The future of libraries is...

What's your answer? Here's mine:

Caveat: I am not a futurist.

So let's get the bad news over with.

It looks like we have passed the point of Peak Librarianship.

We can't buy and share books any more.

And libraries would rather pay large licensing fees individually (for content and for infrastructure) rather than contribute small investments collectively.

But this does not mean that you are not needed.

"This lecture, reflecting on future roles, posits the potential dawning of a “great age of librarians,” if librarians make the conceptual shift of focusing on their own skills and activities rather than on their libraries."

I've been reading a number of essays about the future of libraries, and I think this one is my favourite if  just for this reminder: academic libraries are no more dependent on books than they are on scrolls.

I've come to believe that one of the reasons why 'The Future of Libraries' is so difficult to discern is that we don't even have agreement on the matter of what our present is.

The purpose of the Academic Library depends on who you are.

My impression is that institutional interest in Information Literacy is waning.  I blame MOOCs.

But I want to speak to the last point:
75% of library directors think we are gateways. 

 Serials Crisis Time!

And then there's this.

One future scenario: the essentials of scholarly publishing demand extraordinary price increases to increase profits and push the non-essential competition out of the budgets of libraries.

Wait. Did I say this was a  future scenario? 

Amazon has deemed that he price point of an ebook is $9.99. The most common price of a scholarly article is generally between $30 - $40. 

What's the consumer price point of a journal article for the reader? 

Would our faculty just buy articles from their research budgets instead of using libraries if they were set at $0.99 a piece?

What if all of scholarship was free?

 What else do we know?
 

This article on UBC sums up almost all of these points as it looks to its own future.

UBC is getting robots.

NCSU is getting robots.
UCS has had robots since 2007.

Yes, we are being replaced by robots.

And yet we know that a library needs to be more than a room with tables, chairs, electrical outlets and a wifi hotspot.

Bess Sadler suggests we need to design human-scale digital libraries.

I now have five possible trajectories for you.

{After I gave this talk, Tom Eadie said that these five stories reminded him of the story of the the five blind men and the elephant.

 The future is the elephant in the room. }

Remember this line?

It is not a new idea.

Lorcan Dempsey spoke about the Inside out library in 2005 and how we are pressed to find ways to bring our content out of the library and into the workflow of our students and researchers.

Dorothea Salo phrased this re-understanding of our work very nicely as well.

And R. David Lankes emphasizes knowledge creation in his Atlas of New Librarianship. 
 

Here are some of the ways how academic libraries can bring their collections and communities to the world.  

The first is through the hosting of an Institutional Repository.

I lament that there is only one article from 2011.

But I'm not picking on FIMS.  I think this is a reflection of librarianship. There are still many within the profession who do not understand Open Access initiatives as a expression of our values and our work as librarians.

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Unless that information was in a printed newspaper.

The complexity involved in scanning newspapers take a tremendous amount of resources in terms of OCR processing power and requires human intervention (which is why it is suspected that Google stepped away from this venture). Also, there is limited commercial gain from such work.

And yet historical newspapers capture an expression of our local history and humanity to an extraordinary depth and breadth.

Many academic libraries are engaging in a variety of digitizing projects. 

More should do so.

And some libraries provide data archiving and preservation services.

What else can we bring to the world?

The Occupy movement surprised many of us.

As did the emergence of so many People's Libraries.

Why were libraries were so central to the Occupy movement while it seemed we were continually told that our “brand” is no longer compelling?

And why does this community bookshop sound like it's a public library?

In 2009, a temporary 'Storefront Library' was established by Street Lab in Boston to demonstrate the potential impact of a library in the neighbourhood.

This week I read that future library branches in Brooklyn will probably be located in storefronts because the city can no longer afford to maintain their Carnegie donated buildings.

The team behind the Storefront Library in Boston went on to design "The Uni Project" to allow them to create temporary reading space that could be established in public spaces both inside and out.

None of the projects that I have shown you so far have been from librarians. But this is one: Nate Hill worked with a design firm to create design plans for modular library equipment that could be made of readily available material.

The plans are in the Creative Commons. As they should.

At my local public library, they wanted to provide an Apple Store-like experience. So they removed the desks and library staff now help readers through use of an iPhone, a bar code scanner and an iPad.

They are now able to establish temporary library branches in neighbourhoods where the residents could not get to the library.

The branch is the librarian and a small set of material that she brings with her that they request and what she thinks they might enjoy. 

Surely an academic campus could provide a variety of opportunities to establish temporary or re-occurring library branches for a variety of niche or general needs.

But academic librarians may find it difficult to stray too far from their traditional roles within the library

Our work has largely been defined by faculty expectations of what they think we should be doing. 

Same as it ever was.

Do you know who this man is?

Not a librarian! It's Tim Berners-Lee!


 Do you know who said this?

Not a librarian!  It was Jimmy Wales!

Wikipedia is the fifth most popular site in the world. It employs 147 staff. It has about 80,000 volunteers. 

There are 156,100 librarians employed in the United States.

Ed Summers, from the Library of Congress, has been investigating how libraries and Wikipedia can make each other better.

It's not well-known but behind Wikipedia is DBpedia which provided structured linked data that can be re-used and re-purposed.

The BBC uses DBpedia to help organize its content.

Linked Data is an opportunity for cultural institutions to provide structured, authoritative and organized information that our communities can build upon.

 

Aaron Cope is helping design a museum website using the first principles of the Internet.

What if opened up our systems to allow a multitude of ways of querying our data?

Our scholars - especially our Digital Humanists - need open systems so they develop and use tools to do their scholarship.

When the video of this talk becomes available, I'd recommend it as a good introduction to the worlds of linked data.

The next story begins with a joke.

Not enough librarians understand this joke:

So here's a story. During the last presidential election, much was dependent on the technology infrastructure supporting the 'get out the vote' efforts and early detection of possible ballot box improprieties.

The Obama system was called Narwhal and was developed in-house and was built using Amazon cloud services. It was built to be robust. The team had already planned and prepared a variety of contingency plans so that when hurricane Sandy took out  power on the East Coast, Narwhal was ready and able to handle it.

The Romney Team treated technology "like a distressed asset" and outsourced their technology to established vendors and used software that was web-based but not cloud-based. "They left their technology fate in the hands of outsiders". It was designed to be efficient. They called their system Orca and on the day of the election, it failed in a multitude of ways. 

The bad news is that libraries use technology like the Republican Party. 

 

The value of total library commercial automation marketplace is $630 million dollars.

This is not a lot of money. 

For $630 million dollars you can buy a bridge over the Mississippi.

Over the years libraries go to a set of established vendors for their technology needs. The number of vendors in this marketplace continues to shrink.

And what's very troubling are the number of library automation companies that are owned by private equity firms.  Private equity firms don't invest in companies over a long period of time. They own them and make them more profitable - usually by cutting staff or product lines - and then sell them.

For example, in 2006  Ex-Libris was bought by Francisco Partners. 

Two years later they sold it to Leeds Equity. 
Recently Ex-Libris was sold again to Golden Gate Capital.

Golden Gate Capital has bought library technology companies before. And they have dissolved them and incorated them into other company holdings.  In 2006 Golden Gate Capital absorbed Geac into a company called Infor.

Infor has a staff of 71 full time employees and they make $2.8 billion dollars annually. If I was one of Ex-Libris 512 employees, I'd be very worried for my job.
 

But I have enough worries at the moment. 

Many of my campus library's services are dependent on Ex-Libris software. The decision of which of their software lines will continue to be available or further developed will not be made by librarians. 

It doesn't have to be this way. 

Collectively we have enough assets to develop our own Narwhal.

There are new suites of software being offered to libraries called ERMs. They are a class of enterprise software that promise to handle all the present day functions of a library: circulation, asset management, discovery, cataloguing, licensing, all in an efficient manner on the web.

But I think there's a better way: open systems and small methods.

There are real cloud-based solutions available right now that libraries could take advantage of.  There is a group of OpenLab scientists at Drextal who make use of Google App Scripts (cloud-served javascript in a Google spreadsheet) to check the CRC Handbook for properties. They also use PHP to check if the Drextal University Library has a particular research article by using a DOI.

The library is embedded in the document.

Brett Victor provides some wonderful examples of reactive documents that invite exploration through visualization. 

I wish he would design something for libraries.

Earlier this year, the President of UVA was asked to resign by her university's Board of Directors. The crisis received national attention.

The library of UVA recognized the enormity of the moment and responded by collecting both physical objects related to the subsequent protests as well as digital objects such as Twitter posts related to the controversy. 

They had a done similar projects before and so were ready when the crisis arrived at their doorstep.

 

But you don't need to be a library to start archiving and preserving the past.  With the right tools and the right skills a person like Jason Scott can save an entire history.

 And you can join The Archive Team and spring into action whenever the present threatens the past... because history is our future.

In 2006, Dan Chudnov made a personal mission for himself to help people build their own libraries. 

I think it's a very good mission that can take us into the future.

Try to be the best people you can be.

Access Conference + randomness = design for joy

My daughter is 4 years old and she produces - at school and at home - a tremendous amount of drawings. At the end of every week, there are piles of Anna's art that I photograph before it is  discretely recycled. Within a week, every table surface in the house is hidden under her artwork again.

My son is 7 years old. He isn't as inclined to sit down and just draw like he used to when he was 4. And when he does put marker to paper, it is either an interpretation of LEGO Star Wars or LEGO Ninjago.

Somewhere between 4 and 7, my son started preferring playing in the imaginary landscapes of other people instead of his own mind. I think most kids are like this.

But it could be worse.

Sometimes I sit beside my daughter in the morning and we both grab pieces of paper and she immediately starts working away at something, whereas I just sit in front of the blank and perfect paper and think, what should I draw. And I'm paralysed.

I've been thinking about art and drawing and creating and designing because I've been thinking about 3D printers lately. And I've been thinking about what I would like to print with a 3D printer and nothing is immediately coming to mind.

It feels so daunting. What thought would you like manifested in form?

If you provide a 3D printer to the readers in your library, will people print out items that don't originate from a cartoon universe?  The answer will probably (and thankfully) be yes.  That's one of the lessons that I took away from the session "Discovering New Dimensions" session from this year's Access Conference.  Dalhousie University Library bought and made available a 3D printer for the campus and through outreach and word-of-mouth, interested faculty and students came forward with research-related models and replacement parts for tools to be printed. As did the attendees of a local Comic Convention.

It's been over a week since I've been to Access and this post is a summary of some of what still sits with me and what I have been still turning over in my in my mind since then.

Of all the wonderful presentations that I listened to in Montreal, what has been occupying my mind the most has been Bess Sadler's Closing Keynote address: Brain Injuries, Science Fiction, and Library Discovery.

In this talk, Bess Sadler told us that she recently suffered a brain injury and has been on disability leave from work. As she has been recovering, she has been learning more about the brain and how it functions. And what she experienced and have since learned has changed the way she thinks about the work that she does and that we, as librarians, do. From her talk:

When you engage in an activity that is intrinsically motivated, you’re not looking for some outside reward. Those of us who are very lucky are able to find paying jobs that sometimes involve flow activities for us. When I’m really in the zone, writing software can be a flow activity for me, but other days, when I’m slogging through something, it’s that paycheck that keeps me going. And I believe that most library users are the same way. Of course we’ll always need to serve folks who are slogging through a paper they don’t really want to write, but I’d like to spend some time thinking about how we might enable as much flow in the library as possible. I want to figure out how to make our collections genuinely pleasurable to use.

[You know who also talks about the feeling of flow in their work? Game designers. And as a related aside,  Game designer, Jane McGonigal also suffered a brain injury and her subsequent recovery also led to a re-thinking of her work and the nature of productivity, resilience, and joy. I meant to ask Bess if she has seen Jane's TED Talk of this story and I even had the opportunity - but I  forgot.]

It's this line from the above that I keep coming back to in my mind:

I want to figure out how to make our collections genuinely pleasurable to use.

It's telling the very librarians who are largely responsive for the shape and capacities of our digital library systems and collections recognize that they are building efficient systems at the expense of serendipity and of the expense of joy. Something feels wrong, and at some level, everybody knows this.

When describing physical browsing, people used emotional words. They felt joy when they encountered that serendipitous find in the stacks. They felt tranquility when they browsed the new books shelf in the reading room. One sociology PhD student described to me in loving detail her favorite place to study in the library. She described the lighting, the smell, the quiet, the beauty of her surroundings, the pleasure she felt at running her fingers over shelves of books on her favorite subject. Another student told me, with clear distress and frustration, that he used to spend every lunch hour in the new journals room, happily browsing, but now felt at a loss because the library had cancelled their print subscriptions and he had to rely on online access. If he knew what he was looking for already, he said, online access was very fast and efficient for getting it, and there were times he really appreciated that. But he also felt he had been robbed of a great pleasure, and one of the ways he felt most comfortable staying current with research in his field.

Our users wax nostalgic of spending hours in the library shelves, browsing and smelling paper. But if you press them, these same readers don't miss the experience so much to actually to tear themselves away from the screen in the office, and spend those hours today in hopes of finding something they won't recognize until they see it. They are also trading joy for efficiency.

Aaron Cope - who gave a wonderful opening keynote at the conference - also talked about a lost opportunity for his workplace to spend their re-branding efforts on telling and showing that what they do instead of reducing themselves to particular activities for target markets:

Second, we are bucketing our audience in to kinds of aspirational typecasting usually reserved for buddy movies – things like the "new" and the "hip" and the "mommy blogger" and so on – instead of simply talking about what we collect and why., 

You should read his keynote too and look at the alternative posters he made that can not help but convey a sense of wonder and curiosity in those who cast eyes upon it.

Aaron suggested that museums, archives and libraries, would do well to surface - as much as possible - their entire collections and put them on the web in a way that anyone can explore them, connect them, showcase them and make sense of them.

Also related: when Jane McGonigal designed a game for the New York Public Library, she didn't use the opportunity to teach players how to find a book; she designed a game to help them write a book. 

When I was in library school, I remember particular conversation I had with a good friend of mine who happened to be very interested at the time in Tarot card readings. I remember her telling me that some people believe that Tarot cards are able to divine the future through the energy transmitted in one's hands. But, she added, that even if you don't believe in such things, Tarot cards are still useful and interesting because even a reading of random cards makes you consider possible interpretations of your own life in a ways  that you might not normally think of, just because of habit.

For reasons I can't explain, that insight really struck me and while I don't do tarot readings, I would have to say that I have had an interest in randomness for some time now.

In fact, I asked Access speaker Kim Martin who spoke about serendipity (point of order: the schedule says that her colleagues were also there and speaking but they were not) about the relationship between randomness and serendipity. I wasn't able to write down her exact answer, but the gist of it was that they should be considered separate things. But I'm not so sure.  And I'm not the only one who thinks that they might not be so separate as just days ago, Bess Saddler posted this on twitter:

Sembl is a system for thinking and learning in a divergent, creative, social way – by exploring resemblance. catherinestyles.com/category/sembl/ #lovethis!
— Bess Sadler (@eosadler) October 28, 2012

I guess this is a good as time as any to announce my own little project that I've been working on about libraries and randomness. The project is a series of iterations of a very simple idea: choose and share a random passage from a random book from the library where I work. The project is called Bibliomancy named after the practice of divination by books, although I'm hoping to divine new Oblique (Research) Strategies rather than the future.

• The first version was created using a Google spreadsheet. 
• The second was written using Javascript. 
• And the third is still unfinished. It's written PHP and mysql that can be called on from this site. 
• Here are the passages and books already chosen 

And what I find particular gratifying is that this work has already inspired other folks to make similar things. John Fink made a bibliomancy program written in Ruby and Doug Satori made this Bibliomancerbot that selects random passages from random books in Project Gutenberg.

I don't consider this work a form of art (high, low, or outsider). I think of this little programs I've written as "toys".  And from then I make and play games for myself and the books I've chosen (using Jesse's Schell's definition of game as "a problem-solving activity, approached with a playful attitude.")

Here's one game I'm working on. I'm playing around with the idea of making and releasing paper cranes that bear a passage and the call number of the book that contains it.

If you ask me why, I will tell you that I'm doing this to get across the idea that every book in the Leddy Library has a unique call number. We often forget that call numbers are not obvious entities to non-librarians.

More like street addresses RT @hhwlib: Not *just* links, no. RT @thisisaaronland: aren’t call numbers just links? #accessyul
— Mike Kastellec (@mkny13) October 21, 2012

@thisisaaronland @mkny13 @hhwlib Call numbers encode information. They a bit like massive lossy compression of a book's contents.
— William Denton (@wdenton) October 21, 2012

... but the real reason why I'm making paper cranes is because since I was a child I have been captivated by origami and I don't do it often enough and I don't know why because it brings me joy.

Bess Saddler gave us some suggestions on how we might try to design systems that bring back joy and resonate with the our emotional selves. One suggestion was to make bring our collections down to a scale that they could be understood and navigated by our physical selves. She also said this:

So these students who use augmented reality are really excited about the library becoming digital, because it means they can use the library collections as if they are using the library in Hogwarts, or Discworld, or any of the other fantasy worlds that they choose to inhabit. And I adore this idea. I mean, first of all, these students are really excited about their university’s digital library interface. This is my kind of escapist fantasy. But also because, this seems kind of do-able. We have an API that can give us a virtual shelf list now, we’d just need to render it in a 3D game engine. Actually, someone already made a video game that includes the Unseen University Library from the Discworld books.

I would happily spend many hours exploring library collections in a beautiful virtual setting and I don’t think I’m alone in that. By tapping into video games we could tap into spatial reasoning and memory, aesthetic pleasure, and all of the visceral reactions that the video game industry has put so much work into.

Libraries are filled with books that contain compelling and understandable fictional worlds. These are worlds of shared experiences.  Just like how my son finds it easier to draw from the Star Wars universe and play with other kids who automatically understand what the rules are for playing in that universe, we might find it easier to use narratives to explore our collections. I'm paraphrasing, but also at Access, Aaron Cope said something along the lines of this: "a collection opens a narrative space were we can explain ourselves and find meaning."

Years ago, I read a post on Kottke.org (at least I think it where I had read it) in which a designer (or was it an illustrator?) gave advice to those who were starting out in creative work and who were worried that they had not developed their own personal style.  I can't find it now, but what I remember of it was this: if you create many things and solve lots of problems and while doing so draw on all aspects of yourself, you will automatically develop your own personal style because you are already unique, and your personal style just needs to be drawn out.

And yet, for non-artists, once we leave childhood, many of us are unable to draw, write or create anything, even for ourselves, even in private. But there are (oblique) strategies to restore that sense of joy. If you want to start writing and drawing again, I highly recommend Lynda "Funk Queen of the Universe" Barry's "What it is."

It is easier to draw from the fictional universes that are readily available to us than to design something from scratch. And yet, with 3D printing and with our collections - digital and otherwise - we have an opportunity to build almost anything. So let's design for joy.

The Professional is Political

Today is Ada Lovelace Day.

Last year I celebrated the occasion with a cryptic lament and a celebration of two women involved in  Drupal development and whose very presence made me feel comfortable in the Drupal Community.

This year's cryptic lament is this: work done by women is frequently ascribed by others to personal motivations as opposed to professional ones. As a result, personality becomes a liability.

I've been blessed to have worked with a number of great women managers over the course of my working life. When I was just out of school, I wondered why many of these managers were always so staunchly professional all the time and kept 'themselves' to outside of the office. Now I know why.

Ok, that's enough lamenting. Today is a day to celebrate women in science and technology.

My Ada is ladyada, aka Limor Fried, founder of Adafruit Industries:

Adafruit was founded in 2005 by MIT engineer, Limor "Ladyada" Fried. Her goal was to create the best place online for learning electronics and making the best designed products for makers of all ages and skill levels. Since then Adafruit has grown to over 25 employees in the heart of NYC. We've expanded our offerings to include tools, equipment and electronics that Limor personally selects, tests and approves before going in to the Adafruit store.

Now, I didn't select Limor because of the obvious word association. I chose her because I'm trying to learn and play with electronics and while I haven't bought anything from Adafruit yet, I've already made much use of their amazing tutorials and explainers. And I love the Adafruit badges. My inner Girl Guide LURVES THEM.

And I'm learning about electronics at the moment for a reason: I'm now a director of the newly minted Hackforge board - a group dedicated to setting up a Hacker/Maker Space in Windsor, Ontario. And it looks like we have a space... in the front section of the Windsor Public Library.

And I'm very especially excited about this group and the work we're going to do because there is a commitment not to turn the space into a foreboding clubhouse - but to make the place open, awesome and welcoming to anyone and everyone. Even to girls and women with strong personalities.

Bibliographic Software → ??? → BePress

The Leddy Library will be shortly launching its new Institutional Repository. Our site will running on a BePress server and we’ll be having its official launch just after Open Access Week. At the moment, we still only have access to a demo site that we can use for ‘practice’. We are using this interval to investigate and figure out possible workflows that will allow a variety of staff to be able to identify, select, and upload faculty publications that are eligible for archiving. We are hoping that once liaison librarians and staff identify papers eligible for our new IR, they will pass on the information about these papers to our IR coordinator who will double check things and then bulk upload the papers.

For those unfamiliar with BePress, individual article uploads are possible by means of an online form that is readily available on most BePress sites. Bulk uploads are possible by making use of a pre-formatted Excel spreadsheet provided by BePress and available to BePress site administrators. Bulk uploads are also available using XML but as this requires some effort to finesse into functionality, it’s not particularly encouraged by BePress.

BePress also offers a service to identify and upload suitable documents into one’s institutional repository but IMHO the service is very expensive. It’s unfortunate that BePress provides this service because it appears to present an disincentive for BePress to improve their software’s bulk uploading capabilities. I expect more because I work with Syrup -  the wonderful and sadly under-appreciated course reserve software created by Art Rhyno and Graham Fawcett - and Syrup provides the very feature I would have expected from IR software today: the ability to easily upload records using the RIS standard of bibliographic software. But you go to war with the army you have and not the army you want.

My colleague asked for workflow suggestions on the BePress mailing list and I did the same on code4lib. My email went like this:

We're trying to figure out a workflow for our BePress IR and was curious if anyone in code4libland has developed "something" (an Excel macro? a Zotero export function?) that could take formatted citations and put them in the proper order so they could be bulk added to the BePress bulk upload Excel spreadsheet.  Or perhaps there's an altogether different way of going about collecting, formatting, and adding such things for BePress.   

Everything counts in large amounts

And from that we found out that Roy Tennant, some years ago, created a Perl script that collects the latest citations in Web of Science (WoS) via their WSDL. Lisa Schiff kindly found this script and sent it my way. While the script is admittedly out of date (and Web of Science now provides an API for this sort of thing) it still will will prove useful if and when we get to a point in which we want to automate and script our workflow. (Thank you Roy, Kirk Hastings, and Lisa Schiff!)

And here are some things that we’ve figured out ourselves:

• Between Zotero and RefWorks, Zotero exports the cleanest results to excel format. RefWorks can easily export to Excel, while Zotero requires the use of an SQLite extension and this script (https://github.com/RoyceKimmons/Zotero-to-Excel-SQLite-Export/blob/master/export.sql) kindly provided by Royce Kimmons. On this page (http://royce.kimmons.me/node/24) Kimmons explains how one can select one or more Zotero collection/folder for export.
  
  
• No one that we know of has created an Excel macro to automate transferring the result of an export to Excel from RefWorks or Zotero to ease the cutting and pasting necessary to get the information into BePress’s Excel Spreadsheet.
  
  
• An alternative means of sharing citations is to avoid Excel exporting altogether and instead, have staff make their papers available on Zotero.org in a public library and have the IR coordinator use Zotero to download the citations using that are either tagged as appropriate (e.g. https://www.zotero.org/copystar/items/tag/publisherPDF) or those that have been placed in a given collection folder (e.g. https://www.zotero.org/copystar/items/collectionKey/THDEN26X).
  
  
• Papers on BePress can be added to Zotero on each item level page but not on a collection page.  Improving this capability would require creating a special Zotero translator for BePress: https://github.com/zotero/translators/issues/212

Thank you everyone who has helped us work through this. I hope what we’ve learned proves useful to you as well.