Can Architects Save Libraries from the Internet?

theodp writes "Slate has an interesting photo essay exploring the question of how to build a public library in the age of Google, Wikipedia, and Kindle. The grand old reading rooms and stacks of past civic monuments are giving way to a new library-as-urban-hangout concept, as evidenced by Seattle's Starbucks-meets-mega-bookstore central library and Salt Lake City's shop-lined education mall. Without some dramatic changes, The Extinction Timeline predicts libraries will R.I.P. in 2019."

Not just the architects' responsibility

[arcsimm]

IANAArchitect (though I am an architecture student), but it would seem to me that decreasing relevance of the library in the urban fabric is more of a problem of programming than design, and one that is being addressed just fine already. As the Internet becomes a valid source of information and entertainment, the libraries are shifting focus, becoming more akin to public computer labs. While the appearance is different (rows of PCs instead of books), they still serve the purpose of providing free democratic access to knowledge. The next big shift is creating a more social atmosphere within the library, which as the TFA shows is ongoing and would seem to be effective.

Is the library changing? Most certainly, yes. Is it dying? Not so much.

I work in a library

[Anonymous Coward]

I work in a library that has 16 branches. While much of our catalog is stocked with books we have many popular DVD's and multimedia selections that cost thousands of dollars. Many of our patrons cannot afford to buy these (including myself). We also have free on-line newspapers and free subscriptions to many paid-for content on the web such as the Rosetta Stone for language learning. All this for $12 per year.

We are very technology focused and offer free wireless internet access at all of our branches, in addition to free public terminals that are currently Windows-based but we are looking into replacing them with a Linux-based desktop with OpenOffice to save costs.

Our library is not that unique, most well funded libraries are very advanced and are embracing the technology age. Check out you local library and you will likely be surprised at what they have to offer. Notice that I said "well funded".

Re:The problem

[psychodelicacy]

"This I agree with, although I can't see why they couldn't function electronically as well."

You don't mean entirely electronically, do you?

I'm an academic working in the field of medieval culture. While I can access facsimiles (print and electronic) of medieval manuscripts, it's sometimes essential to look at the originals. You can't rely on a facsimile to tell you whether pages have been removed, or whether two texts were originally bound together or created separately. A facsimile won't always show up erasures from the text.

What I'm trying to get at is that there are two ways of treating books (and other sources of printed information). The first is to see them as simple repositories of information, whose content can be translated into electronic form without any loss of meaning. The second is to see them as objects of study or artefacts in themselves. Some books can be treated in the first way without any problems; others must be treated in the second unless we're prepared to lose a lot in understanding them. For me, this second category of book is one reason why libraries will never entirely disappear.

Re:The better question is: should they?

[Rogue Haggis Landing]

Since I started my studies, I spent exactly 0 hours and 0 minutes in the university libraries. I access all the scientific material online, and even the books.

FWIW, your experience is not entirely typical right now, because the sciences are well ahead of the other fields of study in terms of online material. A lot of this is because there is so little use in most sciences for older material (i.e., an paper on Shakespeare from 1950 might still be relevant, a biology study from then almost definitely won't be). So if there are only the last 10 years online that's just great, especially to someone like a medical student who won't (or shouldn't) look at much with a copyright date more than 5 years old. Another factor is that science publishing has become extremely centralized, especially journals. So when Elsevier went online, a huge percentage of medical journals are suddenly electronic. Finally, the article really talks about public libraries, which don't really have the same function as a university library, and certainly don't have the same resources. A university library can pay licensing fees for it's 10-50,000 students and employees; the Chicago Public Library probably has less funding and potentially millions of people who could use it, making licenses much more difficult.

For antique books, sure, libraries will always exist, but even there I'd prefer to see them as conservation points where they are transferred into electronic format(s) made available online. Being an antique book collector myself, I would hate to know that precious antique books are being touched by people who don't wash their hands, or worse.

Ha! I work at an archive cataloging American books published between 1750 and 1920. I wash my hands regularly after handling them, but it's more to get me clean than the books, because 19th century texts, especially if they were bound in leather, just shed crap all over everything. As for storage and transfer, that clearly is the future. A lot of libraries will go from being what are called "dim" archives (with things physically accessible, but closely controlled) to being "dark" archives (things stored offsite, or at least away from patrons and accessible in a matter of days and not minutes), at least for older/rarer/valuable material.

BUT, and this is a big but, librarians will tell you that there is not yet a tried-and-true method for electronic storage. The world is full of old storage media that are basically unreadable. What can we put things on that will still be good in a few hundred years? Or will there be some sort of reliable upgrade method? And are we really going to trust someone like Google to effectively be the repository of the world's knowledge?

Another issue is that of storing physical things. Libraries work right now as basically distributed storage. No library is encyclopedic, but if you can look at all of them (through something like OCLC's WorldCat) then you can find most everything. If, as we assume, the number of libraries storing physical things goes down, then it becomes more likely that the last remaining copies of a lot of texts are going to disappear. We can argue if this is a bad thing or not, but it definitely needs to be considered.

Re:Extinction Timeline

[owlnation]

The Extinction Timeline is total garbage.

Yes it certainly is, and it appears to have been created by "some guy". If he has any academic qualifications and credibility it's not immediately obvious. I have the sense that the blog hosting the Timeline is written by someone who looks like he has all the credibility of an NLP snake-oil positive motivation seminar leader.

I strongly suspect sock-puppetry is somewhere at the root of this "article".

Re:The better question is: should they?

[Selanit]

Hi, I'm a librarian.[1] I appreciate your response, and I'm glad you find us useful. I'd just like to elaborate on one of your points. You wrote "I like going to the library just to browse and to see what I can find." (Emphasis added). This is one point where physical libraries still have a distinct advantage over the Internet.

People who are trying to retrieve information have three basic types of queries.

1. They know exactly what they're looking for. (A "known item" search, e.g. "I want a transcript of the Obama-Clinton debate from Austin last week", which results in one document).
2. They know roughly what they're looking for. (A "known class" search, e.g. "I want to read essays on Kierkegaard's philosophy", which results in a reasonably well-defined group of documents).
3. They don't have a clear idea what they're looking for. (Called "browsing," e.g., "I'd like to learn about world history.", which results in a vastly huge set of documents that might potentially meet the need).

The Internet is pretty good for known-item searches. Especially if the item has indexable text in it. Other types of information are harder. Quick! Using Google Images, find me a picture of a sheep facing left at sunset.

The Internet is less good at delivering focused results for a known class search. It can retrieve relevant documents, but there's a good chance that it will also retrieve lots of unrelated or only tangentially related things. Which means you have to spend ages sorting through a giant list of search results to find what you really want. Specialized databases tend to produce much more focused results, of course, but most of those aren't freely available.

And lastly, the Internet is lousy for browsing. Browsing is about finding out what's available within a very broad class of stuff. Search engines can tell you that documents share keywords; they can't tell you for certain that the documents are actually about similar things. And within the search results, they're organized according to (roughly) how popular they are, as measured by how many sites link to them. They're not organized based on their similarities to or differences from one another. Compare to a library, where you can start at the beginning of a shelf and scan the titles. Because librarians have invested a TON of time and effort into classifying the books, you can count on finding many documents about the same topic stored in the same location. There've been efforts to classify the web, but so far nothing really good has popped up. Wikipedia helps in some ways, but it still relies heavily on searches. The contextual navigation from one article to another helps a little, but a lot of the time the articles are linked to one another simply based on the words appearing in the article rather than on whether the articles are strongly related to one another. It does promote serendipitous discovery of information, but it's not so good for finding out a comprehensive list of what's available.

We aren't going away any time soon. Plenty of change a' comin', I reckon, but we're going to be around for a while yet.

[1] Well, technically, I'm a librarian-in-training. Close enough, though.

Re:The better question is: should they?

[mollymoo]

On-line != public access. The trend is to make them available on-line for a fee. My library card doesn't get me access to Safari [oreilly.com] from home and I very much doubt it ever will. I can't see on-line public libraries happening, because that would completely destroy the business of every publisher which would result in far, far fewer books being written. Nobody wants that to happen. Perhaps all the books will be electronic, but you'll still have to go to the library to access them, because the library's terminals will have access to the electronic copies and the subscriptions.

Re:The better question is: should they?

[Lijemo]

Actually, quite a few public libraries do pay subscription fees for proprietary information so that you don't have to. (for instance, Boston Public Library: http://www.bpl.org/electronic/index.htm [bpl.org]) You need to either be physically in the library or logged in with your library card to access it (subscribing to the databases doesn't allow the library to make it freely available to anyone anywhere in the world on the web), but it can get you access to a lot of information that would otherwise be quite expensive to obtain.