I’ve been thinking about this for a while and it’s been gnawing at me. The concept of libraries/librarians of gatekeepers of information. Libraries and the internet battling it out for who is going to be the great bastion of knowledge… Initially I thought these were two kind of separate issues but they keep getting intertwined in my brain.
Ok, first the gatekeepers issue, or… we’ll start there because that’s what struck me first. I can’t remember what I was reading or overhearing or … what. I think the context was how it was great that libraries/librarians are the gatekeepers of information and knowledge and how librarians vet and serve out The Best™ Information, that pep talk we give ourselves about the service we provide to our various communities.
I think I might be in a minority in that I mostly use my library card for searching for articles that come up in Google behind paywalls. Now and again I’ll get a book, but like an increasing amount of people, one of my earlier stops in the information gathering process is to check out what’s online in the great unwashed, dirty masses of Google. Maybe I’ll ask Google to take me to the Wikipedia article – it’s still somewhat unwashed, but it usually gives some pointers to some relevant and somewhat better sources. Or maybe I’ll just see if something fits in the top ten to twenty results (unless I’m really obsessed – I’ve been known to go hundreds of pages deep poking at what’s out there, less so more recently though).
The majority of the time, for my personal purposes, I find what I’m looking for without busting out the library card. For professional purposes, I… well, I follow largely the same pattern. Don’t need a library card because I’m in the library/publishing industry & I have access to certainly not all of what I need, but a fair amount of it & if the price is right, I can buy what I need, if I don’t have access through work or a library or Google. But most of the time I can find what I need online.
I get it when people say “I can find what I need online – why do we need libraries?” I can find what I need online to my authority qualified standards. I may disagree with someone else’s assessment of what’s an authority but that’s going to be true still if I’m standing behind a ref desk helping them try to find something too. Librarians may be gatekeepers of information, but with the internet seems to be a low barrier to information & an easy fence to jump. Might not get into the ivory tower, but there’s plenty of goodies in the king’s woods.
What I worry about with the gatekeeper metaphor is that “normal people” will start seeing the ‘gatekeeper’ mentality is less one of Information For The People! than truly a gatekeeper mentality of Information For Our People. There’s a tension between The library is free! Information wants to be free! and the reality of the cost of that information and who, in reality, pays for and gets to use that information. Libraries have their audiences. Public libraries are funded and supported (or not as the case sadly seems to be increasing) by their local tax base and it’s hard, if possible at all, to get a library card for the next town over. Libraries do provide interlibrary loan, for which I’m thankful. I’ve gotten good books that way (and interlibrary doc delivery supports my brother, for which I’m also thankful, he does some awesome stuff).
I think libraries are really important. I have to believe that libraries have a place in our future. Maybe not because “that’s where we keep our books, our trusty knowledge repositories” but we do keep our knowledge repositories there with professionals who can help us find and retrieve them when we can’t find them. If we know they can do that. Yeah, and here is where my thinking breaks down because nothing is ever as simple as it seems.
I do wonder about the assumption that “everything is online” and think it would be really awesome if libraries could get localized matches in search engines. Somehow. I know. And then there’s WorldCat. Still never seen that show up in an internet search result despite that being kind of the point of it. Weirdly, I do see LibraryThing fairly frequently. What is LibraryThing doing right that WorldCat isn’t?
I don’t know – it’s rambling; there are holes in my logic big enough to drive a parade of MACK trucks through. But I think there’s something there at the core, that might be true, and that little piece of truth nags at me. And there was a small bit of illumination that just came to me & left again. It’s been a long week of thinking about things.
