Like many of my colleagues I have been thinking about the growing momentum of the transition to e-books (and e-magazines, e-music, e-movies) and the implications for libraries. The blogosphere has been awash in commentary about the relationship between libraries and publishers of e-content, and I keep starring posts in my Google Reader account so I can go back and try to make sense out of all of the thoughts and ideas.
My own thoughts are largely inchoate, and I'm not even going to try to put them in writing until they have had more time to, as one former colleague put it, "ferment".
One blog post that I have find myself coming back to again and again is "What Are Libraries For?" by Hugh McGuire guest-posting on In the Library With the Lead Pipe ,. Hugh goes beyond the complaints about current-e-publishing and content-licensing models that have been dominating a lot of the discussion in the library world, and tackles the fundamental question - "If ebooks will become dominant, and if community libraries have, to date, structured their existence around a dying function (lending print books), then how will libraries remain relevant in the future?"
He goes on to ask the even scarier question about what happens to libraries, which have had as one of their primary functions the distribution of books, if e-books not only become dominant but no longer cost anything to access.
I will not recap his arguments than to say that I think he is right when he predicts that over time (and maybe a fairly short period of time) content will be both ubiquitous and freely available calling into question some of the functions that we have long promoted as key to our mission, and in which we invest the majority of our resources, obsolete - namely assembling, housing and providing access to content.
The post concludes by putting forth two key roles for libraries in the future.
The first, as community spaces for interaction and the exchange of ideas is one that we play now and I think we can continue to expand, although if this is truly a core purpose (rather than the ancillary activity it is today) it will require a total re-envisioning of everything from what skills our staff will need (think facilitation and group process skills rather than information organization and retrieval) to how many staff we actually need to how our buildings are designed.
The second, helping people manage the superabundance of freely available digital information, I find harder to imagine - not because we don't have the skill but because people don't see this as one of our roles today and I don't really see a pathway to changing their minds. Perhaps our role in this arena will be to use our skills in information organization to design the digital tools that will help people manage their own content. In any case this points to a possible role for librarians, but not really to a role for libraries as institutions other than perhaps as places where people can come to learn about how to use these tools.
Whether I agree with his conclusions or not, I thank Hugh for asking big questions at a deeper level than I have seen in most other writing on the topic...and for providing input that helps push my own thinking along.
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