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Skating on Thin Intermediation: Can Libraries Survive?

2008; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 27; Issue: 2-3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/02703190802398581

1540-949X

James M. Donovan,

Copyright and Intellectual Property

ABSTRACT Predictions about the end of libraries point to a real crisis, but assign the wrong cause. Libraries will not be displaced by technology like Google, but can be undermined by librarians’ own reactions to patron demand for Google-like experiences. Librarians can respond with a “weak model” that prioritizes the satisfaction of patrons, or a “strong model” that recognizes higher values rooted in the status of librarianship as a profession. Although recent trends favor the dominance of the weak model, only by embracing the strong model can librarians survive the challenges that threaten libraries. KEYWORDS: GoogleInternetlibrary 2.0professional ethicspatron expectations The author would like to thank Carol A. Watson and Taylor Fitchett, who commented on an earlier draft of this article. Constructive feedback was also generously offered by his former colleagues of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Brock Scholars Program, Lori Whaley Barton, Becky Estes Bell, Cheryl S. Clingan, Clay Sellers, and Andy Walker. Any errors or outlandish claims are entirely my own. Notes 1. Lawrence B. Solum, Blogging and the Transformation of Legal Scholarship, 84 Wash. U. L. Rev. 1071 (2006). 2. Lawrence B. Solum, Presentation at the American Association of Law Libraries 100th Annual Meeting, New Orleans: Blogs, Working Papers, Electronic Publishing: Will Changes in Legal Scholarship Affect the Future Development of Library Collections (July 14–17, 2007). 3. Posting of Ross Dawson to Trends in the Living Networks, http://www.rossdawsonblog.com/weblog/archives/2007/10/extinction_time.html (October 14, 2007, 8:44 PM US PT). 4. American Association of Law Libraries, Toward a Renaissance in Law Librarianship 27 (1997) [hereinafter AALL Report]. 5. Id. at 40. 6. Mark Sandler, Disruptive Beneficence: The Google Print Program and the Future of Libraries, 10(3/4) Internet Ref. Servs. Q. 5, 17 (2005). 7. Thomas Augst, American Libraries and Agencies of Culture, in Libraries as an Agency of Culture 5, 16 (Thomas Augst & Wayne Wiegand, eds., 2001). 8. AALL Report, supra note 4, at 14. 9. Id. at 17. Lyman Ross and Pongracz Sennyey recommend this same approach for all librarianship. Lyman Ross & Pongracz Sennyey, The Library is Dead, Long Live the Library! The Practice of Academic Librarianship and the Digital Revolution, 34 J. Acad. Libr. 145, 147 (2008) (“Libraries should also consider opening its professional ranks to nonlibrarians [because high-level] skills in marketing, systems, and a new competitive attitude, so uncharacteristic of the traditional librarian, are now needed”). 10. Proceedings of the 90th Annual Meeting of the American Association of Law Libraries, 89 L. Libr. J. 467, 494 (1997). 11. AALL Report, supra note 4, at 138 (quoting Roy M. Mersky). 12. Laura B. Cohen, A Manifesto for Our Times, 38(7) Amer. Libr. 47 (August 2007). 13. Dave Muddiman, Towards a Postmodern Context for Information and Library Education, 17 Educ. for Info. 1, 4 (1999). 14. Id. at 16. 15. See, e.g., Michael E. Casey & Laura C. Savastinuk, Library 2.0: A Guide to Participatory Library Service (2007). A recent editorial by John Berry identifies most of the important themes of this essay, including the jarring preference of library revisionists for the term “customer” rather than “patron,” as well as the weak model's logical culmination in the replacement of professional librarians as directors in favor of “business types from industry.” John N. Berry, III, The Vanishing Librarians, Libr. J., Feb. 15, 2008, at 10. 16. Augst, supra note 7, at 17. 17. See Rebecca Knuth, Libricide: The Regime-Sponsored Destruction of Books and Libraries in the Twentieth Century (2003). 18. Richard A. Danner, Redefining a Profession, 90 L. Libr. J. 315, 326 (1998). 19. Id. at 352 (emphasis in the original). My reliance on this article to isolate important trends is not a straw man. It is much revered within law librarian circles. For example comes this eucomium from the editor of the Legal Reference Services Quarterly: “I previously mentioned Dick Danner's Redefining a Profession; if you haven't read it, you should. If you have read it, you should re-read it. It's that good.” Mike Chiorazzi, The Next Twenty-Five Years of LRSQ, 25(4) Leg. Ref. Servs. Q. 5, 10 (2006). 20. Hanna Levenson, Differentiating among Internality, Powerful Others, and Chance, in Research with the Locus of Control Construct, Vol. 1: Assessment Methods 15 (Herbert M. Lefcourt, ed., 1981). 21. E.g., Matthew Battles recounts disagreements among early library professionals that echoes that between the strong and weak models: [Melville] Dewey actually used the admittance of women to the [Columbia School of Library Economy] to the same end he used their hiring the library: to define the profession down. Women were already socially subordinate to the men who filled faculty roles; for Dewey, this subordination nicely mirrored the professional subordination of librarians to professors and other experts—a subordination he deemed necessary to the efficient workings of the library. While his colleagues in the ALA cultivated the authority to direct the reading of their patrons, Dewey eschewed this mandate. Library workers, after all, were far too busy cataloging books and putting them in patrons’ hands to trouble themselves with the choosing of books. Matthew Battles, Library: An Unquiet History 144–145 (2003). 22. Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control, On the Record (2008), available at http://www.loc.gov/bibliographic-future/news/lcwg-ontherecord-jan08-final.pdf; see also Thomas Mann, “On the Record” but Off the Track: A Review of the Report of the Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control (2008), available at http://www.guild2910.org/WorkingGrpResponse2008.pdf. 23. E.g.. Casey & Savastinuk, supra note 15, at 4 (“Our customers don't first turn to their library's Web site when seeking an answer to their questions. It is not just that there are alternative sources out there; it is also the fact that we are competing with so many other commercial and nonprofit services”). 24. Robert Mitchell, Harvard to Collect, Disseminate Scholarly Articles for Faculty (Feb. 12, 2008), http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2008/02.14/99-fasvote.html. On May 7, 2008, this initiative was adopted by Harvard's Law School. Harvard Law School, Harvard Law Faculty Votes for “Open Access” to Scholarly Articles (May 7, 2008), http://www.law.harvard.edu/news/2008/05/07_openaccess.php. 25. Google Press Center, Google Checks Out Books (Dec. 14, 2004), http://www.google.com/press/pressrel/print_library.html. 26. McGraw Hill v. Google, 05-CV-8881 (S.D.N.Y Oct. 19, 2005). 27. A review bibliography of the controversy surrounding Google Book Search is available from Charles W. Bailey, Jr., Google Book Search Bibliography (May 27, 2008), http://www.digital-scholarship.org/gbsb/gbsb.htm. 28. Jean-Noël Jeanneney, Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge: A View from Europe (Teresa Lavender Fagan, trans., 2007). 29. Janice Adlington and Chris Benda, Checking Under the Hood: Evaluating Google Scholar for Reference Use, 10(3/4) Internet Ref. Servs. Q. 135, 141 (2005). 30. Ian E Wilson, Foreword, in Jeanneney, supra note 27, at xiii. 31. Walt Crawford & Michael Gorman, Future Libraries: Dreams, Madness & Reality 105 (1995). 32. David Weinberger, Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder 230 (2007). 33. Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture 9 (2007). 34. Robert Darnton lists eight reasons why Google—and Google Book Search—“will make [libraries] more important than ever,” rather than rendering them obsolete. Robert Darnton, The Library in the New Age, N.Y. Rev. of Books, June 12, 2008, at 72, 78. A historian rather than a librarian, Darnton's opinion is ironic given that his appointment as head of the Harvard libraries makes him symptomatic of the problem that he intends to critique. 35. Jeanneney, supra note 27, at 24. 36. One recent example worrying about how “competitive” libraries are in the digital age can be found at Ross & Sennyey, supra note 9. 37. Crawford & Gorman, supra note 30, at 108. 38. Id. at 3. 39. Space prevents a fuller elaboration of the ways in which electronic versions are viable substitutes for paper editions in only limited contexts. First, digital editions preserve only one copy of a text; scholarship will often require study of multiple copies of a given version due to the value of marginalia in revealing social and cultural background and impact of a specific text. See id. at 110; Anthony Grafton, Future Reading, The New Yorker, Nov. 5, 2007, at 50. Second, the library-created semantic network that turns information into knowledge can be approximately embodied by arrangement of the physical items on the shelf. Any systematic classification arrangement can make shelf-browsing and the serendipitous discovery of useful but unexpected information one of the true pleasures of library research. 40. Cf. Scott Bennett, Righting the Balance, in Library as Place: Rethinking Roles, Rethinking Space 10, 20 (2005), available at http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub129/pub129.pdf (“It is good that food service of one sort or another has become a standard feature of library design”); see also Andrea L. Foster, Snacks in the Stacks: Libraries Welcome Food Amid the Books, Chron. Higher Educ., Apr. 18, 2008, at A1, A38 (“Fed by a desire to make libraries more inviting places for students to work in groups, many colleges are installing cafes in their libraries.”). It remains unclear whether the “library as place” movement promises an improved outlook on the future of libraries, since it deemphasizes what should be the heart of the library, the collection, in favor of study areas and social gathering opportunities. 41. Andrew Lavallee, Discord over Dewey, Wall St. J., July 20, 2007, available at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118340075827155554.html. 42. Movers and Shakers: The Man Who Said No to Dewey: Marshall Shore, Maricopa County Library District, Libr. J., Mar. 15, 2008, at 12. 43. AALL Ethical Principles (approved April 5, 1999), available at http://www. aallnet.org/about/policy_ethics.asp (“By collecting, organizing, preserving, and retrieving legal information, the members of the American Association of Law Libraries enable people to make this ideal of democracy a reality.”) See also ALA Code of Ethics (adopted June 28, 1997; amended January 22, 2008), available at http://www.ala.org/ala/oif/statementspols/codeofethics/codeethics.cfm. 44. Fred Lerner, The Story of Libraries: From the Invention of Writing to the Computer Age 186 (1998). 45. Id. at 126–127. 46. AALL Job Hotline, Associate Dean, Library and Information Resources, http://www.aallnet.org/hotline/showarchive.asp?jobNum=1452 (last visited February 24, 2008). 47. Harvard Law School, Palfrey Appointed as New Head of Harvard Law School Library (April 30, 2008) http://www.law.harvard.edu/news/2008/04/30_palfrey.php. 48. Andrea L. Foster, Strains and Joys Color Mergers between Libraries and Tech Units, Chron. Higher Educ., Jan. 18, 2008, at A1, A13. Harvard has now created a tradition of belittling librarians, having earlier appointed a historian as the library dean. Among law libraries, disregard for professional criteria for directorships has occurred at institutions besides Harvard, including Northwestern, where the newly named head was hired from a background in web management but with no apparent library education or experience. Northwestern University Pritzker Legal Research Center, Welcome Lois Remeikis, Associate Dean for Information Services, http://www.law.northwestern.edu/library/aboutus/announcements/2007-11-12/ (last visited June 4, 2008). 49. Suzanne E. Thorin & Robert Wedgeworth, Librarians of Congress, 38(6) Amer. Libr. 86 (June/July 2007). The statutory requirements for Surgeon General are that the candidate “have specialized training or significant experience in public health programs.” 42 U.S.C. § 205 (2000). By contrast, law stipulates only that the “Librarian of Congress shall be appointed by the President, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate.” 2 U.S.C. § 136 (2006). 50. Elbert P. Tuttle, Heroism in War and Peace, 13 Emory U. Q. 129, 138 (1957).