"Breaking out of the box: Libraries without walls"

"Breaking out of the box: Libraries without walls"(published in wordsend.org, 6th Oct,2006)

Terry Reese, Oregon State University, “Breaking out of the box: Libraries without walls.”

……Libraries today are suffering from an identity crisis, trapped between the traditional roles of a library and the current expectations of its users. So what do undergraduates want? They want a library that fits into an ipod, they wanna use google and other software they’re already familiar with.

Libraries are their communities’ (esp. small communities’) primary information providers. Libraries have also started facilitating, for example, borrowing from other institutions (interlibrary loan), providing e-resources. Nowadays, libraries are one of the many information providers available to their users.

Libraries’ evolving roles aren’t new. They’ve traditionally evolved with technology. But up until now they were central repositories of trusted information, and now they’re no longer in that center. (vz: or not in the center alone.)

Evolution isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It underlines libraries’ past successes, and it also demonstrates a vibrant information ecosystem of which libraries are now a part. But with evolution comes the necessity to learn a new language. Syndication; blogs and blogging; reviews and user-driven ratings all are parts of that same ecosystem.

Library 2.0: socially driven content; social networking; social bookmarking; personalization. Folksonomies, tagging and tag clouds. This may be scary for librarians, but it’s also what the users want to do. New programming tools: AJAX, API, ruby on rails, Python, LAMP. From there follows: open access, open source, open content. (Metadata wants to be free! Free the metadata!)

Also, Library 2.0 is about web services. Digital library dev’t needs to start with an understanding that the library needs to be more transparent (a sort of business model; for example, label everything so that users know where their information is coming from). Libraries need to look outside the library community for usable technologies. Maybe libraries could start collaborating as groups, and develop software of their own, perhaps starting with some open-source software and customizing it for librarians’ purposes.

How the user sees the library in the digital world. Looking to the past: library -> individual materials. Looking to the present: library [as middleware] -> a complex interconnected lot of materials.

“Unlibrary”: digitization is not enough; accessibility only through the library isn’t sufficient.

In 5 years, in Terry’s library, simple aggregation of resources will not be enough. Databases and websites will be replaced by mechanisms that fetch information into users’ workflows. Single points of access for information will be the goal. Also, “intermediate environments” (mashups, aggregations, workflow – think Spell with Flickr… and, oh my gawd, hamster sudoku! And, holy $#!7, Massachusetts campaign contribution map) will be consumers of library services, just like more traditional users.

An example of how libraries could usefully do that sort of thing is umlaut by Ross Singer. There are also search engine that search multiple resources, whether within or outside the library.

So what can libraries do? They can work with partners: no library, LC or the smallest of them, is large enough to solve these problems themselves. They can also continue to innovate: libraries need to do more development. They should depend less on their vendors and more on developing solutions to their problems themselves. These solutions should be open-source. Finally, libraries can open their current systems to outside users. This is something libraries don’t like to do right now. But libraries expects groups like publishers, Google etc. to provide harvested metadata, but they don’t build this facility into their own systems……