Rory Litwin has a nice comment today over at Library Juice. He says he hates the slogan "Librarian: The Original Search Engine" because it confuses what librarians do with what search engines do. He suggests a better analogy would be: "Librarians are to search engines as astronomers are to telescopes."

People who don't know much about astronomy can get some use from a telescope, but we understand that with an astronomer's knowledge it can become much more powerful as a tool for discovery. We would not say, "Astronomers: The original telescope," and we wouldn't think for a second that that a slogan like that would be flattering to astronomers or supportive of the astronomy profession.

But he goes further. Read the whole (short) post:

• You would not say, "Astronomers: The Original Telescope", by Rory Litwin, Library Juice, (November 30, 2012).

  ...a good slogan for the library profession should also encompass the other roles that librarians play in their institutions, as selectors, organizers, and preservers of information resources who have their communities in mind, and as the creators and maintainers of the systems and intellectual infrastructures that facilitate the connections between them.

Today I was re-reading an article from a few years ago and was struck by how prescient it was in providing a formula for the success of libraries. Here are some of its main points:

• Find a niche with growth potential (serve a community).
• Organize information to make it useful
• The internet is a distribution channel -- not a product (add value!)
• Turn words into math (sophisticated mathematical formulas can find patterns in content and make it more discoverable)
• Separate the signal from the noise (Type the word "jaguar" into Google's search engine and you'll get 64 million results. Fix this!)
• Computers can't do everything (humans indexers and editors make the difference that algorithms cannot)
• Print's not dead, it just needs online help

There you go!

Oh, I left out two things: One of the main rules was "Treat content like patented material" and the article was not about libraries but about Westlaw which has a successful "business model" of doing what libraries don't do anymore because "it is all on the web" and "someone else is doing that" etc.: selecting, acquiring, organizing, and preserving information and providing discovery of, access to, and service for that information. And they built their business model on using Free information. Most libraries do not have to make money which means they could do this for less cost and deliver the results to more people for free. But libraries would have to make the case that this is a better, more equitable, more democratic model than relying on the private sector. And they'd have to have leaders with the vision to build a 21st century library. Westlaw and others did it in the 20th Century. Google could never have built Google books without all the work libraries provided by building collections. What libraries have this vision today for future generations?

Read all about it:

• Westlaw rises to legal publishing fame by selling free information, By Erin Carlyle, City Pages, (April 29, 2009).

Earlier today I posted a couple of favorite quotes about the role of libraries as institutions that hold in our collective memory things that would otherwise be forgotten. A short article in Scientific American notes the importance of "the internet" as "external memory" or "transactive" memory:

• Piece of Mind: Is the Internet Replacing Our Ability to Remember?, by Larry Greenemeier, Scientific American (July 14, 2011).

  ...[T]he Internet has become a primary form of external or "transactive" memory ... where information is stored collectively outside the brain. This is not so different from the pre-Internet past, when people relied on books, libraries and one another ... for information. Now, however, besides oral and printed sources of information, a lion's share of our collective and institutional knowledge bases reside online and in data storage.

The researcher says that "Information is much more available than it was." An interesting article, but it misses, I think, the key point that if no one preserves "the internet" (or the parts of it that we want to preserve), this transactive memory won't be there for us to use. (The article even makes this amazingly naive statement: "And if our gadgets were to fail due to a planet-wide electromagnetic pulse tomorrow, we would still be all right.")

This is important because, if we think our "external" memory is safe and we rely on commercial interests to preserve that information, then we are leaving our very memory at the commercial mercy of those companies. An alternative is for communities of interest to rely on libraries to preserve important information.

A related article about the same research:

• Internet Use Affects Memory, Study Finds, By Patricia Cohen, New York Times (July 14, 2011).

From the Library of Congress:

• It Takes a Village…to Archive the Internet, guest post by Abbie Grotke, Web Archiving Team Lead at the Library of Congress (posted by Mike Ashenfelder), The Signal, digital preservation blog, Library of Congress (July 14th, 2011).

  Despite the tremendous amount we’ve preserved, we know we can’t do it alone. We often collaborate to build web archives with other libraries, archives and organizations in the United States and around the globe. We do this when events unfold quickly on the Internet and the Library can’t react as quickly as we’d like for whatever reason, but also when the scope of a collection is so big that we must work with others to ensure that breadth of content is preserved.

  ...So while each institution has its own collection policies to follow, there is an obvious recognition by web archivists that the Internet is a global place, not neatly wrapped by physical boundaries. Personally, I value these collaborations and know that my colleagues do too. If we work together, we can ensure that more of the Web is preserved, and often we can act more quickly, particularly when the risk of loss of content is so great.

Corrected attribution above.

On a quiet Sunday, here are two quotes that I find both memorable and inspiring when I think of the role and future of libraries. These days we see so much emphasis placed on fast access to current, popular, "must see" information. Although libraries have a role to play in that as well, few if any institutions have the long-term role that libraries have.

We mustn't model the digital library on the day-to-day operation of a single human brain, which quite properly uses-or-loses, keeps uppermost in mind what it needs most often, and does not refresh, and eventually forgets, what it very infrequently considers -- after all, the principal reason groups of rememberers invented writing and printing was to record accurately what they sensed was otherwise likely to be forgotten.

-- Nicholson Baker. Double Fold. NY: Random House, 2001. p245.

Libraries exist to preserve the thoughts and deeds that no one else has time for anymore, to collect items that might not be used for another ten, fifty, one hundred years -- if ever. It is this last uncertainty that makes libraries the most heroic of human creations.

-- Paul Collins. Banvard's Folly: Thirteen Tales of People Who Didn't Change the World. New York: Picador, 2001. p.285-286.

This research shows how much users value convenience and quick access. That will probably not surprise you, but it should help inform choices for libraries. The choices libraries make will increase their value to users or drive users away.

• Connaway, Lynn Silipigni, Timothy J. Dickey, and Marie L. Radford. 2011. 'If It Is Too Inconvenient, I'm Not Going After it:' Convenience as a Critical Factor in Information-Seeking Behaviors. Library and Information Science Research, 33: 179-190. Pre-print available online at: http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2011/connaway-lisr.pdf (.pdf: 275K/46 pp.).

  It can be argued that in the not-too-distant past, resources were scarce, and libraries were one of the only sources of trustworthy information. Users were obliged to conform to library practices and standards in order to successfully meet their information needs. Now, users' time and attention are scarce, while resources are abundant with the development of the Internet and Web-based services (blogs, chat, social media sites, etc.) and easily accessed, digitized content. This article provides an overview of findings from two multi-year grant-funded projects. These projects address the questions: "Why do people choose one information source instead of another?" and "What factors contribute to their selection of information sources?" Specifically, the emergence of the concept of convenience as a critical factor in information-seeking choices among a variety of different types of people, across a period of several years, and in a variety of contexts, is explored.

The new report Surveying the Digital Future from the Center for the Digital Future at the USC Annenberg School, says that internet users are increasingly concerned about their privacy:

The annual study of the impact of the Internet on Americans conducted by the Center for the Digital Future found that almost half of Internet users age 16 and older -- 48 percent -- are worried about companies checking their actions on the Internet.

-- press release and highlights

Users are more concerned about corporations than governments:

By comparison, the new question for the Digital Future Study found that only 38 percent of Internet users age 16 and older are concerned about the government checking what they do online.

It is not clear from the press release that respondents were asked about any specific activities or behaviors of governments or if they were asked about any specific laws such as the "PATRIOT" Act.

Providing users with privacy and confidentiality when they read is one of the key, long-term values of libraries. As we look to our future, we should invest in our ability to continue to do that by hosting digital content and providing users a way to securely and privately browse and read digital content.

See also:
Privacy: "I have nothing to hide"

Disintermediation

The Public Library Manifesto, by David Morris, Yes Magazine, (May 06, 2011).

We need a grassroots effort to defend our public libraries, an effort that can and should be part of a growing nationwide and international effort to defend the public sphere itself.

Joseph J. Esposito, an independent management consultant to for-profit and not-for-profit clients, has written a nice post at the Scholarly Kitchen about disintermediation:

• Disintermediation and Its Discontents: Publishers, Libraries, and the Value Chain, by Joseph Esposito, Scholarly Kitchen (April 18, 2011).

In this piece, Joe describes the "value chain" in scholarly publishing in which each link in the value chain adds something to the process: the author creates value by originating an idea and content; the publisher adds value through editorial selection, refinement, production, and marketing; and so forth. Libraries, too, contribute to the value chain:

Libraries are selective; they help guide readers to materials of higher quality. Libraries have purchasing power, which saves money for readers. Libraries provide a suite of tools for organizing publications and helping readers find what they are looking for. Libraries provide so much value that most people want them to be bigger.

Disintermediation occurs when one link in the chain is bypassed. This can be caused by the link losing value, but it can happen for other reasons and can result in destroying the value provided by that link.

How does this relate to the FDLP and government information? As we've noted here and here and elsewhere before, users of government information no longer need to go through FDLP libraries to get government information. And, as many others (including Ithaka S+R) have noted, FDLP libraries no longer have a monopoly on free government information, have no "purchasing power" advantage, and so do not save readers money. That particular value of libraries in the information value chain no longer exists and that results in government information users bypassing libraries for their government information needs.

Some (including Ithaka S+R) have concluded from this that libraries can rely on online access to government information stored on government-controlled web servers and create a service-only model of libraries without collections.

But this view overlooks the other important values that libraries add to the value chain. These include libraries' selection of materials of interest to particular user communities, their tools for organizing information to make it easier to discover, their tools for making information easier to use, and their commitments to freedom to read, user privacy, and long-term free public access to information. It also overlooks the ability that libraries have (but which government agencies for the most part do not have) to build collections that combine government information with non-government information. In short, it overlooks the importance of digital library collections.

Joe makes another good point that is equally relevant to FDLP libraries: that, when we see a link in the value chain being bypassed, we should be asking what effect management decisions had in making that link lose its value.

[D]isintermediation lends itself to a version of technological determinism. Because the Internet makes it possible for an author to have a direct connection to a reader, therefore, it is assumed, authors inevitably will connect directly to readers. This ignores the role of human agency.

...[D]isintermediation, in other words, is an outcome; but the input is management strategy. Rather than talking about disintermediation, we really should be talking about the things that affect management decision-making and strategy and to take control of them.

Thus, shouldn't we be asking, If users are bypassing libraries for their government information needs, what decisions are libraries making that make the library of less value to the user?

In some cases users may not be aware of value lost. If governments fail to preserve all the information that users need, users will not be aware of this until they find information missing -- at which point it will be too late.

In other cases, users may find that getting some information easily (e.g., using google to search the web and find some possibly-relevant government information) is better than using primitive hard-to-use library tools to find some possibly-more-relevant government information. Librarians may say that users "should" use libraries and they'd find "better" information if they did; but making that argument will not attract users. Providing better services will.

If we look at what services users do use, we will see that they tend to be services built on top of digital collections. ProQuest, for example, does not build indexes that point to government web servers; it collects digital information and builds services on top of that.

In short, libraries could create new value in the government information life-cycle by building robust services on top of rich digital collections (FDLP: Services and Collections ). Or, as Joe says,

[I] think of it as the creation of a new value chain, with the stress being given to the new value that is created.

Kate Theimer has posted her presentation, Extinction or Evolution? (A slowed down version of my Smithsonian Ignite presentation on ArchivesNext. Although she addresses the future of archives, there are a lot of parallels to libraries. One point that I think is particularly relevant to government information is that if 10% of all information meets the needs of 90% of the public, what will happen to the rest of the information? Thanks, Kate, for a provocative presentation!

More presentations from Ignite:

• the Program section of the Ignite Smithsonian site
• selections at ArchivesNext