a Web site’s URL is ox.ac.uk, we have little if any idea who is behind it, whether a Nobel prize recipient or a first-year undergraduate.

On the Internet, only Google seems to enjoy any level of trust, though even that is beginning to wane as we learn how Google kowtows to the Chinese government and routinely passes material on usage to the U.S. intelligence services. (At the same time, it is American librarians who are taking a stand against the Patriot Act and refusing to reveal information to the intelligence services about online user behavior.) Libraries and librarians are seen as trustworthy, helpful, neutral, unbiased and objective. Quality assurance, relevance ranking and recommended resources are areas that are ripe for exploitation.

There are other positive straws in the wind as well. Projects such as the Emory Transatlantic Slave Trade database and the University of Texas Human Rights Initiative, which through the custom harvesting of human rights themes from the Internet seek to preserve and disclose endangered digitally created documents, are exciting and relevant and show what libraries can contribute. All of the materials in these projects require two things that only librarians can provide. First, they need to be bibliographically secure, definable, and accessible—attributes associated with work performed by the local library. Second, they must be aggregated with the resources of other university libraries and assigned additional value through the creation of virtual collections complete with metadata and tagging (which demonstrates links).

The beginnings of such aggregation can be seen in the first struggles to build major collections. For example, the recently launched Europeana database aspires to make available 10 million cultural heritage objects from hundreds of European libraries, museums and archives by 2010. This idea proved so popular that, at its launch earlier this year, Europeana crashed under the weight of 10 million hits on its Web site. In the same vein, Gallica links almost a million French objects. Importantly, both collections are dispersed, and libraries are using technology to aggregate links rather than objects. Both collections point to the digitized objects of the past rather than digitally created resources. But the methodology and focus are the right ones.

Focusing on Strong Themes

To make the most of these and other opportunities, we need to recognize that information fluency is a critical skill, one that we can help nurture. Information literacy should be taught at school; what we can add is fluency and sophistication. Offering demonstrations and training in how to get the most out of the material we buy and license will be a key task.

Two decades ago, it was fashionable to define librarianship pithily as “the three S’s”—selection, storage and support. These remain powerful tools, albeit ones that require re-interpretation in light of the challenges posed by digital barbarians. Selection—otherwise known as collection building—must apply to both commercial and locally produced digitally created material that is relevant to the purposes of the organization. Storage, including bibliographic authenticity and metadata tagging (thereby allowing aggregation with other resources from other places), will be a key task. Support, whether through the training of individual users or providing policy advice to our organizations, positions us as the undisputed experts in information management.

These tools provide the basis for developing a professional foundation and carving out an undisputed role for the library and librarians. We must also focus on several strong themes that can underpin a profession that has lost its way:

• Building e-research collections and contributing to a virtual research environment of digitally created material;

• Recognizing the importance of quality assurance, trust metrics and relevance ranking;

• Managing institutional digitally created assets and making the content available;

• Adding value to content;

• Providing training in information fluency; and

• Offering policy and standards advice.

Engaging Clients, Adding Value

As a profession, we must engage our clients on their terms, not expect them to deal with information on our terms. Information users are already voting with their fingers, and the trick must surely be to follow them where they go and not wait for them to come to us. We know that they go to Google; we know that they use Twitter and Second Life and Facebook and SMS messaging (although there is an interesting study to be performed on the half-life of social networking sites). We know that this behavior is not exclusively the preserve of school-age children; researchers, too, are beginning to move into social networking with sites such as Openwetware.

We must not try to compete with these new communication vehicles but instead find where we can add value, often by working with other libraries. We then need to make sure that we have very visible Web presences, from entries on Wikipedia to Facebook accounts. Most of all, we need to be comfortable that our profession adds value, albeit in new forms.

We need to get used to providing information in gobbits, not being exhaustive. We need to demonstrate that we can make users’ lives easier, not force them to learn something extra before they get to what they need. Much of this will be about getting out of the library as a physical place and working with the digital barbarians and other users in their virtual spaces.

REFERENCES

Childwise. 2009. ChildWise Monitor Trends Report 2008. Norwich, England: Childwise.

CIBER. 2007. Information Behavior of the Researcher of the Future. London: CIBER.

Nicholas, D. 2009. What is beyond books and journals? Pointers from CIBER’s Virtual Scholar program. Third Bloomsbury Conference on e-publishing and e-publications, 25-26 June.

OCLC. 2006. College Students’ Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources: A Report to the OCLC Membership. Dublin, Ohio: OCLC.