11Update

Facing the real challenges of digital libraries

Derek Law

The now all but forgotten Whiffenpoof song, contains the famous line that “We’re poor little lambs who have lost our way”. Sadly, this seems to be the case with libraries. As libraries face the bleakest future for decades, we may justly claim that they have never been better managed and never been better run. Tales of hospitals going bankrupt are manifold, while tales of libraries doing the same are never heard. But although we have kept all the plates spinning impeccably, we have failed to grasp the message of the digital revolution and failed to put it at the core of what passes for the theory and philosophy of librarianship. There is no digital Grand Unified Theory or Theory of Everything under discussion, far less agreed. Apart from desultory attempts to rewrite Ranganathan’s principles for a digital era, the philosophy of future libraries comes only from booksellers, authors and publishers whose answer is to invest in more dead trees. The price of becoming great managers has been the disappearance of library thinkers. As a profession we are mute, while the steady erosion of the library schools suggests that no salvation theory will come from that quarter.

Future collections

Recent figures have shown an explosion of born digital material. 5 Exabytes equates to everything ever published. In 2006 some 161 exabytes was the size of digital traffic on the Internet and by 2010 this had mushroomed to 988 exabytes, a sixfold growth that shows no sign of decreasing. And what have libraries done when faced with this tsunami of information? Two things: we have set up committees to negotiate deals with publishers of commercial material, similar to the deals negotiated by all the other consortia and we have digitised some of the bits of paper we already have. And yet for research libraries at least, commercial material has only ever been a fraction of the material we acquire. From archives to grey literature, from government publications to incunables we build our collections on a huge variety of publications. Now while it is try that lots of interesting experiments have taken place and some librarians have embraced Facebook and no conference is complete without its Twitter feed, we ignore our own institutional output. It seems likely that no university could produce a definitive list of its intellectual outputs. This would include: Research papers; Conference presentations; Theses; Wikis; Blogs; Websites; Podcasts; Reusable Learning Objects; Research data; e-laboratory books; Streamed lectures; Images; Audio files; Digitized collections; e-Archives; e-mail; HR Records; Student/staff records; Corporate publications; National heritage artefacts etc. etc. No university far less university library has an e-collections policy covering all of this, far less organising digital rights management. Libraries have developed international standards and systems to make books available and arguably we need to do precisely this with born digital material. The Emory Slave Trade database for example shows exactly how the aggregation and management of related material can make the whole much more powerful than the sum of the parts. And it is we who collect and curate the information not Google – although it may have largely taken over the role of discovery.

Nor is this an issue exclusive to research libraries. A recent heartening paper by an American Library IT Director suggests that the role of public libraries is to serve as community platforms: "The purpose of libraries when they were created was not to purchase commercial content for use by the community but to store and organize the content of the community. Popular materials have fueled a huge boom for popular libraries, but libraries were created to protect and ensure access to things like [local texts and history] for the communities that produced them, not to subsidize access to the hottest new clay tablets from Babylon . . . The 20th-century [library] brought the world to its community. The 21st-century library brings its community to the world."

Library users

How we interact with that community is just as much in need of a radical rethink. We may join the ranks of the tweethearts and the intexticated, but need not more toys but a rigorous theoretical underpinning for why we use social networking and how we interact with digital users. For example, Librarians have embraced Twitter with the passion of a first school room crush. No library conference these days is complete without its twitter feed. But it is much more difficult to discover good examples of the use of Twitter by libraries in support of users. It is estimated that some 300 US libraries have twitter feeds, with only 400 librarians active in the UK. Behind conference traffic we find libraries promoting specific books, author events and closing times, and it becomes clear that the principal (and not unimportant!) use is by librarians tweeting to other librarians.

Prensky’s seminal work on digital natives and digital immigrants was (and is?), like climate change, controversial. But in both cases the steady and continuous drip of evidence shows that his thesis was sound, that rather than the normal intergenerational shift, we face a fundamental dysfunctional change in user behavious

Some depressing statistics come from a recent OCLC (2006) survey which showed that:

• • 89% of students use search engines to begin a search

  • 2% use a library web site

  • 93% are satisfied or very satisfied with self-help

  • 84% are satisfied if librarian assisted.

    • In other words, help from a librarian reduces satisfaction. One explanation for this reduction is the so-called “eat spinach syndrome”. Thus when a user wants a quick fact or a short cut or simply the answer, we insist on showing them how to do the task properly. Do it properly or not at all; eat your spinach, it’s good for you. Worthy as such an approach is, it is clearly not what the market wants and we have to devote much more effort to meeting user needs not to handing on traditions of competence – or indeed hanging on to traditions of competence. We have huge potential to be real partners in the teaching and learning process, but this will require a fundamental rethinking and refashioning of the concept of user support. For example: managing the collections of learning objects; managing and preserving the wiki and blog spaces; managing the content links and licensing. These are all well within existing library competences.

Meeting the challenges posed by a digital environment

It is an old saw that the market will decide. Information users are already voting with their fingers and the trick must surely be to follow the market and not wait for the digital consumer to come to us. We know that they go to Google not the OPAC; 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 is not exclusively the preserve of school age children; researchers too are beginning to move into social networking with sites such as Openwetware. So we must look not to compete with these new communication vehicles but to 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 and that as a profession we engage on the users terms, not expect them to deal with information on our terms. 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 the user’s life 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 users in their virtual space.

The Whiffenpoofs (a Yale a cappella club) put some of their singing profits into an international childrens literacy initiative. Have we the imagination and can we discover the principles to do the same for a digital future? There is a wealth of imagination, innovation and inquisitiveness within the profession. The challenge then is whether we can inspire colleagues to embrace these digital developments as central to the future of the profession and not the ephemeral and transient gewgaws of an eccentric fringe. So will we define a Grand Unified Theory of Digital Libraries, a Theory of Everything that will clarify what we do beyond opening a building staffed by volunteers or will we, in another line from their signature song “pass and be forgotten with the rest”?