Articles written for the old Library Leadership Network by Dr. Glen Holt

Content, Convenience and Cost in Research Source Use

Originally appeared September 2006

North Carolina library information technology specialist Andrew Pace’s “Hectic Pace” is always fun to read. His August 29, 2006, posting starts with a Seoul, Korea, IFLA conference quote from Sungdae Ahn, vice president and general manager of EBSCO Information Services-Korea, who reportedly said, “Service, not content, is the new king.”

Pace questions the validity of the assertion. I’ll go Pace’s gentle response one or two better. Ahn’s quote for me presents a false dichotomy, because it suggests that either undefined “content” or the even more nebulous “service” is the ruling mantra in what sources researchers use.

Categorizing any aspect of library use as a duality nearly always confuses the issue more than it helps. Duality suggests that library use is like switching people on and off. Actually, individuals use and don’t use libraries for all kinds of reasons.

Like lots of other professional writers and researchers, I define my reasons for using any library or any private-sector data source in different terms. At the very least, my quick decision about what to do next in my research involves explicit and implicit thoughts about content, convenience and cost. To hold and win users, reference librarians need to consider how researchers define and redefine this triad of issues.

Content Still Matters

We can start thinking about these issues by considering Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who has spent billions of dollars buying and capturing content. To paraphrase the Microsoft position which has been aboard as a philosophy for at least a decade, “When all else is gone, content is king!” True to this premise, in 1989, Gates founded Corbis, which now owns or holds reproduction rights to 11,000,000 images. Corbis is a for-profit company. In the last holiday season, I received two different art museum CD disks that had the Corbis copyright all over them. Meanwhile, nearly every week, Microsoft business developers make another deal to partner with or capture innovative searching software in all kinds of information categories.

Next, consider Google. The point of Google’s billion-dollar scanning project is to control--or at least direct--user pathways to content. Google already has graciously put out the word that all of us Net users can have free access to their horde of out-of-copyright items through the Google browser. The strategy makes sense: It draws searchers to Google, who see and may buy products advertised on Google and who during their visits will become familiar with Google’s access for-a-fee databases.

Or, we can look at the example of Ahn’s own company, EBSCO, which Pace mentions in his rejoinder to Ahn. EBSCO’S incredibly successful NoveList and its newer but becoming-successful product, NextReads, both are examples of the triumph of content. The company introduced both products into the popular reading market that drives library circulation statistics. Duncan Smith, the founder of both companies, and his friends and colleagues, recognized that there was a huge “latent demand” for the kinds of popular-book information furnished by these two products. At the same time, anyone who has used NoveList and NextReads recognizes that part of their advantage is the ease of their use and the fact that they are free through many local or state libraries.

So, we who have watched over content for generations can act like it still is king. We all need content, whether we know it or not. And, as the Microsoft, Google and EBSCO examples show, convenience is a very big deal as well. So, as radio news analyst and octogenarian Paul Harvey reminds us six days a week, “Here’s the rest of the story.”

Service and Control

That story begins in the recent past, in a time when libraries and librarians had so much control over content that they could use it like a weapon. I was one of the users who experienced those bad old days.

I remember well at age eleven being thrown out of the “adult library floor” in my home town Carnegie library because what I regarded as my very-serious-research-question about a Guy de Maupassant story was not serious enough to merit an “adult” answer, much less a look at the story, though I knew where the author’s complete works were shelved, having snuck to the adult floor previously to read from the author’s collected works.

Or, of being tossed out of a middle-school library because I wanted a book on Darwin so I could go to war with my Sunday School teacher.

Or, as a college sophomore fighting with a librarian to get into the stacks of my college library to do research on Nikita Khruschev, because only “upper classmen” were allowed to do “serious research” in the stacks. That rebuff resulted in my driving to a nearby state university where the librarians were incredibly eager to share their collections, not limit access to them.

Today, even as a pre-teen kid hacker using tied-down public-library Internet sites, I could find my way to Guy de Maupassant stories or Charles Darwin’s theory or news analysis about how Nikita Khruschev’s rivals died or disappeared mysteriously as he rose to power– -not in a library but on the Internet. The Internet is a swampland of facts, lies, valid information and stuff so lame that you hope that person creating it doesn’t drive to work, much less vote in the next election. But mixed in amid all the chaff are lots of content grains, sometimes offered for a fee and for free on different websites.

Complicating the issues of getting useful content are those publishers and publication/information vendors who profess to make life “easier” for us by allowing us entry to content flows through copyright, subscriptions and variable item pricing. Library vendors are among these. They organize varying content arrays for children, adults and businesses in many venues--clothed as fun, education, crafts and/or meeting other specialized research needs of various types. What these electronic data bases prove is that only a few individuals and companies have any idea how to make money in the new electronic environment without operating some kind of good old-fashioned monopoly.

Some content vendors have succeeded. Highbeam, Elsevier and EBSCO, to name only a few have been early to enter “latent markets” of content demand, Many others are still struggling; they show up at one ALA convention with one idea and one database and will never be heard from again.

Libraries already have been affected by the liberation of content away from printed collections and outside libraries. The drama of drastic changes in content research and in librarians’ lives is all around us.

The “special libraries” at Southwestern Bell-St. Louis (now ATT), McDonnell Douglas Aerospace (now Boeing) and Union Electric (Now Ameran UE) all are gone, with the current companies now mostly using contract information services along with a company archivist and/or a legal assistant to keep their patents straight and financial records in compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley.

In two other information-focused businesses, law libraries and medical libraries filled with old litigation records and old paper-published research, gather dust as researchers use their personal laptops to explore content in Lexis-Nexis, WestLaw, MedLine and hundreds of free medical and health information sites.

Meanwhile, a savvy young computer literate finishes high school and goes off to become a college freshman with her laptop browser already bookmarked to term-paper, college-course reading and research sites. Late-night walks through large university libraries often provide scenes of mostly empty reading rooms with a few students sleeping here and there because it’s quieter than in the dorms, minimal staffing or no staffing at reference desks, coffee addicts having their last caffeine fix in the library eatery, and rooms full of students using on-site computers to get free or cheap content and higher speed browsing and downloading than they have on computers in their homes and offices.

Beyond that, the professional staff in big public libraries watch as their staple corporate, art, law, medical, personal investment, travel and genealogical researchers check out a few new books to learn the synonyms and search terms on subjects they are just getting started on, so they will be prepared for their next stop on the Net to make use of free information sites and to quickly track down specific bits of information for which they willingly pay fees.

As a result, even as customer demand for lots of old “core” public library reference help declines, patrons ask for more esoteric information because their Net research takes them to dead ends for which they have no search strategy for finding what they need. Typically, therefore, the number of repetitive or at least similar “easy” reference questions declines even as most of the fewer reference questions get “harder.” Then library administrators are faced with declining reference numbers even as reference staff need more training to keep up with their users.

What all this means is that we in the library community must stop finding remarkable the supposed war over whether “service” or “content” is the “killer app.”

Content, Convenience and Cost

Content and service are not locked in a duel to become “the ultimate fighter.” Instead we need to recognize that we work with a triad of factors--content, convenient access and cost--that play out in myriad individual ways. And, what makes now different from the past is that researchers have access to more sources of information, each with different search strategies, and each with different costs whether in personal time or out-of-pocket fees.

I am a good example of that kind of user. I am a professional researcher and writer who happens to be a former library director who, as well as anyone, knows the strengths and weaknesses of the libraries in my community. I live less than a block from a major branch library of my city system and I live less than two miles from the libraries of two major research universities. And, I pay yearly fees for access to three different electronic databases each of which I use frequently.

I do virtual research almost every day at one or more of these sites. When I do leave my desk to do something connected with my research, it usually is to go to the library to pick up a book or a journal article not available electronically. To put the matter another way, when I have a research question, I decide which of my five virtual sites to access, judging where I will make the fastest and easiest find of the information I want or need. I already have made the more important judgment about cost. I have decided that I make better use of my time to research virtually at my desk rather than to take the time to go to any of the near-by physical libraries. In short, I pay some fees (cost) to save time, which I value highly.

Is that a bad economic bargain? I don’t think so. And neither do hundreds of thousands of other researchers who once depended on paper collections held almost entirely by libraries. We have made implicit or explicit decisions that send us to our virtual databases instead of using our time to make visits to our university, special, public (and increasingly school) libraries. The future of libraries is about the same issues as the future of all information companies and information products on the Internet. The future of libraries is about content and convenience and cost.

When library administrations and librarians, especially reference librarians, think about their future, they need to recognize that “access to content” alone guarantees no future use. And that much-articulated mantras about “service” are meaningless until they involve the conduct of specific individual transactions between a library and those who are willing to use it. When content is available in multiple ways, then personal convenience and individual cost, calculated implicitly or explicitly, determine which source a researcher will use.

When it comes time to think about how to set up or improve our libraries’ “virtual branch,” or just our “online presence,” we need to recognize that for many professional researchers and full-time students, our libraries are just another possible stop on the Internet. Some people will use the library site if the content is what is wanted, the access is convenient, and the time and/or out-of-pocket cost makes sense for the searcher.

Yes, library colleagues, there is competition out there. And we need to deal with that on-going and ever-changing reality.

Digital Preservation's Impact on Libraries and Librarians

Originally published January 2008

During the radical protests of the 1960s, Stokely Charmichael (Black Panthers), Tom Hayden (Students for a Democratic Society) and Martin Luther King (civil rights sit ins and marches) agreed on at least one point: The way to start changing people’s minds was to change their behavior. Each leader found a way to use public protest to make people behave differently.

John Budd, in his new book, Self-Examination: the Present and Future of Librarianship (Libraries Unlimited, 2008) makes the same point about librarians. Over and over again, he shows how librarians changed their minds as they changed their behavior. In the process, they evolved newer and different versions of what most professionals continue to call librarianship.

This article is about one set of behavior/belief changes that have come to the library profession, those associated with digital preservation. Once again, changes in behavior are shifting professional thinking.

Defining Digital Preservation

At the outset, let me be clear about definitions. I am using the word “digital” with its dictionary purity, i.e., “processing, storing, transmitting, representing or displaying data in the form of numerical digits, as in a digital computer.” I am using the word “preservation” as the guarding or maintenance of a document or object of value in an unchanged condition free from danger, harm or injury. This latter phrasing is an amalgam of the first and second definitions of the word in the Encarta Dictionary.

The premise of this article is that library work routines have shifted as preservation of both paper-based documents and material-culture-based objects has come to be dominated by digital media. Television changed not only how people communicated but also the content of what they said. As we have begun to build high speed, interactive, digital communication into our lives, this kind of change has occurred again. Witness text messaging, which uses orally-based spellings and old symbols to shorten and thereby hasten the sending and receiving of individualized text messages.

Marshall McLuhan’s “the medium is the message” probably evidences too much hyperbole to describe digital culture’s impact on library science.^[1] For purposes of this paper, Neil Postman’s now quarter-century old charge that “typography moves to the periphery of our culture” because of television (Postman, 29) suggests just how powerful electronic communication is on print culture and those who work with it.^[2]

Certainly the impact that Postman suggests can already be seen in the way digital culture has affected library work culture. The shift to digital preservation already has changed the way librarians regard original documents, objects and knowledge transmission. We should try to understand the implications of these changes and adjust our professional work rationale and routines to catch up with how we behave in our work with digital culture.

Digital Culture Democratizes Specialized and Scarce Information

Before digitization, preservation--whether of archives, rare books or objects--always focused on saving and protecting “the one” and sometimes “the only one” of a particular thing. Saving and keeping the item secure took precedence over getting (accessing) whatever information could be obtained from looking at it or reading it. The Shroud of Turin or the US Declaration of Independence, for example, were sealed away, almost never handled by their keepers, and protected even from qualified researchers much less visitors who might accidentally breathe on them.

Digitization reduced the value of the saved original. It brought about that reduction by democratizing specialized knowledge, distributing it digitally into not just museum and library culture but popular culture as well. My 12-year-old grand-daughter’s History Fair paper last year, researched almost entirely via the Internet, had a dozen digital images of documents and artifacts connected with New York City’s Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of 1911. Had I done the research, even as a young professor in the 1970s, the same “finds” would have taken me weeks to run down, get copies made and obtain permissions for use. This kind of access to information previously looked up in little used archives or old books in specialized research libraries, is the real boon of digital culture. Huge amounts of specialized information have been democratized through digitization.

Because so much specialized information is easily found and downloaded in digital formats, it has bred new access businesses. Ancestry.com is one example. I took out a subscription for one year and identified and found reliable basic information on over 90% of the relatives which are now included as branches and leaves on our family tree--without going to any library or even touching any paper documents except our trove of family papers.

Librarians, archivists and curators have distributed so much digital information on the Internet that the first question I always ask when a new reference book arrives for review is “Would I use Internet sources first before I would buy this book or go to a library to use it?” In most cases the answer is yes. That recognition changes the value I--and others--place on that book. One example is City Profiles USA 2006—2007: A Traveler’s Guide to Major U.S. and Canadian Cities, one of Omnigraphics’ offerings to the library reference world. Because of the high error rate in such volumes and how quickly their data ages, in my review I encouraged librarians to question whether investing in this book was a good buy for their particular reference collections.

Some reference book publishers are hedging against this kind of thinking. Neal-Schuman, for example, in 2007 issued Rosalind Farnam Dudden’s 460-page Using Benchmarking, Needs Assessment, Quality Improvement, Outcome Measurement and Library Standards. Inside the back cover of Dudden’s book is a CD that contains all of the worksheets which are printed in the book. If you don’t like those worksheets, you can go to any number of authoritative Web sites and download the same material types in numerous configurations--both with and without fees.

Librarians can predict the implications of this digital trend. The US is a nation where the freedom to “do it yourself” is exercised almost as frequently as the constitutionally guaranteed right to criticize government offices and officers. The “stuff” on the Internet allows many different types of individuals and groups to do their own “research,” no matter what the subject. The continued expansion and refinement of digital culture is going to increase pressure on librarians to organize and publicize information about their treasure troves in generally accessible digital format. That is, it’s going to push librarians to democratize their specialized collections by making them accessible virtually.

Digital Preservation Discounts the Value of the Original

Most library and museum professionals make an effort to upscale information about an original before electronic publication. That may mean taking new measurements, including detailed chemical analysis, carbon dating or other tests for authenticity. It means researching the context to increase the original’s intrinsic value. It means checking the holdings of other research institutions to compare “originals."

That research effort, recorded appropriately, allows more people to know more about an original than they would if they simply viewed it. An example is the British Crown Jewels. Anyone who has personally visited the Crown Jewels in the Jewel House at the Tower of London and undertaken internet research on the jewels knows how little there is to learn by looking at them. The Jewel House visitors are given almost entirely to oohs and aahs and questions like “Did Princess Diana ever wear any of these?” For those of us who like to read museum labels, the experience of seeing the original jewels comes across more as a tourist experience than a learning experience.

In other words, our reliance on digital culture allows us to discount the original because all the information we need about that original is disseminated so broadly that it is judged always easily accessible to anyone with a high speed networked computer. It still matters that the original exists, but it may matter less because the original is so well documented in such a democratic way.

In discounting the value of the original, we are thinking rationally. If the original document or object is destroyed, we still have every speck of information about it that was available up to the moment of its destruction in easily accessible digital form.

The impact of this discounting on the organization that holds the original is not always clear. Knowledge about a rare thing does not necessarily lead to the desire to help save it. Historic preservation documentation efforts, art and document originals, even whole species of plants and animals, do not seem to be much better off even as our ability to learn about them digitally increases exponentially. The owning organization still has to make a solid case for the conservation and preservation of the original be it building, document, painting or common object.

Decades ago, Daniel Boorstin analyzed American preference for the “pseudo-event" rather than the actuality itself. In The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1964), he wrote that Americans had come to prefer the “contrivance” of pseudo-cultures such as television’s view of “The American West” more than experiencing the realities of traveling in the actual West.

Small museums and libraries encounter this problem all the time. The Tom Mix Museum in Dewey, Oklahoma is one such place. As an “affiliate museum” with the Oklahoma Historical Society, It struggles to exist to show “original” items from Mix‘s personal memorabilia. Meanwhile, the multi-billion-dollar fabricated cowboy movie-and-TV-show culture is built atop the foundation of the 336 movies that the Western star made before his death in 1940.

Libraries that own important or rare documents and art need to be careful about how they protect their ownership of the original and its reputation as well. “Exposing the collections digitally” has both a positive and a negative side. Wide knowledge about a library’s rare or special-collections item may well demonstrate its lesser value rather than enhance its reputation.

Digital Culture Makes Dreck More Obvious

The third impact of digital culture is that it makes dreck--worthless trashy stuff--more readily apparent on the net and in our own libraries.

In archives, it is a recognized policy that many, even most, archival collections ought to be weeded at least every generation and, in the case of larger, newer collections, usually more often. That re-weeding concept is based on the honest acknowledgment that not all of the past is worth saving. Certainly dreckish stuff is not worth saving everywhere, i.e. at every institution where it is possible to save it.

At what point, for example, do huge business papers collections need to be weeded - and then weeded again? Newberry Library’s Railroad Archives Collection, for example, includes 1,000 cubic feet of records of the Illinois Central Railroad and 5,000 cubic feet of the records of the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad. Holding collections of this size no longer requires an archive but a warehouse--or a few former refrigerator cars, which is what is used to hold the massive paper collections of the St. Louis Terminal Railroad Association at the National Museum of Transport in St. Louis.

How many more detailed historical studies do we need on the 19th century history of the IC and the CB&Q? Such questions about original paper collections need to be asked and answered with the word value broadly and sternly defined to sort out which originals ought to be saved.

If you don’t agree that lots of business collections ought to be weeded, would you agree that lots of hard copies of old, never called upon mediocre fiction books, old history books, old math books, held in collections throughout the US as demonstrated by the endless ownership lists in WorldCat, should be weeded?

Digital culture makes it possible for most public libraries and a great number of university libraries with only limited research collections to set the absolute physical limits of the amount of shelf space they are willing to give to paper-based books and bound periodicals. To restate what will become a ruling maxim of 21st century librarianship, “Access is more important than ownership.”

A surprisingly up-to-date job of pointing out the relative nature of access and ownership occurs in UK library consultant Maurice B Line’s 1995 IFLA paper, Access versus Ownership: How Real an Alternative Is It?. Line’s abstract reads:

The assumption that access is to be preferred to ownership as a matter of policy needs to be questioned. Browsing and serendipity are lost in the access model. Access is better for periodicals than for monographs on the criteria of speed of supply, reliability and ease of use, but for both it is generally inferior to on-the-spot access. If cost were the only criterion, the current relative costs of access and ownership, which favour access, may change substantially as and when access becomes electronic. Alternative forms of control and publication of research material have advantages and disadvantages. Ownership has limits: it can never approach comprehensiveness. Ownership of and exposure to a wide range of current material should be combined with access to older material. A strong case could be made for larger acquisition funds in view of the coming emphasis on self-directed learning.

I intentionally began with the negative image of dreck because my own research experience has been climbing through piles of old books to get at what I have been interested in researching. Line’s admonitions about browsing and serendipity are still important. However, these capabilities are different but much broader with electronic cataloging than we ever gained through endless stack-searching in the nation’s and world’s collections.

 Access and (not or) Ownership

Access and ownership are not a dichotomy. They have to be balanced. The current issue in maintaining this collection balance is the knowledge and intentionality of collection managers. What to buy? What to rent? (Subscription electronic database access is rented, not owned.) These are the questions that library professionals have to ask before they spend their limited funds.

In asking such questions, librarians need to be aware that at least one scholar believes the wave of the whole capitalist future is renting rather than owning. Jeremy Rifkin, in his The Age of Access: How the Shift from Ownership to Access Is Transforming Capitalism (2000), forecasts that renting will replace ownership in most areas of our lives, including both the public and private sector. While Rifkin was accused of being short on evidence at the book's publication, the commodification of banking (money), homes (leasing), autos (leasing) since the book’s publication seems to support Rifkin’s argument. In 1996, Bruce Kingma provided much the same kind of vision for the library profession. It was only a matter of time until rental (access) would dominate library holdings.

What to Weed?

Because of its history, the Owning-Rental Collections Spectrum has an additional dimension. That is, what to weed? And, related to this, what to do with items our libraries do not need to hold any more?

Book collecting, cataloging, processing, accessing, and checking out are expensive. But the “albatross expense” of old collections is more long lasting. The functions of campus and public libraries are changing. As homes and apartments (and families) grow smaller, students and researchers of every kind are looking for places to study, to hang out, to eat and to meet and to socialize. Lots and lots of users want to start their work--or carry on their library work--using high-speed Internet computers before turning to books, journals, magazines and archives. Storage is space intensive, which is building intensive, which is capital intensive, and, unless appropriately shelved within a digital storage system, often labor-intensive as well. Where will the space for the new functionality come from? Either from new building or refurbishment and repurposing of the old. The hunt for things to throw away is on.

These realities mean that librarians need to spend a great deal of time on collection planning, which includes collection assessment within their constantly updated collection development policies to eliminate from their collections what they should not take responsibility for saving or providing access to. There is a big difference between a library collection’s “crown jewels” and its accidental or antithetical oddments, its expensive albatross of old books.

While some items in a library ought to be elevated to the rank of institutional treasures, other items need to be in the repositories of other libraries, archives or museums. Many others need to be discarded. The new intellectual need for library professionals is to think and to plan how best to deliver access to information and knowledge to current and future users within budget. That, for most, library professionals should mean more attention to collections management within definable limits and with rental--including borrowing from others--as a desirable option.

Digital Culture Encourages the Preservation of More Originals

“Oh, we ought to digitize that!” stated emphatically by a bibliographer, curator or bibliophile is an observation we hear increasingly in the profession. “Oh, we ought to preserve all Internet sites!” These two quotes suggest the new easy entitlement of digital preservation, i.e. we most preserve as much of our own present as we can so our own past does not get ahead of us.

This trend can be seen first in the digitization project of the work of librarians working on the Missouri Valley Special Collections of the Kansas City Public Library. No one can dispute the careful professional work which is evidenced in this collection’s website as KCPL librarians and technologists have used digitization to enhance the knowledge and easy access of their regional and local history collections. Paper originals are being preserved either because of the inherent problems of digitizing or calculated decisions about the value of the original (e.g. photograph or document) that may be derived from future study. Meanwhile, the library’s rich collections and availability are broadcast across the net. Here, then, is a case of balancing paper preservation as digitization takes place.

A different kind of digital preservation is seen in the work of Brewster Kahle, co-founder of the Internet Archive. In 1996, Kahle began taking web snapshots. At the time the whole web, according to his estimate, amounted to only 1.5 terabytes, and his preservation tool was magnetic tape.^[3]

Following up on that beginning has involved huge collection growth, according to Wikipedia:

As of 2006 the Wayback Machine [the digital snapshot recording mechanism of the Digital Archive], contained almost 2 petabytes of data and was growing at a rate of 20 terabytes per month, a two-thirds increase over the 12 terabytes/month growth rate reported in 2003. Its growth rate eclipses the amount of text contained in the world's largest libraries, including the Library of Congress. The data is stored on Petabox rack systems manufactured by Capricorn Technologies.

These two cases suggest that digital culture has changed the rules about what originals ought to be preserved by creating digital records. Even the most careful of archivists, even the most anti-technologist among them, would have to admit that we ought to think carefully about how much of the present we should save as either legal or historical records, including digital preservation.

The old adage “less is more” comes to mind as a mantra that might fit our new preservation situation, especially when we look at the scale of what is here now and what is to come in preservation for the maws of the Wayback machine. Weeding before, during and after initial weeding, is a good thing, not only for paper but for digital archives as well.

Implications of the Impact of Digital Culture on Libraries

Taken together, these digital culture trends suggest both dangers and opportunities for libraries.

Digital Culture Makes History, Especially Recent History, Easier to Manipulate

There were frauds, lies and gossip long before the Internet. Digital culture only enhances these opportunities. Library professionals are going to have to decide what to do about these machinations.

Lazy reporters looking for a story edge have turned to blogs, with all of their whimsy, emotional dumping and vendettas. Librarians will have to sort out or develop professional methods to measure these sources which have far less documentable authenticity than news videos and radio interviews instigated by named reporters.

On the other end of the spectrum the dangers of corporate propaganda in the information marketplace offers another manipulative danger. Harrison Ford’s trials as the doctor accused of murdering his wife in the movie The Fugitive (1993) highlights this danger. The wife, in fact, was murdered as an incidental part of a conspiracy involving a pharmaceutical company and some rigged safety trials.

The current global warming debate--with its charges and claims back and forth about ethanol, butanyl, solar power, wind power, national politics, international politics and “peaked big oil production”--makes a strange bedfellow when any high school kid asks a reference librarian for help in getting starting on what is posed as a “simple” research paper.

Old professional canons about “searching for truth” or “presenting both sides” appear about as relevant as copyright law for library professionals trying to make their way through the information swamplands looking for legitimate sources of environmental information.

Digital Culture Allows Libraries, Archives and Museums to Share Professional Expertise

Libraries are not nearly as far along in sharing professional expertise as they might be. Why, for example, does the library turn its back on legitimate kinds of expertise in their own communities even though such persons do not have library degrees?

One example. The largest Midwest collection of printed materials on all aspects of wine and gourmet cooking I have ever seen (tens of thousands of items) was in the home of the CEO of a self-owned manufacturing company. By day (on most days), he worked to effectively run his company. The remainder of the time, he was on the phone and then the internet, talking with other experts and other collectors. People who learned his name called him from all over the world to ask questions only an expert could answer. But, just before he passed away, he remarked, “So far as I know, I never got a call from a library. I guess I just wasn’t an acceptable source.”

Or, what should we do when we know from looking at the Internet that the most expert library reference person on a particular question is in another library, in another state or another nation? In today’s digital culture, what defines the edges of where we should look for specialized information?

This question seems important because of the substantial number of entrepreneurial companies that promise to provide all kinds of specialized reference help via phone or Internet for a fee. As we share more and more of our information and reading resources in various places throughout the globe, how will that affect staffing decisions about hiring and retaining a reference librarian with this bibliographic specialty or that particular type of reference expertise?

This question will become more relevant as library vendors decide to add value to their database distribution services. Medicine and law probably will lead the way as these professions do in so many information assessment, access and distribution areas. If we follow the reference leads of these professions, we might expect the emergence within the library and information professions of well-defined pools of knowledgeable bibliographic and reference experts who serve many different libraries with the ability to answer referral of hard questions that only a few persons in the world can handle. Such specialty reference pools have already sprung up on the internet. We should probably expect to see some of these develop among library professionals.

These observations are another way of saying that libraries that share database information likely will move to sharing expensive expertise that no single institution can afford. In other words, the staff configurations of many libraries will change even more dramatically than some of those already out in front on these collaborative issues.

Where to Learn More

We do not have to go far to find the ideas in this article expressed in library source material. Our colleagues at the University of Illinois who edit Library Trends have paid a great deal of attention to digital culture and its impact on libraries. Most recently, such a compilation appeared in Summer 2007 when LT brought out its most recent issue on digital preservation. The LT’s electronic searching capability makes it easy to find previous issues that deal with similar issues, each in its own time, with experts trying to cope with the meaning of the new digital culture for their libraries.

This rich Summer 2007 issue opens with a thoughtful and provocative article by Ingrid Mason entitled “Virtual preservation: how has digital culture influenced our ideas about permanence? Changing practice in a national legal deposit library.” The article’s messages, written by a staff member from the National Library of New Zealand, are only one set of thoughtful digital preservation practices that US library professionals would do well to examine.

Digital culture costs a lot, offers a lot of new opportunities and creates ever-changing issues about what ought to be saved, how it ought to be saved, and how best to ensure easy use in the ubiquitous virtual world of inquiry and scholarship. The growth of digital culture is one of the leading trends of our own time. The ways that library professionals handle the issues raised by that innovative, ever-changing culture, I believe, will affect the significance of librarianship for many decades to come.

Endnotes

1. ↑ Marshall McLuhan. The Medium is the Message. (Orig. ed., 1967; Ginkgo Press, new ed., 2005).
2. ↑ Neil Postman. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. (Orig. ed, 1985; Penguin 20th anniversary edition, 2005). p. 29
3. ↑ Bill Barnes, "Nothing but net: Preserving the internet, 1 terabyte at a time." Slate (February 28, 1997). Downloaded on January 14, 2008.

Envisioning a Smart Library?

Originally published May 2006

I was talking with an MD friend this week, and he told me about a recent speech he had heard on “smart hospitals.” It turns out that medical folks are well along in trying to figure out what intelligent communication and computing capabilities new hospitals ought to have to deliver quality patient care at the lowest optimal costs. Not only are people thinking about them, but other people are building them. To use that old cliché phrase, someday soon somebody is going to open “the smart hospital of tomorrow--today!”

Internet and “real print” publications suggest that the characteristics of the smart hospital are pretty neat: They will include single and double rooms in which electronic monitors installed in the walls (or in wireless satellites above) take all mechanical readings of all body functions on any patient and transfer it to wireless monitors at nurses stations, cell pagers/phones of busy staff and to a specialized consultant thousands of miles away. Moreover, the hospital’s data center will be hooked up via wireless cell devices to implanted monitors on patients going about their lives anywhere in North America. And, of course, this communication is two-way, with doctors connected via the hospital data center having the capability to change the pulses of pacemaker or the flow of insulin pumps in all patients who are within range of any cellular tower in the US or Canada.

Using the same principles, a nurse at a specialty medical station can change the IV dosage on a bedridden patient anywhere in a medical center or in an intermediate- or full-care nursing home. Nurses and aides who attend patients can pull up medical records on touch-screens at the foot of each patient bed. Conversely, they can update observations about patient status at the same time that “the room” is sending accurate patient data and receiving text containing questions or ordering new procedures regarding chemical dosages or procedural orders. Meanwhile, doctors performing operating-room procedures can input data as they work through voice-activated computers, while a consulting specialist in another nearby room, another hospital or another country can render opinions as the stages of the operation proceed--with pictures from the pre-operation MRI test sent from the electronic-scanning department attached.

In short, the “smart hospital” treats the facility as more than just a place for trauma care and surgery. Rather, the building with its electronic capability functions as part of a diagnostic and treatment tool, receiving, holding and sending information in ways that make the human medical team more effective and hastens and helps achieve positive patient outcomes.

If you do an initial search on Medline or just about any-first-twenty references for “smart hospital” on any mainstream browser, you’ll find that “smart hospital” features like those I described in the last paragraphs are not “somewhere over the rainbow,” but right-here, right-now subjects that doctors, nurses, patient advocates, medical administrators along with computer and information specialists are talking about or applying today in United States and Canadian hospitals.

Once you have a sense of what is happening in the literature of smart hospitals, take a look at the ALA or CLA websites or just about any first-twenty references for “smart library” on any mainstream browser, and you’ll find almost nothing worth your time in doing the search. You can find scads of discussions on why librarians became librarians, why RFID is ethically evil or ethically OK, how librarians can use machines to put books back on storage shelves or why professors should be happy with electronic catalogs and stop browsing shelves, and why books are going to be with us forever no matter what happens with technology and lots of other familiar topics related to library operations.

Here are some examples of what you find with a search for “smart library:”

• The National Institute for Social Science (NISSI), a non-profit, non-partisan institution whose mission is to invest in individuals and economies through knowledge to alleviate poverty. At the site you find clusters of resources for study on crime, urban poverty, children and families, micro-enterprise and other social welfare topics as well. A question early on the site’s pages asks, “What makes a Smart Library distinctive?” And, it answers, “Experts select the best research on a topic; Qontent (a software product) transforms the research into easily readable summaries; and Qontent connects research summaries with questions and answers.” I tried navigating the site on two different days and both time received some of those hated “404” error messages denoting inaccessible pages nearly every time I clicked for content. NISSI may have lots of smart people associated with it, but its website seems simplistic, dated, wordy, and “404-prone.”
• http://www.psz.utm.my/sla/login.asp The “PSZ Smart Library,” which turned out to be the Perpustakaan Sultanah Zanariah library at the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia. My desire to find out just how smart the library was came to an abrupt end with the first instruction: “If you are a patron, please key in your barcode and pin number to access the Smart Library Applications.” My second visit with more time was better. Then I found out that the “PSZ Smart Library” was a traditional library with digital features dressed up with a bright-sounding name.
• At http://lii.org/ the Librarians Internet Index, nothing relevant appeared. At OCLC, the same thing. At amazon.com, the same result. All of us who are heavy Internet users know how important these websites are in our professional lives, but none of the three claims to be doing anything smart. And, if you really want to be frustrated, go to amazon.com and try the “smart library” term. You’ll get “smart almost-anything,” but no “smart library.”[1]

A search for recent print articles on “smart library” found Chris Taylor’s less than one full-page “Smart Library” piece in the November 17, 2003 [(162:20), p. 68], issue of Time, which is not about libraries. Instead, it “reports on the new feature at Amazon.com which allows consumers to search the text of 120,000 books, [and] the efforts of Amazon's CEO Jeff Bezos to improve consumer access to books in order to sell more of them.”

At ALA’s website, I found listings for “smartvoting@yourlibrary and “smart ideas” that can be searched using the “smartest card.” and “Get information smart @ your library,”

Then, salvation! The Smart Libraries Newsletter, published by ALA.

SML has been in existence since December 2002, when the organization announced that “Library Systems Newsletter boasts a new name: Smart Libraries Newsletter.” The press release notes:

The publication carried its original title proudly for 22 volumes. The newsletter's mission--to provide useful, vital coverage of library technology in practice--has not changed. Over time, however, the perception and definition of "library systems" has. Just as the newsletter's focus and voice have been updated to incorporate more digital library and electronic serials information, its name has changed to indicate the authors' awareness and acknowledgment of that evolution.

Like most library directors, I read Library Systems Newsletter fairly regularly. It is one of ALA’s purest attempts at library journalism. Like its successor it reports on “technological breakthroughs, new products, governmental rulings and their impact.” LSN, now SLN, has lots of useful information in it. However, it reports on present-day developments, not on future prospects. And, unless it breaks out of its heritage, it will remain fixated on the tools that library automation companies provide, not on the tools that we will expect data, information and knowledge vendors of all kinds to provide for us in smart libraries of the future.

So, given this brief report, I ask, if there is a lot of good thinking about the library of the future, who is doing it? And, if “they” are doing it, where are “they” making it available for others to see? To hear? To tweak, annotate and participate?

What will it be like to use the smart library--in which the library building serves a constituent community as a communications center for text and pictures and any other form of data, information or knowledge that happens to be around, whether it originates in another country, another state or a nearby library?

How about smart libraries where a user who wants a book can use text messaging on a cell phone to dial up that volume at a library location and have it waiting at a will-call drive-up window or rapid delivery of the item by rapid parcel service? Or better yet, why can’t smart libraries be places that allow us to tailor-make content delivery for our own needs the way we personally want it, providing payment for more convenience by the chapter, page and paragraph.

Why can’t books be like electric drills and be pre-tagged before store delivery so that the only library processing required is placing them on shelves or kiosks so that there never is a processing backlog longer than that required to open the boxes and scan contents tags against electronic packing slips?

Why are we not trying to figure out how smart libraries can optimize user experiences--whether they want a quiet place with subdued lighting to read a book or a rowdy bunch of little kids to get really excited experiencing a great story teller. If restaurants and retailers and concert halls and stadiums can control lighting and sound to optimize the visitor experience, why do libraries have to be staid cavernous, noisy (or tomblike) places that are as unchangeable as a pyramid.

There’s more--much more--that we ought to be thinking about around the idea of what great librarians could do with really smart libraries.

I know the arguments about why we don’t need to have this discussion. I know that technological innovation is happening--in college, public, school and special libraries throughout the United States and the World. That’s great, but it is moving us forward only a piece of library at a time. And that same limitation is seen when we continue to try and fit innovations into the “hybrid library,” which, alas, is more dumb than smart, rather than asking how these same innovations are steps along the road to smart libraries.

“Where there is no vision, the people perish,” John Fitzgerald Kennedy reminded us on the eve of his assassination. The same thing, I think, can be said about institutions. I have never thought that “changing the rules on fines,” or simply “speeding things up a little” or “creating dial-up access” were about anything except trying to keep up--to tinker with the familiar--in an electronic world that gets stranger and stranger as its shoots off in new directions. While we pride ourselves on incremental change, the electronic communication and computing revolution is shattering old and recasting new marketplaces like e-Bay, new educational options through distance education, and creating personal communication venues that revolutionize the meaning of words like family and community.

We are dealing with a sea tide shift as big as the lifestyle and work style revolutions associated with industrial production, railroad and automobile transportation, and the ubiquitous data (especially pictures) communication of radio, television, videotape recorders, picture phones, and wireless. Where will libraries fit into these changes? More specifically, where do we think that “smart libraries” fit into the tidal waves sweeping over us?

And if we want to create a vision of our future libraries, who should start the discussion? Our architects? Our space planners? ALA Council? IMLS? NCLIS? OCLC? Visionary directors? Or, should we let local, state and national officials, civic leaders, information scientists, computer scientists and library vendors determine the shape and function of libraries as we move toward 2050?

Professional librarians need a vision of “smart libraries.” And that discussion needs to be more significant than the one carried on in Smart Libraries Newsletter. What should be happening in “smart libraries?” What might we become if we take a vision of “smart libraries” into our discussions to provide us continuing inspiration about what we ought to become?

[1] Editor's note: As of late 2007, phrase searches for' "smart library" or "smart libraries" yield relevant results at both Amazon and Worldcat.org.

Getting and Keeping Core Users While Moving to the Web

Originally published November 2006.

Gannett Co, Inc. is big. Its 90 US newspapers have a paid daily circulation of 7.3 million, its 23 television stations reach 20.1 million households and a Neilson audit for April 2006 showed that company websites had 23 million unique users for the month. Like libraries, Gannett is in the information business, and its usage – including newspaper readership - is growing.

Gannett newspapers weren’t always so successful. In the late 1980s, as the public’s participation in the digital culture increased, Gannett’s newspaper circulation began to fall. The company responded and reversed its newspaper fortunes.

Like libraries, Gannett is in the information and entertainment business. Independent observers regard it as successful and profitable. When Gannett succeeds, library professionals would do well to examine their success.

Gannett’s vision and mission statements address change. They follow:

• Vision:

Consumers will choose Gannett media for their news and information needs, anytime, anywhere, in any form.

• Mission:

To successfully transform Gannett to the new environment. We will provide must-have news and information on demand across all media, ever mindful of our journalistic responsibilities.

Replace “Gannett” with “Name of your library,” and perhaps do a little wordsmithing for ego’s sake, and few of our library friends would know that we borrowed our vision and mission from a large, private-sector corporation.

That’s because Gannett’s vision and mission statements address every library’s core change issue – adapting a print-based business to succeed in a digitally dominated culture.

As if taking their cue from current library rhetoric, Gannett’s big innovation was to create “reader-driven newspapers.” For Gannett, however, the change was more than rhetorical. Instead the shift became company policy.Here’s the essence of the story.

Gannett executives in 1991 announced that the company wanted all of its then 82 newspapers to move individually but within a unified strategy to hold and to increase core newspaper readers as they made the transition to Web dependence.

The cardinal elements in this strategy were put forward in a document entitled “News 2000.” That document proclaims:

Complete Community Coverage is the overall news approach to addressing effectively the convergence of print and electronic delivery of news and information to build readership. It requires a new way of thinking about readership. Readership can be gained through online as well as through the conventional sources of newspapers and other print products. As technology expands in wireless and broadband communications, we need to capture readership there, too. But while opportunities to distribute information expand, a constant remains. We know that our true franchise is local news and information. That franchise is our strength; it holds the greatest success for us. The [News 2000] program . . . emphasizes a basic goal: To build readership by being the primary source of local news and information. . . . Within that framework, each newspaper must determine its Readership Objectives. Using formal research results and informal reader input, the newspaper should determine its Key Community Interest Topics and its Readership Goals. In effect, this is the incorporation of the essence of NEWS 2000 but with expanded attention to readership-survey information and follow-up. But, to increase readership, just understanding the audience's primary interests is not enough. We need to establish and maintain fundamental Core Value principles in both print and online. Our credibility in print must carry over to credibility online, assuring that we will be distinguished from other media or media segments. Those fundamental Core Value principles, which evolved from NEWS 2000, our readership program of the last decade, and our Principles of Ethical Conduct for Newsrooms, are:

• Upholding First Amendment responsibilities.
• Reflecting and serving diverse readers.
• Providing quality journalism.
• Assuring credibility in both print and online.

With this set of Core Values in place in both print and online, we can extend our reach through both delivery systems.

To ensure that the News 2000 culture shift did not get lost in the individualistic “I’ll write what I want” reporter culture, Gannett’s executives pushed every staff member to become reader-centered. That meant actually finding out the topics that concerned and interested readers.

In its efforts to ascertain reader interests, The Washington Olympian became a poster-child for the company. One person on staff at the time summarized the extent of the effort.

At The Olympian, this [News 2000 program] meant readers were asked to send in coupons about their preferences for news coverage; editors held nine public forums (some of which were sparsely attended); three reader panels were organized in which members of the community were asked for their views about the newspaper; and reporters were sent to shopping malls and other public places to conduct surveys of readers. All in all, about 700 survey forms, ranking issues of greatest community importance, were collected. This and other material served as the basis for The Olympian's News 2000 plan, which was submitted to Gannett as were the plans from Gannett’s eighty-two other newspapers. Since then, the plan has served as a blueprint for redesigning The Olympian's news pages, restructuring the newspaper's beat system, and instituting a system of editor oversight that insures that Gannett's concept of community-based news dominates the news columns. The result . . . is a system that has broken staff members of routine habits, forced reporters to be in regular contact with readers, and made the newspaper more responsive to community interests. An example, he says, was the concern mentioned by a readers' panel about gangs and the newspaper's neglect of the topic. Oakland says that resulted in a monthly feature called Gang Watch. "Face it, you had to shake up the place," he says. "You had to essentially start from scratch."

As one Olympian journalist noted, "They've taken News 2000 to places where no reporter would want to go."

To ensure that all reportorial staff was involved in the transition to a “reader-centered culture, Gannett dictated an electronic reporting system. Here’s how one article recounts the requirements.

Reporters are expected to write memos updating their story files in the computer as often as five times a day, with additional files geared toward what they are writing for tomorrow, for the weekend, for the following week, and long-term projects. The system, complains one reporter, is run by "journalistic technocrats" who have "bought the company line" and "just want to advance." This reporter adds, "We've become functionaries. It's an absolutely oppressive system run like the Keystone Kops." In fact, the tight leash of the News 2000 program extends all the way through The Olympian's editorial offices [report] to Gannett corporate headquarters. Under the strict accountability system put in place with News 2000, editors are regularly assessed on how well they are following the News 2000 formula, their work being judged by a panel of Gannett editors and corporate officials according to a 100-point grading system. Editors, staff members say, are now under intense pressure to measure up well against their fellow editors in the chain. To do so, the editors have in turn made it clear that employees' job evaluations depend on how well they adapt to the system.

Ricardo Pimentel, editorial editor of the Milwaukee Sentinel, worked for Gannett when the company instituted the News 2000 program. He chafed at the program then. Now he is a booster. In fact, he believes that News 2000 needs an expanded set of core values. Here are the core values he adds:

• Newspapers must continue to have a handle on what readers want through constant ascertainment.
• Watchdog journalism must survive if newspapers want to serve their readers' needs.
• Connecting with the community means newspapers' pages must reflect the diversity of the communities they serve.
• The news must be presented with reader utility and ease in mind. In fact, there is a need to entertain the notion of new story forms (including those online) to accomplish this.
• Consistency means being consistently accurate, fair and balanced. It also means consistent, solid news judgment.
• Readers must have confidence that they can find things in the newspaper because they are where they are supposed to be.

But I would add to these "core values" the following: immediacy, interaction and anticipating change. I might even move them to the front of the line.

Librarians need to remember that public libraries are - like newspapers, schools, travel agents and other information-based and information-providing institutions and publications - “intermediary institutions.” The Internet has pushed intermediary institutions like and including libraries to redefine their roles and how they will serve their continuing and new customers. Many libraries of every type still need to assess how they practice core values like “immediacy, interaction and anticipating change.” Having directed a sizeable library, I am well aware of the long list of reasons that staff can articulate as to why their institutional work can’t be made more immediate, more interactive and more anticipatory. In short, there are always lots of “good reasons” for not changing.

One of the biggest of these issues is reaching out to non-users. Reading the Gannett materials to prepare this column made me aware once more of how little time and attention libraries give to this huge group of groups. At a recent conference, I heard a library staff member from New York City branch systems note that a children’s program in which she was involved was serving 65,000 children. Then she dropped the other shoe: “Of course, there’s a lot we don’t serve. The target population for the ages we’re serving is 1.1 million persons.”

Don’t think that “non-users” is not your problem, no matter what kind of library you operate. In actual numbers, my library had to accumulate 3,000 new users a month just to replace those who went away, never to be heard from again. It, therefore, was a doubly big deal when we managed to move our active user base (cards used within the last 12 months) from 37,000 to over 80,000. Winning non-users is not easy. As Gannett realizes, it takes years. Even libraries that are struggling to keep up with growth will do well to ascertain their non-user population to find out if there is a significant reading or information service that the library should organize to win new users – especially those already active members of digital communities.

So, what can we learn from the Gannett News 2000 story?

First, we can learn the importance of strategic plans and core values that will move intermediary institutions like libraries toward a continuing essential service role in their communities.

Second, we need to recognize that this strategic vision may bubble up from current staff but it is more likely to come from those charged with watching over the institutional bottom line. Scanning the environment is a constant job for real library “bosses.”

Third, the Gannett story is about service to those we serve – and to those that we ought to serve and don’t. Lots of librarians are not going to know what those issues are if they don’t spend time in school classrooms, on the streets and in the institutions that serve library users and non-users alike. When one of my youth service providers said to me in a meeting, “You have made streetwalkers out of all of us,” I regarded the claim as one of the nicest things anyone had ever said about me.

Fourth, the Gannett story was and still is about institutional (i.e. staff) resistance to change and how well or how badly leadership deals with those issues, especially in matters of monitoring change and following up with individuals when they do not change in the way that management wants them to change.

And, fifth, perhaps we can learn that it is better to change old habits than to behave like the proverbial boiling frog.

Many of you will remember the simple riddle: How do you boil a frog? Answer: Slowly. Why? Because the heat of the water gradually boils the frog from the bottom up. And, when the dumb frog realizes it is being boiled and finally makes an effort to jump out of the pot, its legs are too cooked to propel it. The frog is boiled by its own inability to respond to a changing environment that gets hotter and hotter.

Over the last couple of months, I have been able to visit libraries or talk with librarians in five different states. In the best places, the library frog already has leapt out of the cooking pot. In others, the library frog at least appears to be sensing some pain. And in some places, the lethargic library frog already appears to be half boiled but still determined to ignore the pain. Libraries can find examples of how to change outside the domain where they operate. Or, they can be boiled and eaten. The Internet presents libraries with a complex problem in which high-sounding rhetoric will not be enough. The Gannett News 2000 story provides a useful case study in how one print-based organization is dealing with the transformative digital culture.

Sources

• The Gannett website.
• The Gannett News 2000 document and statement of core values is in “Complete Community Coverage”.
• Susan Youngwood. "A Pre-Millennium Preview of Gannett’s Big Changes." Columbia Journalism Review March/April 1993.
• Doug Underwood. "The Very Model of the Reader-Driven Newsroom? How the [Washington Olympian got to the pinnacle of Gannett's News 2000 pyramid."] Columbia Journalism Review, November/December 1993.
• O. Ricardo Pimentel. "Journalism with a difference. News 2000: Gannett was right." Poynter [Institute] Online, October 2006

Reference, Resarch and Buggywhips

Originally published December 2005

Evolving cooperation is a continuing theme in library development. Consider:

• A researcher needs an article that her hometown Library A doesn’t have. She calls her friendly local librarian who calls a friend of hers in nearby Library B. That person drops off the article to her friend in Library A, who calls the customer who drives to the library to get the source. The researcher uses the time to get what is needed, is grateful for the personalized help but cares little where the article copy comes from.
• A researcher wants to read a chapter in a book that pops up during an at-home Internet search where it is suggested he check OCLC WorldCat to find out which nearby libraries hold it. WorldCat shows the book is available in Library C in another state. The researcher requests the book from his local branch Library D which orders the volume on interlibrary loan from Library C. The researcher pays a small fee for the ILL, gets what he wants, is grateful to his library for making the inexpensive ILL possible but cares little where it comes from.
• A researcher recognizes that his hometown institution, library E, does not have the magazine and newspaper databases she needs, but Library F’s website, a thousand miles away, shows that it subscribes to all the databases she needs. She purchases a library membership from library F. Going around hometown library E, the researcher gets what is needed for the price of an annual membership fee, is grateful to Library F for having purchased the rights to the databases she needs, and cares little where it comes from.
• A researcher has a question on the climatology of arid regions. She walks from her St. Louis city residence to her neighborhood branch Library G, where her favorite staff member calls the main library, which has both reference librarians and reference collections. The person handling the reference desk at the main library says, “That’s a question we can’t answer quickly or well. However, let’s check our Reference Help Listings.” Both staff pull up the list and find that Library H at a university research center in the Sonoran desert of Arizona has an arid regions bibliographer. The branch quickly calls the bibliographer who talks directly with the researcher. The bibliographer says, “That is a hard question; it will take me a few minutes to answer it. Where can I e-mail you the information?” The researcher returns home, fixes lunch and in the early afternoon her answer comes in an e-mail attachment. The researcher gets what is needed, is grateful for the personalized help from her favorite librarian but cares little where it comes from. Next time she needs expert information on desert climate, she will call the Arizona bibliographer directly--even if it means paying a fee--because that will be convenient and save time.

I write these examples to suggest that either formally or informally the multidimensional reference world of the future already is open before us. That new world, based on fast, real-time communication, is one in which place and institutional boundaries are falling. The newest piece of the question-answering picture is inter-institutional reference collaboration, where an expert in one institution in one place answers a question for a researcher in another time zone in another place, using either voice or electronic communication.

Just around the corner is another change, when database vendors--in both the for-profit and non-profit sector--offer the help of expert reference staff with the databases they vend to libraries. Those subject reference experts may be in libraries but may be independent contractors as well. For those who think it can’t happen, I point out that the persons who annotate articles for National Institutes of Health are contractors working from their own homes or offices, with quality control handled by a few professional librarians at NIH. Or look at the different roles that different librarians in many different places have played in the continuing development of EBSCO’s NoveList.

As knowledge becomes more and more specialized and electronic communication cheaper and easier, the pattern of library reference will become more formally collaborative. The main resistance now to the next stage of reference collaboration is institutional: Many libraries have not quite figured out that reference expertise is one of the easiest things to share across place and institutional boundaries. As they continue to maintain that resistance, the rest of the reference world will continue to develop new forms.

As the last of the buggy makers and the buggy-whip makers discovered, resistance, rather than adaptation to change results in being run over by a personalized vehicle that users recognize as faster and more convenient than what they offer. Let us try to make sure that library reference does not suffer the same fate as ubiquitous Internet technology casts its spell ever further over the library workplace.