Moving To A National Digital Library?

In a post last year, http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/66967472797/a-national-future-for-libraries , I discussed the increasing volume of digital text, video and audio, produced by millions more writers and artists than have been supported by the big publishing and media corporations in the past.  These trends have important implications for libraries, especially the need to offer library patrons a national collection and reference to materials located anywhere.  That’s why I titled the post “A National Future For Libraries”.

So it was great that the US Government’s Institute of Museums and Library Services (IMLS) conducted their “Strategic Priorities 2014” conference with a focus on a National Digital Platform. 

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The meeting, held at the main building of the New York Public Library on Tuesday this week, featured most of the key leaders in the world of libraries and other non-profit cultural and information organizations as you can see below.

Jason Kucsma, ‎Executive Director of the Metropolitan New York Library Council, was one of the speakers – a nice recognition for the innovative work that METRO is doing under his leadership and METRO’s role as the New York State hub for the Digital Public Library of America.  (Note: I’m President of the board, but Jason and the staff of METRO actually do the work.)

It was very encouraging to see these leaders working together with a generally positive frame of mind, trying to figure out how to create and, more important, sustain a national digital library.  There’s clearly lots of work ahead of us – including much more than the usual community of librarians – but this was a good start.

You can see the conference video at http://www.tvworldwide.com/events/imls/140429/.  Since it was a whole day event, I’ve put the agenda below so you can watch particular sections.

Welcome and Framing the Day

Anthony Marx, President and CEO, New York Public Library – @NYPL

Maura Marx, Deputy Director for Libraries, IMLS – @mauramarx / @US_IMLS

Play Flash Video


INFRASTRUCTURE: Examining the Hubs Model

Moderated by:
Jim Neal, VP for Information Services and University Librarian, Columbia University, @columbialib

Panel:
Dan Cohen, Executive Director, Digital Public Library of America – @dancohen / @dpla

Brett Bobley, Chief Information Officer, National Endowment for the Humanities – @brettbobley / @NEH_ODH

Elliott Shore, Executive Director, Association of Research Libraries – @ARLnews

Play Flash Video


CONTENT: Beyond the low hanging fruit: Strategies on Providing Access to Complicated Content

Moderated by
Rachel Frick, Director, Digital Library Federation – @RLFrick / @CLIRDLF

Panel:
Sari Feldman, Executive Director, Cuyahoga County Public Libraries – @Sari_Feldman / @CuyahogaLib

Katherine Skinner, Executive Director, Educopia Institute – @Educopia

Clifford Lynch, Director, Coalition for Networked Information – @CNI_org

Play Flash Video


USE: Challenges and Opportunities to Broad Use of Digital Content

Moderated by:
Susan Hildreth, Director of the Institute of Museum and Library Services – @IMLSDirector / @US_IMLS

Panel:
Susan Gibbons, University Librarian, Yale University – @YaleLibrary

Bernie Margolis, New York State Librarian and Assistant Commissioner for Libraries

Play Flash Video


TOOLS: Encouraging Innovation

Moderated by:
Mary Lee Kennedy, Chief Library Officer, New York Public Library – @NYPL

Panel:
Ben Vershbow, Manager, NYPL Labs – @subsublibrary / @NYPL_Labs

Martin Kalfatovic, Associate Director Smithsonian Libraries, Program Director BHL – @UDCMRK / @SILibraries

Tom Scheinfeldt , Associate Professor of Digital Media / Director of Digital Humanities at University of Connecticut – @foundhistory / @UConn

Play Flash Video


ACCESS AT SCALE

Moderated by:
Josh Greenberg, Program Director for Digital Information Technology, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation – @epistemographer / @SloanFoundation

Panel:
MacKenzie Smith, University Librarian, University of California at Davis

Jason Kucsma, ?Executive Director at Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO) – @J450NK / @mnylc

Dan Chudnov, Director, Scholarly Technology, George Washington University Libraries – @dchud / @gelmanlibrary

Play Flash Video


SKILLS

Moderated by:
Bob Horton, Associate Deputy Director for Library Services, IMLS – @US_IMLS

Panel:
Nancy McGovern , Head, Curation and Preservation Services, MIT Libraries – @mitlibraries

Jack Martin, Executive Director, Providence Public Library – @provlib

Play Flash Video


CONCLUSION AND CLOSING DISCUSSION

Maura Marx, Susan Hildreth and Bob Horton – @mauramarx, @IMLSDirector / @US_IMLS

Play Flash Video

©2014 Norman Jacknis

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Intellectual Property?

Last, the Metropolitan New York Library Council held its Annual Meeting at the vertical campus of Baruch College/CUNY.  [Disclosure: I’m President of the board, although the staff does all the real work.]

METRO has turned this into quite an event, filled all day with various breakout sessions.  But there is still a keynote address, given this year by Jessamyn West who discussed her views on copyrights and how libraries are and will continue to be affected by copyright law.

You can see the slides from her presentation at http://www.librarian.net/talks/metro/ , although you can’t see and hear what she had to say about each.  You can get a flavor for her entertaining presentation style by noting her concluding slide.

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If I had to summarize her message to the library world and to others in one sentence, it is this: aggressively apply your “fair use” rights for copyrighted material.  (You can read this article for a summary of “fair use”.)

The Wikipedia entry on fair use provides this conventional summary:

“In United States copyright law, fair use is a doctrine that permits limited use of copyrighted material without acquiring permission from the rights holders. Examples of fair use include commentary, search engines, criticism, parody, news reporting, research, teaching, library archiving and scholarship.”

The traditional copyright that the writers of the US Constitution had in mind – fourteen years for printed material – has been buffeted by the pressures of copyright owners, on the one hand, and developments in technology on the other.

The copyright owners have succeeded in extending the life of copyrights to seven decades after the death of the original copyright holder.  They have also tended to generalize what was a fairly limited monopoly into the much larger concept of “intellectual property”, which often translates into a monopoly on an idea. 

The Internet, of course, has made things more complicated. There is the increasing digitization (scanning) of existing printed material.  There is also an ever increasing percentage of published material that is born digital.  The Internet has also made possible a boom in self-published works, usually in e-book form.

All of these trends mean that traditional copyrights, which were managed by a small set of big publishers of printed books can no longer be so easily managed.  Readers can more easily copy digital books than printed books, so having a copyright is no longer as strong a protection of a monopoly as it used to be.

Indeed, the very idea of a fixed book – something with a finite number of printed pages, contained within hard covers – is challenged by the digital form.  We are already seen and can expect to see more mash-ups that might take a paragraph or a chapter here and another from there and so on in order to create something that some readers might find more efficient than reading all the original material.

Who owns what in that mash-up? How much can be used from the original sources?  How are rights affected if the original material is modified in some way?  What if those original sources are also some form of mash-up?   These are just some of the questions that will grist for the legal mills in the future.

Indeed, whether ideas can be considered non-sharable, protectable property will be one of the big policy debates of this century – perhaps on a par with the labor vs. capital conflicts of the 19th and early 20th centuries.  Ms. West’s presentation gave the attendees of METRO’s meeting a taste of what that battle will be like.

© 2014 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/74279930335/intellectual-property ]

A National Future For Libraries?

The second and final meeting of the Aspen Institute workgroup on the future of libraries was held last week.

[What follows does not necessarily represent views of anyone else there or even the discussion that took place.  These are purely my reflections when the meeting was over and continue what I started in a previous post.  I also apologize in advance for the length of this post.]

The question that kept crossing my mind is simple: given the obvious trends in the library world and, more broadly, the world of knowledge, is some form of national network of library services inevitable?

When books were physical items primarily produced by established book publishers, the local library was the place local residents needed to go to get access to those books (assuming they couldn’t afford to buy everything they wanted to read).

There are still many printed books in local libraries around the country.  We are, after all, in a transitional period and we can expect to see some printed books lasting long after almost everyone will be reading digitally – 2050? 

But books are changing.  It’s not just that there are digital versions of printed books.  Self-published books and co-created texts already are more numerous than traditionally published books, even including e-books.  With so much digital content, produced by so many different sources, the purely local collections in a local library can easily be outmatched in both quantity and quality. 

The Digital Public Library of America is one important response to this accelerating condition.  Indeed, DPLA is as much the future of libraries as anything on the horizon right now.  DPLA doesn’t centralize all of the digital collections, but it makes them available to everyone.  It uses local library resources (and regional consortia) to collect and organize digital content created locally, but it lets that content escape the constraints of the physical building in which they have been stored.

Another sign of the times is the use of virtual reference librarians.  These were first established to share the load of patron requests especially at odd hours. 

However, the potential of a network of reference librarians is much greater than that.  Consider the deep knowledge that a reference librarian in one part of the country can have about some subject – say Hellenic pottery as an example.  Why shouldn’t she or he get the reference questions that come up about that subject no matter where the patron is?  Can the reference desk in the local library match this knowledge?  Of course not.  Is it possible that the reference librarian locally happens to be that expert in a subject? Of course.  Why not let her specialize?

In a future world where most content will be digital, a national network of reference librarians would provide patrons with the best possible service and pointers to the best places to find the content they are searching for.

DPLA and specialized virtual reference librarians are just two significant ways that library services are no longer limited to the local library building.

So, if not as the collector of printed books or the location for an all knowing reference librarian sitting at a desk there, what will be the purpose of local library buildings in the decades ahead? 

Already we see the library building being used as a meeting place.  Even more exciting, many libraries are becoming centers for create content and culture in various ways – offering Maker Spaces (with 3D printers), poetry rooms, video/audio studios, etc.

Consider also that the national digital collection that is being pioneered by DPLA will need much more manpower to become useful than DPLA and its hubs can provide.  The local library building can be one place where the staff can help with the task of tagging/classifying and otherwise making sense of all the new content produced by others.

The local library can also be the outreach center to get volunteers to help with this enormous task and thus be the local chapters of a national pool of librarians and colleagues.

As with any other sea change, the shift to a national library network will not come without strife.  The most obvious trouble is that libraries have been inherently local institutions supported by local taxes.  There is currently a very small amount of Federal money devoted to library services, mostly in the form of a fraction of the e-rate program.

As library services become not merely local, but an interstate concern, the Federal government or some other national organization is going to have to step up funding for the national institutions that will make those services work.

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The Aspen Institute has also been involved in projects about citizenship so it worth remembering that our founding fathers strongly supported libraries as the cornerstone of an educated citizenry, which they thought, in turn, was essential for democratic government to survive. 

Our national leaders today don’t explicitly share that understanding and seem to find it easier to deal with a less engaged citizenry.  Perhaps the nationalization of libraries will make it easier for American citizens all over the country to gain the knowledge necessary to play their proper role in our democracy and thereby improve the way that our national government functions.  Now there’s a long term goal!

© 2013 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/66967472797/a-national-future-for-libraries]

Aspen Institute on Public Libraries

Last month, the Aspen Institute gathered about two dozen leaders and innovators to a workshop on the future of public libraries.  I was honored to be asked to participate.  I will be helping to develop the larger strategy, but I thought I’d share some immediate observations from the discussions and my reflections on them.

As a pre-condition to thinking clearly about the future of libraries, we need to leave behind legacy thinking. The libraries of today cannot be and shouldn’t be the libraries that we fondly remember from our childhood.  A library is no longer a building merely with books.  Even the addition of e-books to printed books is not a fundamental and sufficient change in the traditional library model.  

To escape that old mold, library services can now – and should now – escape the confines of the library building itself.  With the Internet, library services can be everywhere.

At one point in the discussion, someone put up a picture like the one below – which isn’t quite what I have in mind by going beyond the library building 😉

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The reaction of some people was a feeling that the “little free library” movement built cute little boxes but it is sad that library funding has been so diminished that we are left with such pitiful collections.

My reaction was a bit different.  I said I agreed that this little box was limited, if what you had in it was printed books.  But why not take all the outdoors and other locations which are targeted for “little free libraries” and make the real and much bigger digital library available to people there.  As a portal to the digital library online, the collection can be as large as possible even in this little box.

I also pointed out that our economy has been changing and more people earn a living in digital ways, based on knowledge and innovation.  In such an economy, you would think that libraries should be the key institution and hub of society.  I gave examples of how some libraries are providing support to entrepreneurs.  Another implication of this role for libraries is that the distinctions between public libraries and those labeled as specialized, school or university libraries will be weakening because often an entrepreneur or other innovator needs access to specialized technical knowledge as well as general audience information.

It was clear that the idea that Google and the Internet make librarians unnecessary was weighing on the minds in the room, as elsewhere in the library world.  Maybe it’s because I’ve been an unusually long time user of the Internet, but I’m waiting for help from good librarians.  What most of us face is TMI and TLK – too much information and too little knowledge.

Librarians can be the guide, curator, re-mixer, and knowledge creator for people who are drowning in a sea of information, or worse, swimming in the wrong part of the sea considering what they need to know.

Of course, it was clear from the discussion that many of us realize the users of libraries can also contribute, as in the pro-sumer model where a person is both consumer and producer of information.  So librarians should encourage and make space for people to self-publish.  Going beyond text, libraries should do the same for people making videos, music or even things (through the availability of maker rooms and the like).

Along those lines, there was a bit of discussion about the Douglas County (Colorado) Library model.  That library got fed up with the refusal of four major publishers to sell e-books to them and the tough conditions imposed by the other two big publishers.  So it reached out to many independent publishers to get their e-books in the library.  

A much wider possibility in the future is for the libraries to help authors to publish their works without the traditional publishers. Yes, I know there could be a lot of junk published, but there is no reason why book reviews, peer reviews, and other means couldn’t be used to help identify the junk without the need for editorial approval from the big six publishing companies.  The Public Library of Science (PLOS) has, as an example, established itself as a respectable medium for research using these techniques.

Finally, it seems that each library is trying to create the future itself.  Why can’t librarians and others in the library world work together nationally, enabled by the tools of the Internet.  If there is a librarian in Seattle who is an expert on Eritrea, why can’t she be available all over the US?  Someone described this as the library version of MOOCs.  This kind of federation, perhaps mutual aid pact, is a natural result when librarians realize their services are no longer limited to library buildings.

The Aspen Institute project is asking important questions not only for libraries, but for our country as a whole, so keep track of its efforts.  For more information now, see www.aspeninstitute.org/dialogue-public-libraries

© 2013 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/60932592269/aspen-institute-on-public-libraries]

What Is A 21st Century Library For?

Although I’m not a librarian, I am the President of the Metropolitan New York Library Council (metro.org) and former President of the New York State Library Trustees Association, among other library positions. 

Because of this long standing activity in the library world, which seems to some to be incongruous for a technologist, I’ve often been asked what libraries will be like in a world of Google searches, e-books and the like.  

Although some people question whether we will still need libraries, those folks haven’t been in libraries recently.  Most libraries have had significantly increased use over the last decade, both in the building and online, both for printed and e-books and databases.

Libraries also continue to be the major public institution that helps to overcome the digital divide.  See the recent Pew studies on this subject.

So I’m not going to spend time here retreading the issue of the existence of libraries or even printed books.  Instead, I want to talk about the longer term, more subtle ways that libraries will evolve along with the rest of the 21st century world.

First, look inside the library building itself.  Most newly renovated or newly built libraries have devote a decreasing percentage of their space to bookshelves.  There are computers everywhere and meeting room for community groups, book clubs, author presentations and the like.

In the future, there will be much more than the community center rooms found in most libraries today.   There will creative centers for writing, poetry, music and even community art.  The public library in Aarhus, Denmark has been one of the world leaders in creating these new kinds of library spaces.

In addition, libraries are beginning to understand their key role in supporting entrepreneurs as unofficial corporate librarian for these budding businesses.  The Chattanooga Public Library has made their top floor of their main building a center for entrepreneurs.   The public library in Westport, Connecticut opened up a Maker space in which people can use 3D printing machines to make all sort of artistic and/or utilitarian objects.

Clearly, e-books are increasing in popularity and most libraries offer e-books for loan.  Some even offer e-readers for those who don’t have one.  The serious longer term issue is that some major publishers are refusing to sell e-books to libraries, even under onerous terms such as elimination of the e-book after it has been used a few times.  This is a major threat to what libraries have been all about for a long time – a common collection of books.  I hope the lawyers figure this out soon because if the situation continues it will prevent libraries from evolving their traditional role as collectors of shared books.

It’s worth noting that traditionally published books – print or electronic – are becoming a diminishing fraction of the total written material.  Traditional publishing is being dwarfed by self-publishing and peer reviewed open source publishing on the web.  So one new responsibility of librarians is to include these new sources into the library’s collection, manage them and make them useful to readers.

Moreover, the publishers who are shunning libraries may find they will be encouraging librarians to undertake a more frightening path – mashups of parts of electronic texts.  In various ways, librarians have always been curators.  Now they can curate parts of open source writing and assemble them in new works that help readers better understand a subject than any single author can.

But the most important trend to note is that library services will be everywhere.  They will no longer be constrained by the limits of the building we call a library.

In a sense, librarians will reference guides to the Internet, including the many parts that are not visible to Google and other search engines.  Library services will, as always, help organize the worlds knowledge for us and help us find what we need but these services will be accessible from anywhere. 

I’ve only skimmed the surface here and this post is already too long 😉  So let me know if you want more.

© 2013 Norman Jacknis

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