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Smart Libraries – Smart Librarians! Lai Cilip Joint Conference 2010
- 1. Smart libraries – smart librarians! Peter Griffiths Immediate Past President, CILIP LAI / CILIP Ireland joint conference 2010
- 2. What are smart libraries? Libraries using smart technology? Tomorrow’s plenary sessions – Web 2.0, Information and society Libraries supporting smart initiatives? “The Queensland Government has a vision of a State where knowledge, creativity and innovation drive economic growth to improve prosperity and quality of life for all Queenslanders”. “Smart Libraries build Smart Communities” Smart Queensland : smart state strategy 2005-2015
- 3. Libraries supporting smart communities? Smart services are services that are informative, interactive, innovative, improving and international in scope. Smart services enrich the lives of members of a Smart Community by enabling them to meet the business and personal challenges of the information age through the use of information and communications technology. Smart services provide networked communities with interactive software and multimedia content that is delivered through secure and private in-home, at-work or community access facilities to improve the overall economic, social and cultural well being of a community. Stan Skrzeszewskii, Building smart communities: what they are and how they can benefit blind and visually impaired persons (paper 169-158-E to IFLA, Jerusalem, 2000) Libraries supporting smart ways of working? “McLaren F1 team formed a company that offers consultancy based on pit-stop management – to improve e.g. aircraft turnaround, operating theatre team handovers” EXPLOITING KNOWLEDGE How could you exploit your library’s knowledge? Moving beyond the provision of print information to clients who walk through the library door – unrestricted by location or hours of opening Queensland , Smart libraries build smart communities What are smart libraries? Wired UK, April 2010
- 4. “Such countries are politically, educationally, socially and technologically advanced, however they are relatively small on the world stage; their national libraries, for example, are not global leaders in the same way as the Library of Congress, the BibliothèqueNationale de France or the British Library. These small countries may have cultural identities under threat from globalisation, yet their very size might enable them to respond rapidly to changing circumstances. As such, they can be in a position to help each other in identifying and tackling issues of common concern and bringing solutions to the larger stage”. “Small, smart countries” National Library of Scotland, February 2010
- 5. Smart formats – ebooks, Kindles, Vooks and so on Social networking Generation Y behaviour Information from peer networks What information can you trust? Google (plus its kith and kin) “How do you know?” “I Googled it!” New models of publication Fee or free? London Evening Standard or London Times? Google Books settlement Smart challengers
- 6. Adopting RFID South Dublin, Antrim, Bangor … public libraries Express loans / check-in (UCD) Implementing Web 2.0 technologies Information portals Queensland ECLECTUS portal – photo archive, arts resources and archives in a single portal delivered through library software (as well as library catalogue, Internet resources, etc) Delivering library services via mobile devices, not just services via mobile libraries Smart practices in libraries
- 7. Social networking to inform and link students Universities across the island Web services NI Library Authority single catalogue – cross-Province services and item delivery Use of RefWorks, blogs, Twitter Queens Belfast, UU, TCD, NLI Smart libraries in practice
- 8. Libraries and librarians putting a new perspective on traditions One City One Book Dublin City Libraries bringing this successful format to Ireland Initiative in its fifth year Libraries preserving historic locations Carnegie libraries, former courthouses, churches, market houses… Smart traditions Library under construction in former Courthouse, Ballymahon, Co Longford
- 9. Lessons from the past Ennis - what succeeded and what didn’t High residual levels of IT literacy – and of information literacy?? Building Ireland’s Smart Economy Creating roles for Library, Information and Knowledge professionals Pointers to the future The Internet of Things – Cork Institute of Technology key card system – tracks A new world of embedded technology Managing knowledge in data and things Managing knowledge as well as its containers Applying traditional skills in new and smarter ways Smart futures
- 10. So, how smart are we? Google’s ambition is to manage the world’s knowledge That’s what we do Google wants to find and present the most authoritative sources of information That’s what we do Google wants to support communities of information That’s what we do
- 12. Are libraries and Google inevitable enemies? “Kill the book to save the book” Hyperlinking the content of books Print is portable but wi-fi and broadband are becoming ubiquitous Digital Britain [May 2009] FCC rural broadband report [May 2009] Ireland’s Broadband Performance and Policy Actions (Forfás, January 2010) Are we guardians and interpreters of form or content? How can libraries be “Googlier”? Curating the web Reviewing content and creating expert online communities Didn’t Google already digitise some libraries? What Would Google Do?
- 13. How Google-ish are libraries? Libraries are organisers of knowledge Libraries are collectors and digitisers of information resources Google is open to anyone worldwide, not restricted by location or membership of a particular customer group Libraries are currently developing universal access schemes Google constantly values and brokers information Google micro-auctions information millions of times per hour
- 14. Information as commodity Retrieving auction results, served above answers to enquiries It has passed into the English language meaning to search for a topic on the Internet Yet users are surprised when they learn of its shortcomings Information as a free good Retrieving the answers to enquiries irrespective of cost Often a shorthand term for an image of slightly outdated service and selective stock Users are surprised when they learn of our excellence Google vs Librarians
- 15. Jorge Luis Borges’ vision of the universe as library Every combination of alphabetical characters in a book somewhere – so all of knowledge is there as well as every kind of nonsense There is no order or key – although somewhere must reside a volume that is the catalogue Related ideas are found in The Name of the Rose (Eco), Discworld(Pratchett) The whole of information when unordered equates to a total lack of information The role of the smart librarian facing Google’s “Last Library” The coming search for routes to co-existence A Library of Babel?
- 16. Steps to a smarter profession Defining the wider profession Not just libraries … Reviving information science New professional interests Archives and records management Information security and assurance Information literacy Information governance
- 17. Steps to a smarter profession Librarianship for the 21st century Adopting Web 2.0 to build Library 2.0 Smart Librarians using social networking for CPD You can follow conferences for your CPD via social networking (e.g. #CIL2010) and online Meeting user needs CILIP’s Manifesto for the UK general election Understanding the commercial approach Google adwords are NOT an indicator of relevance Examples of good practice
- 18. Building the smarter profession New roles for professional associations Widening their interests, widening their spheres of influence Preparing their members for the new world of information and knowledge management Lobbying, explaining, engaging with decision makers Working together – LAI and CILIP Ireland, RMS Ireland Group New roles for library and information professionals Widening their horizons Adapting CPD to acquire relevant new skills Promoting LIS skills and potential in new fields and to new clients Acting and thinking smart!
- 19. Questions and comments Peter.Griffiths@cilip.org.uk Text and slide layout © Peter Griffiths 2010 The images used in this presentation are for illustration only and any copyrights are acknowledged
Hinweis der Redaktion
- I’m so sorry that the current travel difficulties have made it impossible for me to be here in person to deliver this presentation. I was especially looking forward to it having been unable to be here in 2009, so it’s a disappointment for me. Maybe there will be a future opportunity to be at one of these conferences.Thanks for inviting me to address this conference, which must be quite unusual in bringing together two national professional associations at an important time in the development of library and information services. I think we all know that there are some challenging times ahead for our profession. The economic circumstances in both [the Republic of] Ireland and in the United Kingdom mean that there will be other contenders for the funding that supports our libraries, and it will be more vital than ever not just to demonstrate the value that they bring, but to argue the case for continuing to support them.The theme of the conference is smart libraries : I want to look at that theme, and to develop some of the ideas that I’ve been talking about during my year as CILIP’s President in 2009. So I propose that not only are smart libraries of great importance, but so are smart librarians.Let me explain what I mean.
- During the next couple of days you will hear quite a lot about smart libraries. So let me describe what I understand by the term. Tomorrow’s sessions (and Brian Trench’s COLICO lecture) will look at particular aspects of technology, and its ability both to bring together apparently disparate elements of information into coherent form through what is generally described as Web 2.0. There is a growing number of applications that will provide useful information to the citizen (using mashups and other techniques) using familiar forms such as Google Maps to present and make sense of that information. But there is also a role for libraries to support “smart” initiatives in “smart” states and their “smart” governments. Part of that role is to act as an informed interpreter of the available information for its clientele; but libraries also have a role as active participants in the business of governments that aim to develop a knowledge-based society. As an example, the Government of Queensland (Australia) has a vision of a smart state based on knowledge, creativity and innovation that is actively supported by its library services. Its government libraries have formed a consortium in support of the government that they serve, whilst there is a defined role for public and academic libraries in terms of facilitating that smart government. The Australian literature of librarianship now includes a number of interesting papers showing how this theme has developed, offering a number of lessons for other countries intending to follow.
- The term has been around for some time. The 2000 IFLA conference in Jerusalem heard a paper on the theme which includes the definition on the slide here. It seems to have many of the elements of which I’ve already been speaking and which will be featured at this conference.Yet there is a lot of discussion of the idea of “smart” business in the current press, some ten years later, so what has happened? I’ve observed before that more and more people seem to behave like librarians without actually realising it (and I’ll come back to this in a minute when we talk about Google). Now, in this month’s UK edition of Wired, I see that the McLaren Formula One team, who evidently know a thing or two about racing – like get yourself a couple of good drivers if your cars are any good – have realised that their learning is transferable to other business sectors, and that their techniques for speeding up pit stops can be applied to servicing aircraft (maybe not right at the moment…) or to the management of operating theatres in medical environments. Queensland seem to have got it about right here in this further quote from their library vision document – library service cannot be restricted simply to the clients who walk into the physical building during the hours of opening or hours of daylight.
- I was interested by the National Library of Scotland’s recent document that sets out a strategy based on a concept of the role of the national library of a small, smart country. I think it’s pretty obvious that they consider Scotland to be an example of such a small, smart country, and as a result they are describing the way forward for the NLS. I think we have also used the word “agile” to describe this situation in libraries – that being under the radar in many organisations, particularly in business, they can often act in what is almost a maverick way to get business done within a broad framework of regulation and ethics, but in a way that delivers real advances in knowledge and helps its users (citizens, members of the company or whatever) to achieve worthwhile results through the use of knowledge and information. The NLS seems to me to be proposing a network of second-tier national libraries which, relieved of the international and national responsibilities of the BL, BN, LC and their equivalents, can seek like-minded libraries to deliver smart, agile services that meet not only user requirements but national services of high quality and relevance. Again I’ll have some more to say in a moment on this theme.
- Libraries are certainly faced with constant challenge from users and competitors.In recent months we’ve seen a number of e-book readers reach market. Indications are that they have had reasonable success, with some unusual best sellers. Last week we heard that Mills and Boon had sold over half a million electronic copies of their romantic fiction in the UK last year – over 400,000 through Amazon. Despite the various formats, the e-book seems to be here to stay, and now public libraries are adding them to stock. Not least they are simple to manage, with the e-book simply expiring from the reader on the due date – assuming that the library has chosen not to offer simultaneous licensing of multiple copies of the title. We’ve heard a lot about the very different way that Generation Y – the people currently at the end of secondary schooling and in undergraduate education – study and use libraries, valuing information from peer networks as much as printed resources, and taking a very different view of how far information resources can be trusted. We’ve seen Google develop from an interesting alternative to Lycos into a verb – “I Googled it!” (so it must be true… oh dear!) And we’re seeing some interesting developments in the fee vs free debate. The London Evening Standard has been successfully published for about six months as a free newspaper with quality newspaper standards of journalism and production, paid for by advertising, but also the news that the Times of London will start charging for content later in the year. The Murdoch team clearly has different ideas about what should be free and what not : but consumers will also have to learn about the balance between cost and reliability that librarians have had to consider for many years in the online world.
- There are plenty of examples of libraries using smart technology. Here are a few of them drawn from across Ireland : RFID being used in public libraries to speed service and focus resources on the most productive areas – starting just across the Square here in Tallaght, and also in both new build and more traditional buildings in the north. RFID also has a growing tradition in academic libraries, such as UCD, making it possible to offer longer hours of service for simple transactions such as loan returns. Libraries also offer smart services using web 2.0 technologies. I found Queensland’s ECLECTUS portal interesting – it offers access to various archives of images and documents as well as library services through a single portal, and we are also seeing access to such portals offered on a range of platforms such as smartphones.
- Libraries are taking advantage of social networks – notably Twitter and Facebook – to provide information about their services and to link their users into a community. UCD’s Twitter page is a typical example. The Northern Ireland Library Authority’s single catalogue offers services and the delivery of requested items to any of its service points through its portal. And a number of libraries offer formatted bibliographic references using Refworks, and comment on current issues using blogs as well as Twitter.
- But I think that libraries are (returning to my earlier comments) combining tradition and smartness in some innovative ways. Right now a lot of people in Dublin are reading The Portrait of Dorian Grey, which is the One City One Book title for 2010. This concept has been used in a number of cities since it was launched in the US in the 1980s, but it has been very successfully promoted by Dublin’s City Libraries and is in its fifth year here. A modern and smart way of promoting literature, a kind of city-wide book group with electronic discussion joining more traditional ways of sharing ideas about the books.And there are a number of examples of parts of the architectural heritage of Ireland being preserved as libraries take over old and sometimes derelict buildings for new libraries. Here is Ballymahon in County Longford, but there was a choice of example I could have used., and we should recognise that libraries are acting smart to preserve heritage in an active and living way as well as by storing it for use by the community. It’s an illustration of the fluid boundaries between ourselves and related professions such as museums and archives management and conservation.
- We should also be looking at lessons from past initiatives to inform our future plans and projects. When I worked on UK government websites in the early days of the web – only 15 years ago in the late 1990s but how far back that now seems – we were interested by the experiment in Ennis, which you will of course remember as the Information Age Town. Because we wanted to use the web as a channel to the British public, but that public was by and large unable to connect to the Internet, we wanted to know what would happen in the situation where computers and Internet access were made widely available and made available across all parts of society. Well, I suspect that the answer is not what we thought; the literature dries up around 2003 with some fairly dismissive conclusions about what worked and particularly what didn’t. But from the library and information point of view I think there were some positive outcomes that could be lost in the criticism of the technical failings. It looks to me that there is a higher level of information literacy among the ordinary people who took part in the project than you would expect to find among the population at large. Even if they subsequently gave up, people would at least understand better where information is available, whether they need an intermediary such as the library to help them, and have a better idea how to choose between conflicting sources. Recognise the positives of projects such as this even if they appear to have been relatively unsuccessful from a technical or financial perspective.Recently of course Ireland has been implementing its own recovery strategy, Building Ireland's Smart Economy, since its publication in December 2008; an update was recently published. I'm sure that those of you here today will know far more than I do about the programme, so I'm not going to comment any further than to note that the second key action area, ‘Building the ideas economy and creating "The Innovation Island“’ has for me a clear link back to the lessons of the Ennis project, and provides an obvious role for knowledge and information management experts, led by the library and information profession. Here is an opportunity to make a positive contribution to a national programme that I'm confident we can embrace. Colleagues here may well find that the CILIP Manifesto, which I'll talk about in a short while, will offer guidance on the policy areas where the profession can contribute(Text for this slide continues on next page)
- (continued from previous slide)Current projects also point to things we should be considering as smart libraries of the future. The Internet of Things is a growing buzz-phrase, and the work at Cork Institute of Technology throws up some interesting sidelights for us. The key card system allows tracking of people and things throughout the system, so that you can see when people are in a particular place, or when particular objects are there – which could be information resources as much as laboratory equipment. It becomes possible to embed technology as an integral part of a location (such as a campus, or its library) and for information to be gathered in the course of everyday life. There was even an item in the London Metro last week reporting that someone has put a phone chip into an electric kettle so that it Tweets when it has boiled and the user can then go and make his or her coffee! That is clearly meant as a demonstration of the possible (or so I hope) but the potential is clear. I heard that when the IP addressing system is extended to IP6 – that is six rather than four groups of digits in each address – it is meant to provide not only enough IP addresses for every device on earth, including that wi-fi enabled kettle, but also for the colony on Mars without having to create a new bank of IP addresses. So there is a plethora of knowledge to be gathered in future, and the skill is going to be not in harvesting it – it will be coming at us from all directions – but in organising it and giving it context and meaning. Which is where smart librarians come in…(Text for this slide is on the next page)
- (Previous slide) Google has made a number of pronouncements about its ambitions. It says that it wants to manage the world’s knowledge. I thought that’s what librarians and information scientists did? And Google wants to find and present the world’s most authoritative sources of information. When I started out we used to call that book selection. These days, as I mentioned in talking about the Ennis project, we talk about information literacy, and are passing our skills of evaluation to our users, but at the end of the day, our professional skill is finding and making available authoritative information. And Google says it wants to support communities of information – again, what are our libraries doing if not this? So I’d say that librarians are equally as smart as Google. In fact, we’re smarter than Google because we make choices based on our users’ requirements , not on decisions made by the information providers because they have a product to sell. Let me explain.(This slide)Google values information : so do we.But Google puts a retail value on information, which is not what we do. We value it for how accurate and authoritative and reliable it is. Information is certainly a commodity, but unreliable information can be a commodity in a search engine if it has been subsidised enough. Although they are now separated from the other results, Google displays not only answers found by search but answers that have been paid for in a microauction that took place while you were waiting for the search results to come back. The equation is said to be the one that Google uses to decide which results to display in the sponsored links part of the page, and it looks at the bid by the information supplier for the “Adwords” in question. In fact Google has developed a brilliantly good model for conduction very fast auctions of commissioned bids in real time, based on whatever terms the user inputs and whatever Google thinks they actually mean by those words. It’s brilliant business but it’s not librarianship or information science as we know it.
- So did Google steal our ideas?A journalist and commentator named Jeff Jarvis has written a whole book (What would Google do?) which looks at how various businesses would be run on Google’s lines. I talked about it in my CILIP Presidential address last year and if you want to see more the slides are available online. Jarvis talked to Library Journal soon after the book came out, and he made these comments. He thinks that Google and libraries have a lot in common, as you will see, and although we may disagree with the last point he’s making, you can see why he might say that.
- So I asked whether libraries and Google must be enemies. Jarvis talks about “killing the book to save the book” – he talks about how Google would run HarperCollins, who are his publisher – and concludes that the current business model of publishing is all wrong. Books have a future but not the way they’re produced. You can hyperlink from an e-book (or you will be able to) but not from a printed book, which is out of date and dead before it even leaves the printers, unless it happens to be fiction or I suppose Shakespeare. The printed book takes no account of wi-fi and broadband becoming an integral part of daily life. The UK election put paid to the proposed 50 pence a month levy on landlines to pay for rural broadband but it’s a real issue. Actually in parts of London slow broadband is a bigger problem than it is in rural areas, and needs urgent remedies if a new class of digitally excluded people are not to be created. If you expect students to use the Internet to do their nightly homework, then they need speeds a lot faster than they currently get. Here in Ireland, Forfàs issued a report in January looking at how the issues around rural broadband should be tackled, joining the reports in 2009 in the UK and the United States. Jeff Jarvis raises other issues about Google and libraries through the book. We need to think more about whether we deal primarily in information content or in the containers that it lives in. I suggest that we should be primarily concerned with the content, although we certainly have a unique skill in managing the containers through cataloguing and resource description that we should not lightly give up. We should be curators of the web (and I’m thinking here of projects like the British Library Web Archiving Programme, showing how we have to have the skills to conserve everything from the Book of Kells to bookofkells.ie) and we should be using our knowledge of our users to create online communities of interest. And you may have heard that Google has already digitised some libraries… what’s that saying about imitation being the sincerest form of flattery?
- So here’s the scorecard. How Google-ish are libraries?Libraries are organised knowledge – so is Google.Libraries are collectors and digitisers of information resources, and so is Google.Where Google does score is on being open 24/7 to anyone in any place, whether or not they hold a reader’s ticket. But libraries have made some big steps on that one, and we’re starting to see libraries making good use of technology to allow users to get access to information wherever it is, and with fewer rules about getting the item back. Libraries will send materials back to other libraries, especially where they’re members of a consortium, and the advent of technologies such as e-books allow users to interact with the library via the Internet 24/7/365.And as I explained earlier , libraries are definitely not Googleish when it comes to valuing and brokering information auctions.So I think we score well on Google’s positive attributes, and better on the things where we do it better.
- I’ve just set the arguments out as a table that you can evaluate for yourselves.The key messages are at the foot of each column, and we need to get the message out there. Too many people think that Google is infallible, when it isn’t. And too many people don’t know how good libraries are : we need to tell them so, again and again, until the message has gone in.
- I wonder if you know of the short story by Jorge Luis Borges, the Library of Babel, which seems to me to illustrate the point about Google very well.The library consists of many hexagons each containing volumes of equal size, each of them a different random combination of letters – very much along the lines of the output from that team of an infinite number of monkeys at typewriters who will eventually produce the whole of Shakespeare at a random moment. There is no order, and no key to the collection, although one of the random volumes will of course be the catalogue to the library. It’s an idea that crops up in other literature such as the Name of the Rose (Umberto Eco), or even Terry Pratchett’sDiscworld, which emphasise the almost mystical importance of the librarian. But here in Babel the librarians are in despair, and can do nothing of value.The point is that when it is unordered and unmanaged, even the whole of available knowledge and information is of the same value as a total lack of information. In a word it is unusable. And that is where the librarian, and his or her skills, are of vital importance. Google’s Library has been described as the Last Library – nobody will ever have the resources to create another, and nobody would wish to create a competitor because there is no economic sense in doing so. The smart librarian needs to address this situation, and show how professional skills and knowledge help us to add value to the flat collection that is the Last Library. Google can only index and retrieve in response to specific enquiries, and may colour the results in the light of commercial and other criteria. Librarians pre-structure information to make it accessible, and to give order to the chaos of words.The trick is of course going to be to find smart ways of co-existing with Google, making it a beneficial relationship for both parties – and most of all for users.
- So how do we become a smarter profession?Our world is much more than just libraries. We cannot remain a narrowly based profession around curatorship of printed materials. Nor are we, of course, but it needs to be said that we should look for areas where our skills have value. We have lost something of the pure tradition of information science in recent years and perhaps we should be looking to revive that, partly for the status that it gave us alongside other scientists but also because librarianship has become a much more technical and scientific profession that it was. We have been leaders in application of IT for as long as I can remember yet we still pass IT issues outside the profession when we have equally valid knowledge and experience to offer to help resolve current debates. As I mentioned when talking about the preservation of heritage, it’s difficult to draw rigid boundaries to the work we do. Archives and records management are very germane to librarianship and information management; information assurance is a huge new area of work in corporate environments, whilst the public urgently need reassurance from trusted experts such as ourselves that their personal data is being responsibly managed by the bodies who hold it; information literacy helps people make the right decisions in their lives; and information governance is a whole new area where our skills make a big difference.Some of these areas have professional bodies of their own, but we must work with them to drive forward the profession and public confidence; others of these areas do not, but we don’t need to create new bodies because these are areas where our own professional bodies already contain the professional skills, disciplines and people that are needed.
- We need librarianship, defined and adapted for the twenty-first century. Web 2.0 will build Library 2.0. Social networking can be used for many purposes, like CPD – last week it was possible to follow the US Computers in Libraries conference using webcasting and reading the Tweets of the participants sharing their experiences and comments in real time.Users remain paramount : whatever we can do just because the technology allows us really should be done for the benefit of the users. If there’s no obvious benefit to the user, then you have to ask why we would want to do it, especially in these hard economic times. We need to be smarter politically. CILIP has issued its manifesto for the current UK general election, setting out six priorities in a number of domains – making school libraries a statutory requirement, sorting out the way data is used by the public sector, building a knowledge economy and so on. This is a good step forward, and shows that we have political skills (not necessarily party political skills, which would be inappropriate), and it shows that we deserve to be heard at the highest levels. We need to understand the commercial approach taken by others even if we do not choose to adopt it. Google makes a business of information, but Adwords are not a measure of accuracy. We should understand that, and make sure that our users do too.And we should collect and share examples of good practice. In the UK a research network is being put together for LIS, but it depends on practitioners reflecting on their work and then contributing that experience to the literature for the benefit of all.
- Professional associations will have to adapt too. Their interests will, I believe, have to widen for them to be hospitable to those seeking a professional home relevant to their 21st-century skills in information management. The associations need to support their members as they make their way in the new landscape of information and knowledge management, and in modern librarianship. And the associations must be ready to meet decision makers in our current societies on equal terms, respecting the skills and experience of those decision makers whilst being confident in their own professional expertise; the associations need to lobby, persuade and constantly engage with those people in government and society whose intervention and support can allow us to make that difference to the lives of our users.Library and information professionals should be confident : they have the skills that are needed now. But they need to see the big picture, with its wider horizons. They need to keep their skills up to date, and embrace new and relevant skills. They need to promote their skills, and the profession, at every opportunity, and be on the look out for new ways to implement those skills, and new areas where those skills can be applied.In short, to get the best from our smart libraries, we need to be a profession of librarians who act and think smart!Thank you.
- In view of this paper being delivered on my behalf, I’m very happy to receive correspondence and to seek a way of publishing any dialogue via the LAI and CILIP websites.