What Libraries Can (Still) Do (2015)
nybooks.com
nybooks.com
The Library of Congress has some remarkable collections and APIs available online; it's worth poking around their site (http://www.loc.gov/library/libarch-digital.html).
They also have an "Ask a Librarian" service that connects you with expert research assistance in any domain, for free, over the Internet. (http://www.loc.gov/rr/askalib/).
Once I commented on a patron's choice of books, and he went into a fifteen minute tirade about his topic of interest, an elaborate Communist plot against the US. The librarian pulled me aside afterwards, and said: "You're not even supposed to notice what they're checking out. It's none of your business. Hope you learned your lesson." To this day, it kind of bugs me when the library workers comment on my kids' book choices when they check out, even if it's harmless chatting.
This was during a time when an organization called Moral Majority was reportedly going to libraries and asking for circulation records, pertaining to some book that they considered to be offensive. Some people showed up while I was on desk duty, and asked to see the records. I invited them to sit in the librarian's office while I fetched her from the stacks. She went in, closed the door, and you could hear her hollering from down the street, then the visitors quietly left.
My other duty at the library was sending out the overdue notices, so I had access to the circulation records. They were kept in a bizarre way, and I filled out the "overdue" postcards by hand. We disposed of records after they were no longer needed for that process. After the incident, I commented to the librarian that I didn't think it was even possible for someone to figure out who was borrowing what books without a pretty elaborate effort. She said: "Now you understand."
Her career lasted well into the computer age, and she was always opposed to electronic circulation systems.
The experience influenced my thinking fairly deeply.
As a side note, libraries can (still) serve as a physical access point for bringing together people who need certain kinds of help, and staff / volunteers who can help them. When I worked at the library, things like the civil service exam study guides were in heavy circulation. Today, at the same library, there are several computers, and a bunch of volunteers who can help people use them. My mom maintains them.
What appears to be an admirable effort by librarians to Americans would still be a gross violation of privacy over here.
For instance, did you know that Apache logfiles are technically forbidden over here because they contain IP adresses which can be traced back to individual users?
Now, during my Student years in the early 2000s, I jobbed in a large University library in southern Germany. Systems were compartilized and there were organizational firewalls between departments so people without a need to know had no way to determine circulation records of or by anyone.
I recently discovered the local library, and it's probably my favorite spot in the city. It's brand new, and internet speeds hit 200mbps. I shelved my unused kindle and picked up reading real books -- got nearly 50 books in the last 2 years.
There are lots of perks to having a free membership too -- I get free online access to dozens of magazines, the NYTimes, ridiculously cheap book sales ($5 per bag full). Plus, there are the occasional exhibits with 500K+ year old human remains, artists sharing their work, and live local orchestras playing inside.
The best news I've heard all month is the city allocated another $400K/year to increase its hours/week by ~14.
Disclaimer: I didn't read the article. I just wanted to share.
Libraries have no food.
The need to be quiet sometimes makes me uncomfortable (I really go to theses places for the background noise anyway)
I love the UCSD Medical Library. They tore out literally tons of shelves and it is now effectively a vast reading room with 20-foot ceilings and huge amounts of soft, natural light coming in through windows and skylights.
Look at the old libraries, how they obsessed with high ceilings and walls lined with books. Not deep warehouse shelving, but glorious, spaces lined with books.
The reading rooms. It's about the reading rooms.
Museums would do well to understand this better also. The National Portrait Gallery in DC does a pretty good job of it.
To sit among the cultural artifacts as you make your own artifacts, or wonder about others, is the beauty of the thing. That's what these post-WWII cinderblock-and-steel-shelving libraries got wrong.
Look at the reading room of the National Library of Medicine. Go to the Library of Congress. The reading rooms, people. It's not about the musty old stacks. It's about the reading rooms.
These segments are now better served by what the NYT dismisses as "a Starbucks wannabe": a free internet node, possibly with curated portals. It might look unfashionable to the NYT, but it's the hard truth. This can absolutely be intersected with your "reading room" concept; I just don't think either concept can survive on its own.
I now get that feeling from art galleries or museums. So many things to be discovered that will change how I view the world. Most of it is on the web, but I want to see it for real. Maybe books need to be treated more as historic artifacts.
First of all, I don't think it's fair to lump the "big boys" (Library of Congress, British Library etc) with smaller city libraries, because they are huge brands that will forever survive as nexus of scholarly research, no matter what fancy media we move on to.
It's much more interesting to look at small city libraries. Their main roles, traditionally, were:
- free access to information
- safe space for reading and studying
- preservation effort for local culture / warehouse for commercial culture
- community point-of-interest for aggregation.
In many places, the preservation element had often got too prevalent for its own good. Now that effort is not necessary at all - that's better left to the big boys, who can leverage a large pool of skills in big cities and archive all tweets for the rest of us, so to speak, with individuals submitting pointers of local relevance ("please archive this and that").
The free access to information is split into two: access to the internet, and access to commercially-available resources. The first is solved with the "starbucks wannabe" model, the second is being discussed with commercial players and we'll have to wait for that - but it's easy to imagine something like patrons getting a locked-down kindle from libraries to borrow ebooks, once the hardware is cheap enough.
What is really interesting is how you can perform the other two roles (reading space, community aggregation) in new ways, now that we're free of warehousing duties. Libraries are now free to experiment with spaces that want to draw people together regardless of the media they consume. I'd love for some local authority to be bold and try out "bookless libraries" concepts that can work through the decades - there is no point, for example, building a library around iPads, because they'll soon be obsolete; but you still have to provide something or people won't come. When you figure that out, you have what is effectively an "engine for meeting minds" which could potentially be much more significant than universities, shaping the relationship between citizens and state/community as well as generating culture.
That's where the fun is.
It's certainly proven that digital data can survive moving from one storage media to another (such as when the first becomes obsolete), and can be protected by redundancy, and so on.
The internet has been around for more than 25 years (which is what we commonly refer to as "a generation"), and digital data has been around for almost 50 years now.
It is patently obvious that we've done a very poor job of preserving digital data and internet artefacts, and little is changing. Sure, in theory preservation can be done, but in practice the required effort, cost (in both time, manpower and materials), lack of skills and the breakneck speed of technological change, are impeding most long-term preservation efforts. Even when all planets align, we often find that our tools are not as reliable as we thought (like CDs decaying and becoming unreadable).
The loss rate for analog media is still extremely good. I can read loads of books from the '90s in their original editions with moderate effort, while most of the '90s (and even '00s) internet was literally wiped out. That is a huge problem, and archive.org on its own is not the answer.