I'm not usually at a loss for words. Especially on the area of libraries. I take great pride in having plenty to say on my favorite topic. But somehow, I ended up rather flabbergasted by a post made by Seth Godin on his blog. In fact, I was even having trouble summarizing Seth's view of libraries. I'm grateful that Censored Genius had a long and very rational (if curse-laden) post about the topic. And she's right about oh so many things. Including the importance of including pie in a well-rounded library collection. It helped me gather my thoughts regarding Mr. Godin's...misimpressions of libraries.
Goden seems to think that books are going away, and this inevitable. Which I couldn't disagree with more. There are SO MANY reasons why I think books are here to stay that I may not be able to summarize them neatly here. Second, he thinks the primary reason for libraries is becoming obsolete. But I think that I disagree with his view of the reason for libraries more than anything else, here. Libraries are not warehouses for books. Nor have they ever been. Librarians are not simply "the people who know where stuff is in libraries." Otherwise librarians would have gone out of style with the card catalog.
I also disagree that the purpose of librarians is changing, and librarians have to get with the times and become super internet searching gurus. That reduces the role of the librarian as someone whose single purpose is to teach people how to massage search engines and sift data for the best results.
Just because information is more easily searchable than it has ever been does not mean that the primary function of librarians or libraries is changing. In fact, there is more information now than ever, which makes librarians more important than ever. Not as Net Gods and Godesses (which we are, but that's a separate issue), but as people capable of curating information, determining relevance and making educated decisions on what information is historically, culturally and locally important (important to local need/interest). Yes, a large part of what a librarian does is retrieval, and teaching people how to retrieve information. But we also curate information. Which is something Google doesn't do.
Google crawls websites, it finds them and knows they are there. It knows how to recall them, when someone searches for "insurgency" or "interdisciplinary action" or "hotdog eating contest." But it doesn't know how relevant those websites actually ARE. It doesn't search paid databases. It doesn't know which databases are the best to search for a history of hotdog eating contests. It just knows that "hotdog eating contest" is a phrase that exists frequently on a page, and other websites about eating hotdogs link to it.
It doesn't know which books are the best for discussing the social implications of food eating contests. It doesn't know how to do a research interview to figure out what a library user is REALLY looking for, or to help the library user figure it out. The internet is not going to remove the need for that human element beyond turning us all into trainers.
The books aren't going away for a multitude of reasons. The technological divide: not everyone has an e-reader. Not everyone can afford one, not everyone has the knowledge to work one. Not everyone has the inclination to learn how to use one. Most folks can flip pages in a book and understand how it works since it is the medium we were brought up in. We have hundreds of years of practice.
There's planned obsolescence: tried opening a file created in Wordstar lately? Yeah. The hardware AND the software ages rapidly in a digital world. Faster than a library budget can reasonably keep up with. A ten year old e-book may be unreadable now, due to changing formats, and the sheer multitude of formats (every reader has a proprietary format). However, I can open a 400 year old book and start reading now. Without special software or hardware. Unless you count my ability to read as software, and a good lighting source as hardware.
There's the cost of implementation. Does a library purchase an e-reader for every user? Do those who cannot afford a reader get left out in the cold? Also, digital rights issues--there're publishers who want the rights to an e-publication to expire, and the library to have to repurchase. Others don't want there to be lending rights.
Lastly, there is the spatial relationships we have with books. Flipping back and forth on a computer screen between texts is WAY harder than have two opened in front of you to compare information, or to be able to thumb to various bookmarks. The blogger in question seems to think that books on paper are going away in 5 to 10 years, which I think is a gross underestimation... if it ever happens at all. However, if it does happen, those of us who know how to "work" a book will have a great advantage over those who do not, when the Technopocalyps happens, and the world is left with only analog technology.
Have I covered everything? Maybe. Maybe not. I'm still a little startled at the one-dimensional view of libraries, librarians and library services presented by Godin. Again, perhaps our own fault. No one has any idea what we do, how diverse our jobs are (some are extremely technically oriented, some not, etc), or the value of what we do. We really, desperately need to change this.
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