The Future of the Stacks
How closing libraries means losing more than just good memories
When asked what they like best about libraries, people often recall browsing in dimly lit stacks for a book. The browsing experience is one of the most magical childhood memories for many people. They have positive associations with the experience of tracking down a book by call number, wending their way through the aisles, and running their finger along the spines of books in musty library stacks.
The joy of unexpected discovery has enormous appeal to people of all ages and all walks of life. The library browsing experience is strongly associated with the concept of serendipity.
There is something powerful about the idea that patrons will find on the shelves books that they didn’t expect to find. To date, this experience has come about thanks to the physical proximity of other books to the book they are initially seeking. For some people, it is impossible to come out of the stacks without armfuls of books, even if they went into the stacks seeking just one. This serendipity has broader social implications too. New ideas and new connections between fields can be created as a result of these unexpected findings. This serendipity, this sense of discovery, relies on a long and complex chain of activities, many of them carried out by librarians.
There is reason to fear that this type of positive experience will be lost if library stacks, and the people who staff them, disappear. If libraries shed their physical collections and materials are rendered to patrons through electronic delivery only, the experience of serendipity could be lost forever. The same fear goes for the decline of the physical, printed newspaper.
When a reader searches only for a narrow topic and ends up with a single story, she may miss the surrounding stories that offer a broader snapshot of what’s happening in the world. (Even the prospect of moving previously inaccessible stacks can lead to public outcry, as occurred with the New York Public Library in 2012.)
If libraries were to disappear, cities and towns would lose essential “third places” that are open to the public. In a 2013 survey, 90 percent of Americans age sixteen and older said that the closing of their local public library would have a negative impact on their community. There are many sound reasons for this concern.
Outside of home and work, third places in many communities are shifting away from library spaces and toward commercial spaces, whether Starbucks in the physical world or Facebook in the virtual world.
The fate of many of America’s Carnegie libraries brings this fear into relief. Built early in the twentieth century, hundreds of the original Carnegie libraries have now been either closed or renovated for entirely different purposes; in either event, they no longer meet the information needs of their communities in the ways that they once did. Without the public spaces that libraries provide, the most vulnerable people in our society will not have safe, comfortable places to go to access information, think, write, and learn.
We should fear the impact on our education system of closing library branches and shortening hours at those that remain open. There is good reason to worry that the ability of a community’s young people to learn, to search for and discover information, and to sort credible information from less credible information will be diminished if the community’s library services are reduced. Students are using Google in particular, as well as other web-based services, but without a great deal of sophistication. The library’s role in the learning process is being undercut by commercial outfits (think of Amazon and its recommendations) and highly distributed nonprofits (think of Wikipedia).
We also have reason to worry about losing important parts of the record of our shared history. Right now, digital materials are harder than physical
materials to preserve.
Without libraries acquiring books, manuscripts, newspapers, and other materials and holding on to them for posterity, we stand to lose more than we gain from the digital transformation in terms of long-term preservation.
Librarians and archivists fear, with good reason, that scholars today are preserving much less of their work than in the past: with email and web-based publication, notes made as Word documents, and so forth, they worry that materials that once were routinely set aside for the future will not be preserved. The prospect of our shared history being less well preserved in the digital world than in the analog world would be a perverse — and avoidable — outcome of the “information revolution.”
Libraries and archives that are open and free to all provide essential services to the public every day. As systems and as networks, these institutions provide equally important long-term services to democracies as they decide which texts and images to hold for posterity and which to let fade away, to become ephemeral. Today’s task is to preserve the most important aspects of libraries while taking advantage of what can now be accomplished in a digital era — all at a moment when public resources for libraries appear to be on the wane.
Marilyn Johnson wrote a book about libraries and librarians that I love called This Book Is Overdue! In the concluding line of her introduction, Johnson writes: “So where does one go in such a wobbly, elusive, dynamic, confusing age? Wherever the librarians and archivists are. They’re sorting it all out for us.”
Though I admire her sense of optimism and enjoy her writing, I am not so sanguine as Johnson about the future of libraries. Some librarians and archivists are sorting out the future for us. Some librarians are market leaders and trend-setters. They are certainly pointing the way, much as library leaders in great city libraries like Boston, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco are doing, and librarians in many small-town libraries as well. They are the wonderful people leading libraries in dramatic and unexpected ways: Annemarie Naylor in Colchester, England; Melissa Techman in Albemarle County, Virginia; Nate Hill in Chattanooga, Tennessee; Kari Lämsä in Helsinki, Finland; Matthew Winner in Ellicott City, Maryland; Luis Herrera in San Francisco; and many other leaders. I recently saw some of the most amazing things happening in the public library system of Kansas City.
But these positive assessments are not universally true, nor do they tell the entire story. There are too many librarians and archivists who are wringing their hands rather than putting those hands to work and collaborating to build a positive version of the digital future. More important, many other people are working hard — frankly, often harder and more productively than the library community — on related problems. Technologists, publishers, authors, agents, business strategists — all are working on the same set of problems, from different angles. There’s a great deal of innovation going on around the world outside of the United States library scene, and we need to incorporate it into the operations of our libraries and archives.
My primary fear about the future of libraries — and this is where I part company with Johnson — is that those in the for-profit sector are working much more quickly and effectively to address many of these same problems, only with a profit motive rather than the public interest as their driver. And they have much more capital and talent devoted to the task.
Right now, I’d put much greater odds on the programmers and graphic designers at Amazon, Apple, and Google than I would on those in the library community to figure out the next big thing in information and knowledge management. Although there have been, and are, inspiring pioneers in the nonprofit space — Brewster Kahle of Internet Archive, Carl Malamud at public.resource.org, Sue Gardner and Jimmy Wales at the Wikimedia Foundation, Mitchell Baker and her crew at Mozilla, the late Aaron Swartz, everyone working at New York Public Library (NYPL) Labs all jump to mind — they are often not seen, much less welcomed, as part, or at least at the core, of the library movement or profession. There are fabulous theorists and doers dreaming up the future of the library world. Dan Cohen, Robert Berring, Robert Darnton, Lorcan Dempsey, Peter Morville, Jenny Levine, Peter Suber, David Weinberger, Jessamyn West, and too many others to list here have written influential work about libraries, their futures, and how to innovate our way there.
As forceful as the ideas of these leaders are, the for-profit sector has far more resources backing their ideas for innovation than the library sector.
There is a massive research-and-development gap between libraries and others who are seeking to solve similar problems. There are simply too few people within libraries right now who are working on highly innovative digital projects that could have a positive impact at scale. As budgets are stretched and libraries are forced to meet demands in both the analog and digital worlds, library leaders are hard-pressed to invest in pure innovation or R&D work. And there are too few partnerships between libraries and other types of organizations — for instance, Microsoft Research, Cisco’s global R&D team, or Google’s nonprofit arms — that could bear enormous fruit in the public interest. Libraries could use a fantastic new philanthropist — a twenty-first-century Andrew Carnegie — to invest in the digital equivalent of the Carnegie libraries of the analog era while public funding continues to support essential, core, present-day library operations.
Even if we came up with the resources as societies, librarians are often too fearful to take risks. An innovative librarian from Finland, Kari Lämsä, said it well in an interview: “Libraries are not so serious places. We should not be too afraid of mistakes. We are not hospitals. We cannot kill people here. We can make mistakes and nobody will die. We can try and test and try and test all the time.” A spirit of risk-taking and assessment, so common among technology developers, has an important place in the world of libraries today.
Those of us who care deeply about the future of libraries are too likely to rely on the deep nostalgia about libraries rather than take risks and invest now in a bright future. The temptation to rely on nostalgia is understandable.
Survey after survey, anecdotal encounter after anecdotal encounter, shows us that people “love libraries.” Just as we all love a memory of a childhood experience, we love the idea of libraries in general. Often, it feels like a patronizing sort of love. An approach that relies too heavily on nostalgia to pull libraries as institutions through this period of transformational change is a dangerous one. It could work, but it is too risky. It is ultimately a losing strategy. The better strategy is to create a new nostalgia for libraries.
Excerpted from BiblioTECH: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google, by John Palfrey. From Basic Books, published May 5, 2015.
Available for purchase from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or your local independent.
Top image: the New York Public Library Reading Room, from drocpsu, via creative commons.
