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Meanland Blog Entry—The world is my library and we are all librarians now.

Catherine Moffat July 08

Ever have that childhood fantasy about being locked in the library overnight?
No? Hmmn – just me then.

I don’t have that dream any more, and it’s not just because I’ve spent large slabs of my life in libraries and the books in my house are stacked two deep on the shelves and overflowing into piles on the floor.

The library fantasy was more than a nascent book-lust, a gluttony to have the library and everything in it to myself. It was about wanting to know things. The books were portals to other places, other worlds. Each book was a promise of losing myself in something new.

I get that promise from the internet now, as well as books. That same sense of wonder and delight, and sometimes horror, I used to find turning the pages of my grandfather’s set of Arthur Mee’s Children’s Enyclopaedia – each page a mix of fact and fiction, folklore and lies. If I want to know something now, I turn to the internet.

But don’t misunderstand me. The fact I can get some of the same sense of wonder from the internet in no way renders the library obsolete. The net is merely an extension of the library which has finally burst its physical bounds to encompass the world. And part of ‘turning to the net’ means searching library catalogues. One of the things the internet has done really well is to connect libraries, making their physical and virtual collections accessible to more people.

Of course, the internet shares the same limitation as my local library – there’s much that it does not encompass and probably never will. Estimates of the size of the invisible web vary, usually coming in at around four to one. Even if the search engines can locate something, there is no guarantee that the words you type in the search box, your search strategy, will retrieve it. (But then, most people are happy with a basic search and don’t look beyond the first two pages of results – probably roughly equivalent to what’s available on the shelves at their local library.)

Finding something is not always the point. Sometimes just looking is enough. I love the idea that somewhere out in cyberspace lie dark archives and hidden libraries. Perhaps even Steven Hall’s raw shark texts lurk somewhere in the gloom.

But a lot is findable. You’ve probably heard the old line about the internet being a library with all the records thrown on the floor? Well, maybe, at first, for about five minutes, but the thing about libraries is they attract librarians. People started picking up those catalogue cards pretty damn quickly.

Metadata and xml in source code show obvious links to the original catalogue records, while hyperlinks function like simple ‘see’ references. But we quickly moved beyond the type of records that need experts to create them. The point of a library has always been to organise information so that it can be found. Social networking allows everyone’s inner librarian to shine.

John Weldon in his recent Meanland blog post on ‘digital writing and oral storytelling’, highlighted the use of Digg and Delicious and other social networking tools as part of a return to oral storytelling. That’s true, but they’re also great ways to create and share libraries. Twitter lets us point others towards information, or follow them to it. We ‘like’ things on Facebook or share photos on Flickr. We tag our photos or allow Facebook to tag them for us. We create cloud tags, and we look for better and easier ways to organise and share our books and information.

But if everywhere and nowhere is the library, then people – usually people who don’t use libraries – start getting concerned about what to do with library buildings. The rash of public library closures in Britain and elsewhere has been eloquently protested by Philip Pullman and Zadie Smith amongst others. Nevertheless, I believe the obituary for the library is as premature as talk of the death of the book and bookshops. Ali Alizadeh’s recent post on ‘the death of the book and other utopian fantasies’ highlights the complexities of these issues.

Seth Godin recently wrote that we need libraries because ‘the library is the house for the librarian’. Godin was trying to highlight the importance of librarian as specialist. Unfortunately the image the ‘house’ analogy conjures for me is a doll’s house complete with a Nancy Pearl shooshing librarian doll in the corner.

The library is a place for people – not a house for the librarian.

Godin goes on to chide librarians for being overly concerned about ebook lending models. His blog post had been critiqued by a number of librarians including Bobbi L. Newman and Phil Bradley. But ebook public lending models are something we all need to be concerned about.

Public library access to ebooks is important. Anyone can walk into any public or academic library and take a book from the shelf and read it. That’s not the case with ebooks, which require devices and licences and logons for access. They’re the equivalent of the books tied to the bookstand in the days before public libraries. Instead of chains we have proprietary platforms and technological protection measures.

It’s fun for those of us who can afford it to debate the ‘thingyness of books’ or whether an ‘old style book’ or an ereader is easier to use. You can argue your point with passion all over the net including with Kim White at the Institute for the Future of the Book. Ultimately, the choice of which book or ereader we take to bed, like who we choose to sleep with, will always come down to personal preference and availability.

Libraries will always have their resident homeless people, their impecunious readers, and people, who because of technological barriers will never negotiate ereading without assistance. And libraries are great sustainable models – everyone wins. Authors get paid via public lending rights, publishers get their cut and those who need to, get to read for free (they’re also sustainable in the sense of shared resources delivering a smaller global footprint). That’s why librarians are concerned about elending models. That’s why we all need to be concerned that the push for ebooks and ereaders doesn’t disenfranchise those who want to read.

If the world is the library and we’re all librarians now, then we have to make sure there continue to be spaces, both virtual and physical, where everyone can read for free.


 

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Comments

by ChrisL
10 Jul 11 at 18:38

Well said sister :)–

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by Laura
11 Jul 11 at 22:14

Interesting take on the “what are ebooks and the internet doing to traditional reading” discussion.

The internet won’t be the death of books – I like to see it as a way of introducing more people to the art of knowledge seeking.

And I love the idea of us all being librarians!

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by Kieran
18 Jul 11 at 13:49

I still fantasize about being locked in the library overnight and I work in one! My locker has supplies for just such an emergency. And Arthur Mee was my childhood hero – I don’t know what happened to the volumes my mother had. I still find the library recreates that feeling for me more than the internet, but I can’t wait to buy an e-reader.

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by Hope
20 Jul 11 at 16:29

You mean… Everyone else goes home at night?

Great post!

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by wnefrpadt
23 Oct 11 at 13:57
by oqpUfawao
25 Oct 11 at 21:37

 

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