All I know is what I read: policy-making signposts for libraries
All I know is what I read: policy-making signposts for libraries
Keywords: Planning, Policy management, Organizational change,Technological change, Personnel
This article takes its title and theme from American humorist Will Rogers(1879-1935) who used the famous quote, "All I know is what I read in the newspapers," as the catchphrase in his entertaining monologues. Will Rogers found topics for his commentary in the daily press. His topical currency formed the basis for much of his comedic appeal and pithy quotability.
As a library director, I often find the times as confusing as Will Rogers did. Just about the time I think I understand a new work process or technological innovation, it changes. And, because my hold on the present keeps shifting, my view of the future is modified as well. I lay no claim to being a futurist, but like all library policy makers, I have to predict and forecast on a regular basis. If I did not think hard about the future, I would make terrible decisions in the present. The following is an extension of my thoughts from my readings, with hopes you find the questions interesting that the future will force us to ask, as well as taking the journey to find the answers.
I use all kinds of tools to help me think about my library's future:quantitative – demographic analysis and projection; statistical analysis of system productivity, including the well-known library tools of output measures;and qualitative – focus groups and surveys to help me recognize what the library's customers want our organization to become.
One of the best and easiest tools for thinking about library futures is to read statistical analyses, like that of Pete Peterson in Gray Dawn(Peterson, 1999); life-style analyses, such as Gail Sheehy's New Passages(Sheehy, 1995); magazines, including The Economist, which always provides a view of "us" that is not our own; newspapers, especially The Wall Street Journal whose writers are paid to spot business and economic trends;and Internet publications of all kinds.
I set to my reading and to the task of sorting out my institutional predictions and forecasts armed with the skepticism advised by French strategic planner Spyros Makridakis in his book, Forecasting, Planning and Strategy for the 21st Century (Makridakis, 1990). Throughout this volume, he warns of the dangers and contradictions in prediction and forecasting. Among these is his outline of the paradoxes inherent in prediction and forecasting. These paradoxes follow:
The future can be predicted only by extrapolating from the past, yet it is fairly certain that the future will be different from the past.
Through forecasting we would expect to reduce future uncertainty, yet as we consider the future more carefully, we realize that unexpected events are possible, thus increasing uncertainty.
Although forecasts can and will be inaccurate and the future will always be uncertain, no planning or strategy is possible without forecasting and without estimating uncertainty.
What follows is a review of four publications that I recommend as directional signposts to the future. All of these signpost pieces helped me to shift slightly my view of the present and what my staff and I ought to be considering as future directions. I hope that you will find one or more of these signpost writings a helpful guide in dealing with your own institutional future.
Bill Gates' newest co-authored book, Business at the Speed of Thought: Using a Digital Nervous System (Gates and Hemingway, 1999), I think is far better than his first. In this volume, he focuses on networked computing and his analysis helped me think about the unrealized potential in networked library computing.
Gates portrays the "computer revolution" as organic and holistic. Bosses and computer department heads, he says, mostly view the computer as a way to enhance control by solving specific problems. The potential of networked computing, according to Gates, is not problem solving but in creating an organic common infrastructure, a digital nervous system that delivers current information to those who need it, when and where they need it. In sum, the great unrealized potential of networked computing is not better control and increased problem solving, but the enhancement of individual and group creativity.
Assuming Gates' forecast is right, what ought library directors to be doing with their organizational computing, especially library automation? Most library automation functionality is in stock control, i.e. ordering; arranging; and finding and vending information (books and magazines).
The weakest aspect of almost all automation systems is their creative limitations. Although the best automation systems now include extensive report compilation capability, they still have a long way to go to make them tools for the cooperative creative knowledge work of the type that Gates sees in the imminent future.
A thoughtful volume to read in association with Gates is Andrew Shapiro's The Control Revolution: How the Internet is Putting Individuals in Charge and Changing the World we Know (Shapiro, 1999). Librarians have and still do make a case for their professional significance because of their role as intermediaries. As one of our teen users told me, our library staff knows "how to organize stuff so you can find it" and "they know how to find the right stuff" that their clients want and need. Like professional historians who deal with fugitive and fragmentary archival remains, librarians have a long established set of tools for authenticating and verifying information and professional canons on which to base their intermediary service.
Shapiro says that the great significance of the Internet is that it has brought about "the extreme disintermediation of our information environment"(Shapiro, 1999). The Internet is currently the cheapest and therefore the most powerful form of personal communication. And the reality of the Internet is that its power can be used by liars, charlatans and pornographers to speak with the same high-octane voices as proven experts, careful knowledge managers and potential censors.
In Shapiro's words, the Internet has put us in a world in which "increasingly,responsibility for determining truth rests as much with those who consume information as those who produce it."
Shapiro's example of disintermediation is the electronic magazine known as The Drudge Report, a journal whose author-editor does not make any pretense of reporting verified information. Shapiro writes, "Drudge doesn't have any confidence that the underlying claim is right, since he's merely relaying what someone else is researching or writing" (Shapiro, 1999). In short, Drudge does not care about either accuracy or verification. He reports without mediating the information and without apparent worry as to consequences of publishing incorrect information.
Shapiro writes of Drudge's rapid-pace communication environment, in which,there is "No Need to Check, ... No Time to Check, .... [and] No Way to Check". Shapiro finishes his chapter on Drudge with newspaper cartoon character Pogo's famous quote, "We Have Met the Enemy [and the Enemy is Us]". The "Internet Revolution", according to Shapiro, has given individuals and groups a powerful new way to disseminate information directly to individuals, without libraries or any other intermediary in between, it has put more and more responsibility on individual computer users "to weigh the accuracy of different content providers." In short, "journalists and citizens become increasingly interchangeable ... A fallacy of the new individual control is the idea that each of us can, or should judge the accuracy of information on our own"(Shapiro, 1999).
What role will libraries and librarians play if 20 percent or 40 percent or 70 percent of all reference information now in libraries can flow electronically direct from information vendor to information user? Shapiro maintains that people still will turn to "middle men" both as those who can best handle specialized tasks like searching and those who bridge the divisions between knowledge areas and need. The author reminds us, however, that these "middle men" roles may be played out over long distances rather than face to face. In the age of disintermediation, in what new ways will professional librarians be asked to play their "middle men" roles?
Times are changing! When I first saw the reference to the next publication cited in a magazine article, the citation format made it look like a book. It took the head of my collection development department to point out that this publication was "on the net and not a book." The electronic publication is Eric Steven Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar. As this article is written, it can be found on the Internet at www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/cathredral-bazaar
Raymond is a largely open-source programmer who co-developed programs like nethack, Emacs VC, xlife and others. The subject of Raymond's electronic monograph is Linux, the free open software that is now being used as the operating system on millions of computers throughout the world.
In spite of his programming background, Raymond was surprised at how Linux took hold among computer users. Here is his reaction:
Linux overturned much of what I thought I knew. I had been preaching the Unix gospel of small tools, rapid prototyping and evolutionary programming for years. But I also believed there was a certain critical complexity above which a more centralized, a priori approach was required. I believed that the most important software (operating systems and really large tools like Emacs)needed to be built like cathedrals, carefully crafted by individual wizards or small bands of mages working in splendid isolation, with no beta to be released before its time.
Then something new happened. "Linus Torvalds's style of development– release early and often, delegate everything you can, be open to the point of promiscuity" – came as a surprise. There is no quiet, reverent cathedral-building here. Rather, the Linux community seemed to resemble a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches, out of which, a coherent and stable system could seemingly emerge only by a succession of miracles.
Raymond's writings served to remind me that the best libraries have always been less cathedrals for the worship of the book than educational and information bazaars. Obviously, library facilities should be as nice as we can afford, but the principal task of library administrators and boards is to create facilities that are, first of all places, where people come to fulfill their economic and intrinsic reading and information needs. To carry out this primary mission, our library computer software needs to be sufficiently flexible and open to ensure staff (and library users) can help create the particular software or databases they need.
As they have been so many times before, libraries are again at a technological crossroads. In his newest book, Pulitzer award winner (for The Making of the Atomic Bomb), Richard Rhodes in his Visions of Technology(Rhodes, 1999) provides us with a compilation of writings about how people have dealt with the challenges of changing technology throughout the twentieth century. Using excerpts ranging from a 1923 Printers Ink editorial ranting against the evils of radio advertising, to H.G. Wells' dreadfully accurate 1914 prediction-description of a mid-twentieth century atomic war, we can recognize the difficulties in using electronic media and information technology to the continual advantage of our library users in the twenty-first century.
Rhodes reminds us in his introduction, "As methodologies, science and technology are demonstrably objective and effective; but they're undoubtedly bound up with power relations as social systems." The conclusion from reading Rhodes' marvelous selections is that institutional policy makers need to maintain a sense of balance when dealing with the hottest new "tech fix"that is going to bring a bright new day to library operations. On the one hand there is good reason for "technological wariness". On the other, "the intellectual bias against technology" is pervasive, especially among those who know the least about it (Rhodes, 1999).
US News and World Report staff writer, David Marcus, provides an appropriate wrap up for this column in a July 12, 1999, article on how technology is changing and the problems that creates for library leaders. The title of the piece is "File this under shock, future."
The "shock" for Marcus was finding how well libraries were adapting to the current massive technological, societal and economic changes. He writes:
for years it was predicted that libraries would become superfluous– mausoleums for books – when so much was available online. Instead,library visits now far exceed annual attendance at sporting events, concerts,and museums combined. It turns out that the very electronic revolution that was supposed to make libraries obsolete has made them indispensable (Marcus, 1999).
Even as libraries become bona fide "destinations" for all kinds of social and demographic reasons, new challenges remain – and most of them have to do with technology. E-books will save stack space, but publishers do not know what to charge libraries for the rights. The ability of computers to shift formats from digital to paper creates the option for even out-of-print books on demand, making library ownership of older works of less value than previously.
The library's heritage is as the caretaker of books. Our newest mission is to deliver essential high-quality, technologically current, reading and information services to an ethnically and economically varied population. In making this transition, we will need every signpost we can find. And, like Will Rogers, we will take many of our performance signposts from what we read, whether the medium is the printed page or digital format.
References and further reading
Gates, B. and Hemingway, C. (1999), Business at the Speed of Thought: Using a Digital Nervous System, Warner Books, New York, NY.
Makridakis, S.G. (1990), Forecasting: Planning and Strategy for the 21st Century, Free Press, New York, NY.
Marcus, D.L. (July 12, 1999), "File this under shock, future", US News and World Report, Vol. 127 No. 2, pp. 48-9.
Peterson, P.G. (1999), Gray Dawn: How the Coming Age Wave will Transform America and the World, Random House, New York, NY.
Raymond, E.S. (1999), "The cathedral and the bazaar",www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar
Rhodes, R. (Ed.) (1999), Visions of Technology: A Century of Vital Debate about Machines, Systems and the Human World, Simon & Schuster, New York,NY.
Shapiro, A. (1999), The Control Revolution: How the Internet is Putting Individuals in Charge and Changing the World we Know, Century Foundation,New York, NY.
Sheehy, G. (1995), New Passages: Mapping Your Life Across Time,Ballantine Books, New York, NY.
Glen Holt is Executive Director of the St Louis Public Library.
