The role of Libraries within the Economics of Information

By Derek Law, Director of Information Strategy, University of Strathclyde in Glasgow

The death of the Library has been forecast almost as often as the death of the book in recent years and on a number of grounds. It has been suggested that the paperless office and the consequential paperless society has no place for the library. Wittily, if scatalogically, Brian Perry has responded that “the paperless office is as likely as the paperless toilet”. It has been suggested that at the very least the advent of electronic libraries will remove the need for libraries as place. This also seems unlikely. Quite apart from public good arguments such as social inclusion there is hard commercial evidence that placing a new public library in a shopping mall increases shopping sales. The Library is seen as a safe place for example to leave small children for a reading hour while mothers shop. Even more prosaically the zealots favouring the virtual library have give little real commercial thought to the cost of converting all existing material.

And so has emerged the concept of the hybrid library. One in which the library continues to exist as a physical place, one where legacy collections remain and where in many cases paper continues to arrive – since those who predict the death of paper publishing clearly ignore the growth in publishing statistics. However, if libraries and librarians are to continue to survive they must offer old wine in new bottles through the continuous reinterpretation of old skills in new environments. But since librarians have done this since they first collected together tablets of stone in the great library of Ashurbanipal some four thousand years ago, we need not fear too much for their fate. Indeed as we approach the information society, we may suppose that those trained in information management skills will have a leading role in that new society. The library rules of the much neglected Indian library author Ranganathan may be rephrased to seem as relevant as ever – “the right information to the right user at the right time”. A simple and elegant phrase whose delivery will require sophisticated and complex systems.

Library roles

So let us consider those traditional roles and which of them will continue to survive. The work of the library may be defined as

• Acquisition

• Filtering of information

• Retention of artefacts

· Organisation of knowledge

• Interpretation

• Custodian

In short the librarian selects that subset of material which is relevant to the work of the organisation, acquires it, normally with a view to long-term preservation, stores it in meaningful relationship to other similar material and lists it in ways which make it accessible. The librarian also acts as an expert interlocutor in assisting library users to find relevant material.

There are two other roles which may also be seen as relevant.

• Publisher

• Trainer

The library in recent years has had a minor role as a publisher as public funds have been squeezed and the need for revenue generation has been imposed. This tends to concentrate on local history and archival material and is very much a peripheral activity. A growing need however has been for training in information management skills, particularly in relation to electronic services. It might almost be one of Murphy’s Laws – “User Friendly Systems Aren’t”. The need to assist library users with everything from

Modem connections to software bugs – quite apart from information selection has been very marked.

The three S’s

This leads to a belief that the reinterpretation of three skills or groups of skills will continue to serve librarians in the new book economy. There is no need to contest the traditional skills areas of other groups in the information chain when there is more than enough need for qualified staff to perform our current roles. These may be defined as:

• Selection

• Storage

• Support

Selection

The view of current users was recently and eloquently described by David Bouchier, an avowed technophobe. He noted that:

From time to time I venture into the howling wastes of the Internet. The technocrats promise us that this information overload will increase a thousand times, ten thousand times until every suburban home will have access to every piece of useless information in the universe.[i]

We might begin to consider whether access to the Internet is a birthright to be interfered with at our peril, or whether organisations will do what they have traditionally done and employ information specialists to select and filter information that information which is relevant to the organisation and its purposes and then create exceptional mechanisms – equivalent to inter-library loan – to deal with that proportion of material missed or excluded by the filtering and selection process. Now this might be done by the creation of gateways of the sort being developed here in Germany as well as in the United Kingdom and Australia. Equally it might be done by holding information locally. As the cost of storage drops both absolutely and relative to bandwidth, it becomes quite plausible to mirror and cache relevant material at the organisation or in a consortial structure. This has significant advantages in terms of both long-term preservation and quality assurance and version control. These three crucial issues for those such as universities interested in information in terms of centuries rather than months, have not satisfactorily been addressed hitherto.

Storage

The organisation of knowledge as evidenced in structures as the Dewey Decimal Classification Scheme is taken for granted and indeed lampooned – until one sees the alternative. The URL must be one of the few constructs which could make the Library of Congress Classification Scheme seem elegantly simple. Computing Science is only just beginning to appreciate that a huge intellectual effort has already been expended on this topic and that library skills (often made more palatable by calling them Information Science skills) are hugely relevant.

Preservation is another issue not yet fully understood or addressed by publishers, national libraries and the scholarly community. And yet libraries, more particularly university libraries have much experience in this field and should be seen as major players. There is an old joke which like many jokes has a grain of truth in it which illustrates the point. The nation state – and by extension national libraries – are a construct of the mid-nineteenth century. No European or North American country save Switzerland and Portugal have retained exactly the same boundaries since the mid-nineteenth century. Only thirty five institutions – all European - have stayed largely unchanged for five hundred years or more: the Papacy; the Parliament of Iceland; the Tynwald of the Isle of Man; thirty two European universities. We may expect to see a vigorous exploration of preservation issues by universities and their libraries.

Storage may also cover network topology. Scholarship is by definition universal in terms of both time and place. Yet networks are being developed almost entirely on the basis of short term commercial expediency. The academic community must begin to consider how network topology will be managed – perhaps in part through mirroring and cacheing, so that scholarly material from developing countries is guaranteed a long term place in the academic firmament. Much of the debate on electronic publishing is driven by the needs of the STM community yet Science, Technology and Medicine form half or less of an average university. There is a responsibility on the academy and on academic and other libraries to protect non-commercial scholarship from all over the world.

Support

Very broadly this covers the teaching of users in information skills. This has been a preoccupation of all librarians at all times but becomes particularly pointed at a time of information overload. The individual who will fully partake in the information society must be fully equipped with such skills. Librarians are well placed to impart them. At a trivial level access to printed literature requires one or at most two skills, the ability to read and perhaps some prior subject knowledge. In an electronic environment this changes when a whole range of new skills from Boolean search techniques to relevance ranking, software debugging and fixing hardware crashes and even simply remembering passwords become central to accessing information . This area of support is likely to be the major growth area for librarians. Nor is learning a one off experience. The skills of computer technicians are popularly reported to have a “life” of three years, as systems change. Even if information systems change more slowly we must assume that information skills will need to be refreshed regularly.

Conclusion

In sum then, the library as a physical place will continue to have a significant future for social as well as preservation functions. The librarian will continue to play a key support role in seeking, selecting and filtering relevant information to suit the needs of those for whom the information is a tool and not an end in itself. Finally, librarianship, even if renamed information science will be seen as a key discipline in providing access to the information society and the new book economy