February 2006 (decennial) issue of Ariadne, with articles by Lorcan Dempsey, Peter Brophy, Cliff Lynch, Derek Law, John MacColl, and Reg Carr and others. Google Challenges for Academic Libraries by John MacColl from Edinburgh University ends with this (deadpan?) statement of principle:
As librarians, running pleasant study environments, containing expert staff, providing havens on our campus which are well respected, and building and running high-quality Web-based services, we will decide which of Google's offerings we wish to promote, and which we are prepared to pay for. And we will stand up - no matter how wealthy we assume our students and academic users to be - for the principle of free and equal access to content, and for the principle of high-quality index provision, whether free or at a cost, because without those principles we are no longer running libraries.
... which I hope makes you want to read the article in full.
Do we need any more poof that librarians are a dying race. I recommend a book called Library by Matthew Battles. There's a myth that libraries have saved knowledge from certain destruction. In fact, collecting books in the major libraries of the past often led to their wholesale destruction (even recently in the Balkans). It was the fact that books were distributed out into private homes, monasteries and so on that led to their survival.
In more recent time book borrowing and attendance at libraries have plummeted (down by over a third since the late nineties). Why? The internet and commoditisation of books through Amazon and good book stores. Libraries are now wasteful throwbacks. Let me illustrate the problem - in Brighton - small town, we have three libraries - Univ. of Sussex, Univ. of Brighton (massive duplication) and a spanking new town library that has scrappy shelving, hardly any books, is closed when everyone wants to use it and doesn't sell coffee. Most sensible people prefer the nearby Borders. Most of the people who do use the library want DVDs and internet access. It should be run by English heritage, as its users come from the same demographic.
Posted by: Donald Clark | 11/05/2006 at 09:10
I too recommend Matthew Battles' excellent book 'Library: an unquiet history' (Heinemann, 2003). However, it is a wilful misinterpretation to suggest that the book advocates that libraries should not exist because they cause the destruction of knowledge. Indeed, the final part of Chapter 2 discusses the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum, which was burnt when Vesuvius erupted in AD 79. Over time, technologies have been developed to allow the fragments of the burned scrolls to be read, so that, as Battles writes 'one thing is certain: the most complete ancient library accessible to us today survived because it burned.' There is no suggestion in the book that libraries are irrelevant in the modern age. Indeed, he concludes by writing 'the Word shifts again in its modes, tending more and more to dwell in pixels and bits instead of paper and ink ... And yet, the very fact that the library has endured these cycles seems to offer hope. In its custody of books and the words they contain, the library has confronted and tamed technology, the forces of change, and the power of princes time and again.'
As for borrowing and usage figures - they go up and down. Public library borrowing in the UK is dropping, but academic library borrowing is not. Public library borrowing in the US is increasing. Libraries are offering more than books, and being used differently as a result. But their values endure. Buying books - whether through Amazon or any other outlet - is not a replacement for borrowing them. To assume it is is to forget that technology has its haves and its have-nots, and to allow the temporary brilliance of new Internet business models to blind us to the fact that we are still handing over cash. The day when we are all prepared to pay individually for everything we wish to read will not ever come, I believe. Collective payment, using libraries as a means to service the 'long tail' of demand has been a constant human approach to knowledge sharing for thousands of years. I stand by my comments about the importance of librarians even in a world of savvy web users who mistake the ability of new technologies to deliver new experiences of fulfilment for Parnassus.
Posted by: John MacColl | 12/05/2006 at 12:42
The book does not claim that libraries should not exist, neither did I. However, it does document many examples over the last 2 thousand years of books being burned in their millions in libaries. My point is not that libraries should not exist, only that they have lost their position of pre-eminence in terms of reading and the distribution of books.
The Villa of the Papyrii is hardly a good example. It was not a library but the country house of Calpurnius, father in law of Julius Caesar. Of the the public libraries in Rome and the provinces - and there were many - none survived.
The figures do not go up and down. The trend is clear. Free public libraries in the UK lose an average of 5% of their borrowers a year and statistically the trend is one of steady decline.
Book issues have fallen by on average 31% in Britain since 1995. In England the fall since 1995 was 33%, in Wales 38%, in Scotland 32% and in Northern Ireland 28%.
The solutions to the problems of both capture and distribution are digital. Amazon and other worthy projects are well underway to digitise text. Books are no longer adequate in themselves. Libraries simply lock down texts to a location.
Libraries won't dissapear, but are becoming less relevant.
Posted by: Donald Clark | 12/05/2006 at 17:33
What do you do if you have blog and people start making comments? I should own up to having drawn Donald Clark's original comment to John MacColl's attention. I do not want this to turn into a "tennis match", and taking some advice from a friend, I decided to write my own comment, not that I am any sort of expert of libraries, public or academic.
Referring to Matthew Battles' book "Library: an unquiet history", which both Donald and John recommend, and for which you can read some informative reviews (or buy it) here, Donald says "The book does not claim that libraries should not exist, neither did I."
That's true, but Donald did say, in his first post: "Libraries are now wasteful throwbacks.", and in relation to Brighton Library, "Most sensible people prefer the nearby Borders. Most people who do use the library want DVDs and internet access. It should be run by English Heritage, as its users come from the same demographic."
Looking at data on the Office of National Statistics web site you can see (warning: danger of link-rot), from the Excel worksheet accessible from here, that in 2000 users of UK public libraries did so mainly to access print media, irrespective of their age. From the Excel worksheet and chart accessible from here the long term steady decline in use of UK public libraries is clear, from an average of over 11 books per person per year in 1981/2 to less than 7 in 2000/01, a trend which has continued. Interestingly, the proportion of library loans of children's books rose over the same period from 16% to 23%. And in 2004, 58% of the UK population were registered members of their local library.
There is a mass of more recent data about library use on the Library & Information Statistics Unit's web site, for example this 2005 report with at-a-glance charts and tables for 2004 [2.1 MB PDF], and this narrative summary based on 2004 data [40 kB PDF], with the following extract broadly supporting Donald's points (in his second comment) that (public) "libraries are becoming less relevant", and that "libraries have lost their pre-eminence in terms of reading and the distribution of books".
The key issue for me is how libraries of all kinds adapt their activities in the face of digitisation, and the steady "commercialisation and concentration" of data and content, of the indexes to it, and of the search-tools for it. And that is one of the issues that UKOLN "A centre of expertise in digital information management, providing advice and services to the library, information, education and cultural heritage communities", which publishes Ariadne, is seeking to address.
Some previous posts and links:
Posted by: Seb Schmoller | 13/05/2006 at 16:07
Look at the objective, "assembling examples of good practice in public libraries, and disseminating these widely across the sector. Areas covered include book-purchasing, presentation and display of collections, design and use of library buildings, and development of staff skills. Any effect of such measures will emerge in future editions of these statistics."
Are they seriously suggesting that this decline is simply due to the poor display, layout and staff skills? Can't they see what's happening here? The system is being propped up my myopic Victorian attitudes towards literacy and books. There needs to be a radical rethink around the role of the public sector in literacy. We've seen disastrous teaching methods lead to high levels of illiteracy and pouring ever larger amounts of money into libraries will increase costs against declining benefits.
Posted by: Donald Clark | 24/05/2006 at 17:02