An Admittedly Utopian View of Library Technology Services
As suggested by the above title, there will be quite a few “wouldn’t it be great if…” scenarios in the following paragraphs, but I believe this to be okay. I believe that thinking in the Utopian sense allows for us to reach higher and while it is true that the ultimate goals of a Utopian society may not ever be reached (or even achievable) I would rather fall short of lofty positive ideals than wallow in the muck of dystopian depression.
Open Source has been in the news quite a bit in the last few years, and even more so in the last few weeks. From Apple open-sourcing their Swift programming language (http://www.wired.com/2015/12/apple-open-sources-its-swift-programming-language/) to Google doing the same to their AI engine (http://www.wired.com/2015/11/google-open-sources-its-artificial-intelligence-engine/) and even Tesla open-sourcing their patents (https://www.teslamotors.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you) the idea of sharing your knowledge with everyone in a way that allows them to help build on it has finally taken hold in even the largest companies.
This current trend of open-sourcing technology has made me wonder what the library could take away from the idea. The first step, I feel, would be to educate the public on the very existence of Open Source. Library events that explain it in a general sense and then show how the idea of Open Source can be applied to areas of one’s every day life. For instance, a talk could be given on how to “Open-Source Your Education” by finding free and trustworthy sources of information and even classes taught by professionals online (Stanford offers a wide variety of their classes online to the public). This past spring and again in the fall I brought in Andy Fischoff a local web designer who also teaches the PHP Coding language. Not only did this attract a user segment that the library typically ignores, the class itself gave each student a chance to use a teaching site they could still have access to after the class had ended.
If the general idea of Open Source is that of sharing for the betterment of the product and the users, then I feel that it is something that the library should not only do but become a leader in. It fits into the mission of most libraries and gets the community involved in actively serving their community — they simply use the library as a hub for their knowledge.
The library of the future that I envision is one in which the community is fully integrated into the services the library provides. The community itself becomes the basis for the information that circulates. Most libraries at the moment already have an “Ask A Librarian” feature, what if this was expanded? What if it became an “Ask the Community” feature? (Yes, I realize I’m asking a lot here, because in order for this idea to work people would have to be genuinely nice to strangers, but I direct your attention back to the “utopian” part of the title…) Not only would it expand the knowledge of those in the community it would also ask that the community become closer, that they trust more.
The reason behind this post wasn’t just to offer some ideas about how “open source” could be applied to the library; it was to ask that librarians use the concept itself to look at their services in a new way. To look at the community not just as a group of “users” but as a group of “helpers” that care about the shared quality of life. If done correctly, the library mission statement could eventually become a shared community mission statement.
One can only hope.
