Libraries and the Information Society: The challenges and opportunities of the twenty-first century by draft
By Alexandra Yarrow.
In Chapter 7 of her book, From Gutenberg to the Global Information Infrastructure: Access to Information in the Networked World, Christine Borgman writes that libraries often “risk being victims of their own success” (194). When libraries function optimally, they offer services that can easily go unnoticed by the general public. Processes such as cataloguing, acquisition of materials, and document and archive preservation are frequently taken for granted when they are done properly. Writes Marcia J. Bates, “the average person […] never notices the structure that organizes their information, because they are so caught up in absorbing and relating to the content” (1045). At the dawn of the 21st century, libraries increasingly also risk being victims of the success of the information society, which has bred a “Google generation” of users who believe themselves equipped to navigate the choppy waters of a sea of information. Libraries are left on the shore, their librarians wondering how to serve a society that believes them to be superfluous. At the same time, however, the information society clearly needs the values and skills of the library profession and its institutions. The information society may appear adequately organized to serve the people, but as Jose-Marie Griffiths points out in her article, “Back to the Future: Information Science for the New Millennium”, information sources such as the World Wide Web are analogous to “the Library of Congress with all its materials shelved randomly, or […] with all the materials in large unorganized piles on the floor, with pages torn out!” (26). Clearly, the information society presents librarians and the library with occasions to define themselves in new ways. It is affecting how they view themselves, their mission and values, their processes of training professionals, and their ideas about information access, preservation and organization. How they are responding to these changes are as complex as the changes themselves, and are but briefly treated below.
In her paper presented at the fifth Australian Library and Information Association Biennial Conference, Mairéad Browne proposed that shared values, and not professional qualifications, should unite members of the ALIA. She affirms the reality of the information society’s impact on libraries and the historical role of the librarian as mediator, observing that “the shift in the nature of information resource and the means of access now available makes it clear that for much of the use of resources our mediation role is not needed – or perceived to be needed” (23-24). Perception is key: even librarians themselves sometimes do not see how their skills are relevant in the information society. Browne suggests that librarians need to adopt an amended set of values that recognizes both the historic value of the library as an institution and the new role of the institution and the profession in the information society. These values should include a commitment to ensure “access, security and freedom of information, […] the preservation of personal rights, […] the protection of the public’s right to know, […] the preservation of worthy information” (29-30). We should also value the protection of the public in view of commercial interests in information, the security and secrecy of certain types of information, and the concept of intellectual property. According to Browne, “all information workers take a position on these values” and they can thus unite “people with common interests […] as we move further into the information society” (30).
Browne’s proposal may seem, as she herself describes it, “radical,” but it is not dissimilar to aspects of the library’s historical mission as described by Richard Rubin (31). Rubin writes that the mission of a library traditionally has included the preservation of materials of a certain type, the public use of information resources (although the definition of “public” has changed periodically), as well as outreach programs to promote the growth and development of a certain community (this community may be the general public itself or a particular group of scholars in a particular field of research and debate). The core concepts of document preservation, public access to resources, and contribution to community development remain the same: only the ways in which libraries and librarians apply these concepts are changing, just as Browne maintains that values remain and only applications of these values evolve. Whereas once librarians may have had to protect countless physical manuscripts from destruction, they may now try to protect the intellectual content of works, and access to these works; where they once strove to serve a particular group of people in a geographic area, they are now adapting to larger “groups” not necessarily bound by geographical limits. Perhaps most importantly, where concern was once for libraries to contain as many physical items (and therefore as much information) as possible, the sheer volume of available information (not always in print sources in a physical location) in modern society calls for librarians to be the ones to discern what kinds of information are valuable and where such information can be found.
The core values of the librarian and of the library itself have not changed as much as it may seem, then; rather, the changes are in the way these values are adapted to daily life in modern society. In this changing environment, the training needed to prepare library and information professionals must also necessarily adapt. As Nancy Van House and Stuart A. Sutton explain in their article, “The Panda Syndrome: An Ecology of LIS Education”, the field of Library and Information Studies education “is operating in an extremely dynamic and highly competitive environment” (140). As the professional opportunities for librarians develop, LIS education must similarly develop to prepare its graduates for the fields in which they might find themselves. If it does not, if it fails to adapt to a changing world, Van House and Sutton predict it will become essentially extinct, no longer relevant in a world in which information professionals are needed to perform a variety of jobs for which traditional library education cannot prepare them.
Many scholars and experts are proposing various changes to adapt the library and information studies field to the reality of the world for which it prepares its graduates. Numerous LIS schools across North America are exploring different options for LIS programs, including streams of specialized study, information technology courses, and management, business, and education applications. As these changes proliferate, they raise the larger question of where the LIS discipline belongs in the academic world. One option is to move towards identifying LIS schools as professional programs and away from identifying them as part of an academic discipline. C. D. Hurt argues that LIS schools and business schools could ally themselves for mutual benefit; alternatively, he also maintains “library science has a bright future in academia, but only if the opportunity to articulate its place in the university or college is not squandered” (180). In my opinion, there is no harm in exploring these and other options: individual schools can define themselves as they feel appropriate. At McGill, for instance, LIS falls under the Faculty of Education. This is one option, and it is an option that works for us. Increasingly, “the distinction between the library and the classroom may […] become obstructive, and may need finally to be minimized or even removed”, as Ross Atkinson points out (11). Different focuses may work for different library schools in different cities and countries. The most important change for LIS education, then, is to focus on teaching skills for a more diverse professional experience. Where LIS education belongs in the academic world is possibly a moot point: what is important is that each LIS school focuses on subjects and applications that will help it serve the community of which it is a part.
The information society is also affecting how libraries are responding to their users’ information needs. Specifically, it is affecting librarians’ ideas about such things as information access, control, organization, preservation, and usefulness. Writes Christine Borgman, “the present challenge is to support the social goals of democratic societies in a new technological environment for communication” (170). Libraries are far from immaterial in modern society; rather, they have a unique ability to protect the public’s access to information resources, to retrieve specific kinds for specific needs, and preserve valuable historical information for future generations. North America may seem to be the ultimate democratic environment where everyone has equal access to resources, but this is not always an accurate description of the world as a whole, or even of North America itself. During our group discussions for this class, for instance, I learned that users of a public library in Shanghai might be charged upwards of 200 Canadian dollars for the answer to a reference question, or for the use of a reference book. Borgman points out how “as knowledge becomes a form of capital, principles of open access to information in democratic societies also are being challenged” (207). This is one of the areas in which modern libraries can distinguish themselves: in a world where wealth is distributed unfairly, and even the most “advanced” societies disallow or restrict access to certain types of information, libraries, especially public libraries, can help ensure access to information. Libraries therefore continue their historical role as educators and preservationists of culture. While access to library resources may once have been a privilege restricted to scholars, Roman citizens, religious clerics, whites, or any other dominant group in society, libraries are now uniquely able to extend their resources to all cultures and nations. Moreover, in the free, universal, but disorganized environment of the World Wide Web, librarians are needed more than ever to sift through millions of pages of information (clogged by big-business alliances and paid advertising) and retrieve that which is relevant. A library’s role may thus be less that of an information provider and more of, as José-Marie Griffiths terms it, an “information interpreter” (27).
As we have seen, the role of the library in the information society is complex. Libraries will always, in my opinion, continue to function in ways that reflect the core values of the library profession: as librarians, we will continue to educate, inform, instruct and nurture the societies that our libraries are a part of. As these societies develop in the information age, the ways in which we pursue our values will develop as well. Librarians – and libraries – will remain important as long as we try, as we are now trying, to incorporate the benefits of life in the information society into our long history of service to civilization. Tefko Saracevic suggests to information science professionals that their greatest success will be if they can “integrate systems and user research and applications” (1062). Libraries are in a perfect position in the twenty-first century to guide and facilitate this integration; in doing so, we can begin to remind the world how important library and information services are in all their forms, regardless, and sometimes precisely because of, the changing times.
Works Cited
Atkinson, Ross. “Contingency and contradiction: the place(s) of the library at the dawn of
the new millennium.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and
Technology 52.1 (2001): 3-11.
Borgman, Christine L. “Whither, or Wither, Libraries?” From Gutenberg to the Global
Information Infrastructure: Access to Information in the Networked World. Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 2000. 169-208.
Browne, Mairéad. “Threat or promise? The information society and the information
professions.” Australian Library Journal 48.1 (1999): 17-32.
Griffiths, José-Marie. “Back to the future: information science for the new millennium.”
Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science 26.4 (2000): 24-27.
Hurt, C. D. “The future of library science in higher education: a crossroads for library
science and librarianship.” Advances in Librarianship 16 (1992): 153-181.
Rubin, Richard E. “From Past to Present: The Library’s Mission and its Values.”
Foundations of Library and Information Science. New York: Neal-Schuman, 1998.
207-264.
Saracevic, Tefko. “Information Science.” Journal of the American Society for
Information Science. 50.12 (1999): 1051-1063.
Van House, Nancy and Stuart A. Sutton. “The panda syndrome: an ecology of LIS
education.” Journal of Education for Library and Information Science 37.2 (1996):
131-147.
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