Perspectives on the Future of Libraries Panel Discussion

Held Saturday, June 28, 2008 Anaheim Convention Center, ALA conference.

How can we not only survive, but flourish and make it a great one? The panelists, who addressed our future in a spirited and sometimes controversial way, were Joan Frye Williams, President, Joan Frye Williams Consulting; Stephen Abram, Vice President of Innovation, SirsiDynix; and José-Marie Griffiths, Dean, School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. R. David Lankes, Associate Professor & Director of the Information Institute, Syracuse University, presented concluding observations, Directions in Participatory Librarianship.

Moderated by Roger Levien of Principal, Strategy & Innovation Consulting, the panelists were asked to consider four questions in their responses:

1. What might libraries look like in 10, 20, or 30 years?
2. Which trends in information technology or society are most important or most interesting for the future of libraries, and why?
3. Given the evolution in information technology and online services, what are the most promising opportunities for libraries in the coming decade?
4. What do the workforce trends today imply about the library services that are delivered tomorrow? And what can be done today to better prepare us for delivering relevant services for the library of the future?

Boiled down and condensed, the basic message wasn’t a particularly new one—our future is about relationships—how they are established and sustained. We know that, but sometimes it seems to get lost in technology. Indeed, technology can help us develop and sustain relationships, but in the end it is all about the human-to-human contact. And trust.

The first panelist, Joan Frye Williams, believes that in the library of the future, relationships to information objects will be less important than relationships with our customers. She reminded us that libraries are trusted and authentic—and that those are great ingredients for a relationship-based service model. Joan advised us to worry less about managing documents and commodities and to be more careful of “relationship.” What do we call the folks walking through our doors? Patrons? Library users? Customers? Williams conducted a survey among the public, and they overwhelmingly suggested “member.” They have a card, after all. The opposite of “member” is “guest.” Libraries are not only places to “find stuff” but to “do stuff.” That will become increasingly important. The future library must be great at creating virtual and physical working environments, and actually co-creating them with the users/members. Williams projects that libraries will be in the ideas business and that the emphasis will be on thought processes, not on the artifacts. The information business may be off-shored, but not the process of creating ideas.

“Take two books and call me in the morning.” Williams also mentioned that due to a larger population of seniors, there will continue to be a rise in the wellness and health area--we should be advocating the role of the library in keeping our brains alive, i.e., “libraries as massive Alzheimer’s prevention places. “

Stephen Abram presented his remarks from the year 2021, looking back to the year 2008, a time when we finally got it right. We became specialists—not everyone was expected to know how to do everything. We also became less anonymous--more of us donned name tags. People could name their doctor, lawyer, and finally knew the name of their librarian. Reference librarians moved out from behind the reference desk, organizational structures changed to facilitate team work, wikis on the web were built collaboratively to put up program ideas, and human greeters were in place. He reminded us how easy it was to use a credit card, but how we had needed a different card for each library. It didn’t make it easy for people to use a library. We stopped our shallow conversations, found our core (questions), placed everyone into an information literacy program, and underwent transformational librarianship. Abram also mentioned that now we can put LC holdings on a cell phone, we need to focus on helping (i.e.,the relationship aspect). In fact, after creating our rather comprehensive database of our collective holdings, Abram wondered why we don’t have a similar database for questions. He also suggested that despite having locally funded libraries, libraries need to find ways to collaborate on the infrastructure so that when disaster strikes, as it did that year with Midwest flooding and before that in the Gulf, libraries can still maintain their online presence.

José-Marie Griffiths would like to see a future for librarians. She indicated that the number of librarians employed outside of libraries is growing faster than within, but that they still advocate for library services. She feels that collections are our underpinnings, even if they do not have to be in one location, and that once we lose the notion of “collection,” we may lose the “library.” The concept of libraries as trusted institutions was broached with this speaker as well, in that we need to maintain this centuries-built value. We are more trusted that corporations and the Internet. Griffiths suggested that the “control” part of bibliographic control should be banned to allow for more opportunities for resource discovery. Discovery and access services are fundamental to the fabric of libraries. She mentioned the physical library’s place being increasingly important in all sectors—that visits are up. Griffiths reminded us of the multigenerational aspect of libraries, i.e., that we serve folks across the lifespan, which provides a tremendous opportunity for many areas, including community education and economic development. Griffiths believes that our greatest threat is the lack of understanding as to what libraries are and what librarians do.

David Lankes. Continuing on with the theme of “relationship,” in his talk on participatory librarianship, David reminded the audience that knowledge is created through conversation; that libraries are in the knowledge business; therefore, we are in the “Conversation Business.” Those conversations can be in the library, online, or even marked in legislation. The library serves as a facilitator of conversation; true facilitation with the community means share ownership. Libraries should invest in tools of creation over the collection of artifacts, i.e.,library users need the ability to make their own artifact whether it is a youtube video or a piano composition (Lankes suggested that our music collections include pianos). He suggested nothing less than a Dewey-level shift in our relationship of items, and that perhapstime should organization materials rather than tags.

LJ ‘s report is here:
http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA65`74501.html?nid=2671&source=title&rid=1677995960&