Mobile library services

Location aware services in a digital library world

This is the third post in a series of three

[1. Mainframe to mobile - 2. Mobile app or mobile web? - 3. Mobile library services]

© Christchurch City Libraries

While library systems technology and mobile apps architecture make up the technical and functional infrastructure of mobile web access, mobile library services are what it’s all about. What type of mobile services should libraries offer to their customers?

As stated before, the two main features that distinguish mobile, handheld devices from other devices are:

• web access any time anywhere
• location awareness

It seems obvious that libraries should take these two conditions into account when providing mobile services, not in the least the first one. I don’t think that mobile devices will completely replace other devices like pc’s and netbooks, like Google seems to think, but they will definitely be an important tool for lots of people, simply because they always carry a mobile phone with them. So in order to offer something extra, mobile applications should be focused on the situational circumstance of potential access to information any time anywhere, and make use of the location awareness of the device as much a possible. But does this also apply to services for library customers? That partly depends on the type of library (public, academic, special) and the physical and geographical structure of the library (one central location, branch locations).

As a starting point we can say that mobile library services should cover the total range of online library services already offered through traditional web interfaces. However, mobile users may not want to use certain library services on their mobile devices. For instance, from an analysis of usage statistics of EBSCO Mobile at the Library of Texas A&M University, generously provided by Bennett Ponsford, it appears that although the number of searches in EBSCO mobile is increasing, only 1% of mobile searches leads to a fulltext download, against 77% of regular EBSCO searches. These findings suggest that library customers, at least academic ones, are willing to search for books and articles on their mobile devices, but will postpone actually using them until they are in a more convenient environment. Apparently small screens and/or mobile PDF readers are not very reader friendly in academic settings. This may be different for public library customers and e-books.

So, libraries should concentrate on offering those mobile services that are wanted and will actually be used. In the beginning this may involve analysis of usage statistics and customer feedback to be able to determine the perfect mobile services suite for your library. Libraries should be prepared for “perpetual beta” and “agile development”.

There are two main areas of information in which libraries can offer mobile services:

Curtin library mobile

• practical information
• bibliographical information

This is no different from other library information channels, like normal websites and printed guides and catalogues.

Practical information may consist of contact address, email and telephone information, opening hours, staff information, rules and regulations of any kind, etc. In most cases this is information that does not change very often, so static information pages will be sufficient. However, especially with mobile devices who’s owners are on the move, providing dynamic up to date information will give an advantage. For instance: today’s and tomorrow’s opening hours, number of currently available public workstations per location, etc.

The information provided will be even more precisely aimed at the user’s personal situation, if the “location awareness” feature is added to the “any time anywhere” feature, and up to date static and dynamic information for the locations in the immediate vicinity of the customer is shown first, using the device’s automatic geolocation properties. And all this gets better still if the library’s own information is mashed up with available online tools, like showing a location on Google Maps when selecting an address, and with the device’s tools, like making a phone call when clicking on a phone number.

Bibliographical information should be handled somewhat differently. Searching library catalogues or online databases is in essence not location dependent. Online digital bibliographical metadata is available “in the cloud” any time anywhere. It’s not the discovery but the delivery that makes the difference. We have already seen that mobile academic library customers do not download fulltext articles to their mobile devices. But mobile customers will definitely be interested in the possibility of requesting a print item to be delivered to them in the nearest location. WorldCat Mobile, like “normal” WorldCat, for instance offers the option to select a library manually from a list in order to find the nearest location to obtain an item from. It would of course be nice if the delivery location would be automatically determined by the mobile request service, using the device’s location awareness and the current opening hours of the library branches.

The funny thing here is that we have the paradoxical situation of state-of-the-art technology in a world of global online digital information being used to obtain “old fashioned” physical carriers of information (books) from the nearest physical location.

Augmented reality, as a link between the physical and virtual world, may be a valuable extension of mobile services. A frequently mentioned example is scanning a book cover or a barcode with the camera of a mobile phone and locating the item on Amazon. It would be helpful if your phone could automatically find and request the item in the nearest library branch. Personally I am not convinced that this is very valuable. Typing in ISBN or book title will do the job just as fast. Moreover, bookshop staff may not appreciate this behaviour.

A more common use of augmented reality would be to point the camera of your mobile device to a library building, after which a variety of information about the building is shown. The best known augmented reality app at the moment is Layar. This tool allows you to add a number of “layers”, with which you can for instance find the nearest ATM’s or museums, or Wikipedia information about physical objects or locations around you.

Layar - LibraryThing Local

There is also a LibraryThing Local layer for Layar, with which you can find

information about all libraries, bookshops and book related events in the neighbourhood. It may even be possible to find a specific book in an open stack using this technology.

All these extended mobile applications suggest that users of apps may not just be a specific group of people (like library customers), but that mobile users will be interested in all kinds of useful information about their current location. Library information may be only a part of that. Maybe mobile apps should be targeted at a more general audience and include related information from other sources, making use of the linked data concept.

A search in a library catalog in this case may result in a list of books with links to related objects in a museum nearby or a historic location related to the subject of the book. Alternatively, an item in a museum website might have links to related literature in catalogs of nearby libraries. Anything is possible.

The question that remains is: should libraries take care of providing these generic location based services, or will others do that?

Mobile app or mobile web?

Technology, users and business models

This is the second post in a series of three

[1. Mainframe to mobile - 2. Mobile app or mobile web? - 3. Mobile library services]

© turkeychik

Mobile access to information on the internet is the latest step in the development of information systems technology, as described in the previous post in this series. The two main features that distinguish mobile devices from other devices are:

• Access to the web literally any time, anywhere
• Location awareness using GPS or the mobile network

Let’s focus on web access first. There are two main ways in which information providers can provide access to their data: by a mobile web browser or by apps.

The easiest way to provide mobile access is: do nothing. Users of mobile internet devices can simply visit all existing websites with their mobile browser. However, in doing so they will experience a number of problems: performance is slow, pages are too large, navigation is difficult, certain parts of websites don’t work. These problems are caused by the very physical characteristics of mobile technology that make mobile internet access possible: the small size of devices and displays, the wireless network, the limited features of dedicated mobile operating systems and browsers.
Fortunately, technological development is an interactive, reciprocal, cyclic process. Technology continuously needs to find solutions to problems that were caused by new uses of existing technology.

Dumbed Down

Many organisations have solved this problem by creating separate “dumbed down” mobile versions of their websites, containing mainly text only pages and textual links to their most important services and information. In the case of libraries for instance “locations and addresses“,  “opening hours“, etc. See this list of examples (with thanks to Aaron Tay). Another example is LibraryThing Mobile, which also has a catalog search option. In these cases you have to manually point your browser to the dedicated mobile URL, unless the webserver is configured to automatically recognise mobile browsers and redirect them to the mobile site.

Of course this not the optimal solution for two reasons:

• On the front end: as an information provider you are complete ignoring all graphical, dynamic, interactive and web 2.0 functionality on the end user side. This means actually going back to the early days of the world wide web of static text pages.

• On the back end: duplicating system and content administration. In most cases it will come down to manually creating and editing HTML pages, because most website content management systems may not offer manual or automatic editing of pages for mobile access. Some systems offer automatic recognition of mobile browsers and display content in the appropriate format, like the WordPress plugin “WordPress Mobile Edition” that automatically shows a list of posts if mobile browsers are detected. This is what happens on this blog.

SCCL App

Because of this situation we are witnessing a re-enactment of the client-server alternative to static HTML that I described previously: mobile apps! “Apps” is short for “applications“, apparently everything needs to be short in the mobile online web 2.0 age. Apps are installed on mobile devices, they run locally making use of the hardware, operating system and user friendly interface of the device, and they only connect to the internet for retrieving data from a database system in the cloud (on a remote server).
A disadvantage of this solution obviously is that you have to multiply development and maintenance in order to support all mobile platforms that your customers are using, or just support the most used platform (iPhone) and ignore the rest of your end users. Alternatively you can support one mobile platform with an app, and the rest with a mobile web site. Organisations have the choice of developing apps themselves from scratch, or using one of the commercial parties that offer library apps, such as Boopsie, Blackboard or the recently announced LibraryThing Anywhere, that is meant to offer both mobile web and apps for iPhone, Blackberry and Android.

Some examples:

• TU Delft mobile app for iPhone (powered by Blackboard). University wide, including library. Haven’t been able to test this because I have an Android phone. An Android version will be developed. For other devices they offer a mobile website.
• Duke University mobile app for iPhone. University wide, including library. For other devices they offer a mobile website.
• Santa Clara County Library mobile apps for iPhone and Android (powered by Boopsie).
• WorldCat Mobile (powered by Boopsie).

An alternative solution to the client-server and “dumbed down” models would be to use the new HTML5 and CSS3 options to create websites that can easily be handled by all PC and mobile webbrowsers alike. HTML 5 has geolocation options, and browsers are made location aware this way too. The iWebKit Framework is a free and easy package to create web apps compatible for all mobile platforms. See this demo on PC, iPhone, Android, etc.
Some say that HTML5/CSS3 will make apps disappear, but I suspect performance may still be a problem, due to slow connections. But it’s not only a technology issue. It’s also a matter of business models, as Owen Stephens and Till Kinstler pointed out.

Apps can be distributed for free by organisations that want to draw traffic to their own data, ignoring the open web. This method fits their clasic business model, as Till remarked, mentioning the newspaper business as an example.
But there is also another side to this: apps can be created by anybody, making use of APIs to online systems and databases, and be shared with others for free or for a small fee, as is the case with the iPhone Apps Store, the Android Market, the Nokia Ovi Store, or the newly announced Wholesale Applications Community (WAC). This model will never be possible with web based apps (like HTML5), because nobody has access to a system’s web server other than the system administrators. It is also much too complicated for developers and consumers of apps to host web apps on a server that mobile device users can connect too.
And there is more: independent developers are more likely to look beyond the boundaries of the classic model of giving access to your own data only. Third party apps have the opportunity to connect data from a number of data sources in the cloud in order to satisfy mobile user needs better. To take the newspaper business example, I mentioned this in my post “Mobile reading“: general news apps vs dedicated newspaper apps. The rise of the open linked data movement will only boost the development and use of the mobile client server model.

In my view there will be a hybrid situation: HTML5/CSS3 based web apps and local mobile apps will coexist, depending on developer, audience, and objectives.

What services library mobile apps should offer, including location awareness and linking data, is the topic of another post.

Old library, new library

Teylers museum library © Dymphie

On Sunday December 27, 2009 I was in the opportunity to visit the, otherwise closed, library of The Netherlands’ oldest museum Teylers museum in my home town Haarlem, together with a small group of Dutch library twitter people. We were very kindly shown around by librarian Marijn van Hoorn, who explained to us the library’s history and collection.

Now I’m not going to say something about the pleasant real life consequences of getting to know people in the virtual world (that has been done by @PeterMEvers already, in Dutch), or about the guided tour (already described very well by @underdutchskies in English and by @festinaatje and @ecobibl in Dutch). Also, none of the photos I made with my G1 phone are presentable; but you can have a look at the photos made by @Dymphie, @underdutchskies and @wbk500).

Instead, I will try to make a comparison between the old library’s course of life and the developments that modern libraries are going through, because I see some parallels there.

The museum was built in 1784 with money from the legacy of the wealthy banker and merchant Pieter Teyler van der Hulst, to preserve his collections and advance the arts and sciences. The museum’s library was established in 1826 to house a separate collection of books and journals in the field of natural history (botany, zoology, paleontology and geology).

One of the objectives for the library was to have a complete collection of all journals in the area of natural history. In the beginning the library was only accessible by invitation, and the honoured guests were welcomed and assisted by the “caretaker” or “landlord” of the museum.
By the middle of the 19th century the library opened up to a more general public, that is to say teaching and research staff members of the emerging universities.
But from 1870 the importance of the Teylers library for university staff declined drastically, because the universities in The Netherlands started to organise academic libraries of their own. So the library closed its doors for regular visitors. The collection continued to be maintained and expanded until 1987, when it was no longer realistic to pursue completeness.
During the 1970’s the privately funded museum and library faced the threat of closing down because of the cost of preserving the historical buildings and collections. In the written library catalog (created over time by a large number of volunteers and employees) all items were annotated with an estimated value in case of forced sale of the collection.

Teylers library catalog © Dymphie

Fortunately the Dutch state decided to subsidise the historically and culturally valuable museum, and now Teylers is a very popular place, with a new wing with a large hall for temporary exhibitions, an educational section and a cafe.
The museum library is only open for visitors on request and on special occasions. The collection is not expanded anymore, but it is a very complete and valuable historical natural history collection, which is, among other things, used to organise temporary thematic exhibitions in the museum. Besides the natural history items there are also old maps and atlases and travel journals, like the James Cook journals by Sydney Parkinson that @jaapvandegeer drew my attention to.
The museum and the library are also looking to the future. Both museum objects and library items are being digitised, there is a European project for creating a website on ornithology that uses the library’s birds images, there is a new thematic website that combines documents, images, metadata from the museum, the library and external sources, the library catalog has been migrated to an Adlib system, and there is a Ning social network.

So, what are the parallels with modern libraries? First of all, it is clear that the influence of external developments on libraries is not something that is limited to the modern digital web age of Google. Just like Teylers library, modern public, academic and special libraries were at first targeted at a limited, well defined audience, and only accessible on location on specific times, after which their target audience and accessibility widened substantially. Catalogs and varying parts of the collection are available online to a global audience.
The external influence from competing university libraries is currently mirrored by the world wide web itself, with Google as one of the main external threats. I have written about this in my post “No future for libraries?“.
The two important issues here are: the effects on modern library collections and audience. Teylers library decided to stop building its own collection, but they keep using it in a number of ways: temporary physical thematic exhibitions, but also in new digital “mashed up” ways. This might be a good example for modern libraries to follow: make use of modern technologies to reuse existing collections to create virtual online thematic aggregations of data, texts, images, etc. See also my post “Collection 2.0“.
As for modern libraries’ response to changing audiences: proceeding with new ways of using their collections will draw new customers anyway. But it is equally important to find other ways to “go where your users are”, like being on social networks like the Teylers Ning site. One of the most important moves in the near future will be mobile presence.

Teylers library shows us that there may be a new life for old libraries.

Just in time or just in case?

Metasearch vs. harvesting & indexing

The other day I gave a presentation for the Assembly of members of the local Amsterdam Libraries Association “Adamnet“, about the Amsterdam Digital Library search portal that we host at the Library of the University of Amsterdam. This portal is built with our MetaLib metasearch tool and offers simultaneous access to, at the moment, 20 local library catalogues.

A large part of this presentation was dedicated to all possible (and very real) technical bottlenecks of this set-up, with the objective of improving coordination and communication between the remote system administrators at the participating libraries and the central portal administration. All MetaLib database connectors/configurations are “home-made”, and the portal highly depends on the availability of the remote cataloging systems.

I took the opportunity to explain to my audience also the “issues” inherent in the concept of metasearch (or “federated search“, “distributed search“, etc.), and compare that to the harvesting & indexing scenario.

Because it was not the first (nor last) time that I had to explain the peculiarities of metasearch, I decided to take the Metasearch vs. Harvesting & Indexing part of the presentation and extend it to a dedicated slideshow. You can see it here, and you are free to use it. Examples/screenshots are taken from our MetaLib Amsterdam Digital Library portal. But everything said applies to other metasearch tools as well, like Webfeat, Muse Global, 360-Search, etc.

The slideshow is meant to be an objective comparison of the two search concepts. I am not saying that Metasearch is bad, and H&I is good, that would be too easy. Some five years ago Metasearch was the best we had, it was a tremendous progress beyond searching numerous individual databases separately. Since then we have seen the emergence of harvesting & indexing tools, combined with “uniform discovery interfaces”, such as Aquabrowser, Primo, Encore, and the OpenSource tools VuFind, SUMMA, Meresco, to name a few.

Anyway,  we can compare the main difference between Metasearch and H&I to the concepts “Just in time” and “Just in case“, used in logistics and inventory management.

With Metasearch, records are fetched on request (Just in time), with the risk of running into logistics and delivery problems. With H&I, all available records are already there (Just in case), but maybe not the most recent ones.

Objectively of course, H&I can solve the problems inherent in Metasearch, and therefore is a superior solution. However, a number of institutions, mainly general academic libraries, will for some time depend on databases that can’t be harvested because of technical, legal or commercial reasons.

In other cases, H&I is the best option, for instance in the case of cooperating local or regional libraries, such as Adamnet, or dedicated academic or research libraries that only depend on a limited number of important databases and catalogs.

But I also believe that the real power of H&I can only be taken advantage of, if institutions cooperate and maintain shared central indexes, instead of building each their own redundant metadata stores. This already happens, for instance in Denmark, where the Royal Library uses Primo to access the national DADS database.

We also see commercial hosted H&I initiatives implemented as SaaS (Software as a Service) by both tool vendors and database suppliers, like Ex Libris’ PrimoCentral, SerialSolutions’ Summon and EBSCOhost Integrated Search.

The funny thing is, that if you want to take advantage of all these hosted harvested indexes, you are likely to end up with a hybrid kind of metasearch situation where you distribute searches to a number of remote H&I databases.

Explicit and implicit metadata

Tagged © funkandjazz

On August 17, after I tested a search in our new Aleph OPAC and mentioned my surprise on Twitter, the following discussion unfolded between me (lukask), Ed Summers of the Library of Congress and Till Kinstler of GBV (German Union Library Network):

• lukask: Just found out we only have one item about RDF in our catalogue: http://tinyurl.com/lz75c4
• edsu: @lukask broaden that search http://is.gd/2l6vB
• lukask: @edsu Ha! Thanks! But I’m sure that RDF will be mentioned in these 29 titles! A case for social tagging!
• edsu: @lukask or better cataloging
• edsu: @lukask i guess they both amount to the same thing eh?
• lukask: @edsu That’s an interesting position…”social tagging=better cataloging”. I will ask my cataloguing co-workers about this specific example
• edsu: @lukask make sure to wear body-armor
• lukask: @edsu Yes I know! I will bring it up at tomorrow’s party for the celebration of our ALEPH STP (after some drinks…)
• tillk: @edsu @lukask or fulltext search… SCNR…
• edsu: @tillk yeah, totally — with projects like @googlebooks and @hathitrust we may look back on the age of cataloging with different eyes …
• lukask: @tillk @edsu Fulltext search yes, or “implicit automatic metadata generation”?

What happened here was:

• A problem with findability of specific bibliographic items was observed: although it is highly unlikely that books about the Semantic Web will not cover RDF-Resource Description Framework, none of the 29 titles found with “Semantic Web” could be found with the search term “Resource Description Framework“; on the other side, the only item found with “Resource Description Framework” was NOT found with “Semantic Web“. I must add that the “Semantic web” search was an “All words” search. Only 20 of the results were indexed with the Dutch subject heading “Semantisch web” (which term is never used in real life as far as I know; the English term is an international concept). Some results were off topic, they just happened to have “semantic” and “web” somewhere in their metadata. A better search would have been a phrase search (adjacent) with “semantic web” in actual quotes, which gives 26 items. But of these, a small number were not indexed with subject heading “Semantisch web“. Another note: searching with “RDF” gets you all kinds of results. Read more on the issue of searching and relevance in my post Relevance in context.

• Four possible solutions were suggested:

1. social tagging
2. better cataloging
3. fulltext searching
4. automatic metadata generation

Social tagging
Clearly, the 26 items found with the search “Semantic web” are not indexed by the “Resource description framework” or “RDF” subject heading. There is not even a subject heading for “Resource description framework” or “RDF“. In my personal view, from my personal context, this is an omission. Mind you, this is not only an issue in the catalogue of the Library of the University of Amsterdam, it is quite common. I tried it in the British Library Integrated Catalogue with similar results. Try it in your own OPAC!
I presume that our professional cataloging colleagues can’t know everything about all subjects. That is completely understandable. I would not know how to catalog a book about a medical subject myself either! But this is exactly the point. If you allow end users to add their own tags to your bibliographic records, you enhance the findability of these records for specific groups of end users.
I am not saying that cataloguing and indexing by library specialists using controlled vocabularies should be replaced by social tagging! No, not at all. I am just saying that both types of tagging/indexing are complementary. Sure, some of the tags added by end users may not follow cataloging standards, but who cares? Very often the end users adding tags of their own will be professional experts in their field. In any case, items with social tags will be found more often because specific end user groups can find them searching with their own terms.

Better cataloging
I suppose Ed Summers was trying to say the same thing as I just did above, when he commented “or better cataloging, I guess they both amount to the same thing eh?“, which I summarised as “social tagging=better cataloging“, but he can correct me if I’m wrong.
Anyway, I hope I made it clear that I would not say “social tagging=better cataloging“, but rather “controlled vocabularies+social tagging=better cataloging“.
Or alternatively, could we improve cataloging by professional library catalogers? I must admit I do not know enough about library training and practice to say something about that. I am not a trained librarian. Don’t hesitate to comment!

Fulltext searching
Is fulltext searching the miracle cure for findability problems, as Till Kinstler seems to suggest? Maybe.
Suppose all our print material was completely digitised and available for fulltext search, I have no doubt that all 26 items mentioned above (the results of the “semantic web” all words search) would be found with the “resource description framework” or “rdf” search as well. But because fulltext search is by its very nature an “all words” search, the “rdf” fulltext search would also give a lot of “noise”, or items not having any relation to “semantic web” at all (author’s initials “R.D.F”, other acronyms “R.D.F.”, just see RDF in the BL catalogue). Again, see my post Relevance in context for an explanation of searching without context.
Also, there will be books or articles about a subject that will not contain the actual subject term at all. With fulltext search these items will not be found.
Moreover, fulltext searching actually limits the findable items to text, excluding other types, like images, maps, video, audio etc.
This brings me to the “final solution”:

Automatic metadata generation
Of course this is mostly still wishful thinking. But there are a number of interesting implementations already.
What I mean when I say “(implicit) automatic metadata generation” is: metadata that is NOT created deliberately by humans, but either generated and assigned as static metadata, or generated on the fly, by software, applying intelligent analysis to objects, of all types (text, images, audio, video, etc.).
In the case of our “rdf” example, such a tool would analyse a text and assign “rdf” as a subject heading based on the content and context of this text, even if the term “rdf” does not appear in the text at all. It would also discard texts containing the string “rdf” that refer to something completely different. Of course for this to succeed there should be some kind of contextual environment with links to other records or even other systems to be able to determine if certain terminology is linked to frequently used terms not mentioned in the text itself (here the Linked Data developments could play a major role).
The same principle should also apply to non-textual objects, so that images, audio, video etc. about the same subject can be found in one go. Google has some interesting implementations in this field already: image search by colour and content type: see for example the search for “rdf” in Google Images with colour “red”and content type “clip art”.
But of course there still needs a lot to be done.

No future for libraries?

Will library buildings and library catalogs survive the web?

© Moqub

Some weeks ago a couple of issues appeared in the twitter/blogosphere (or at least MY twitter/blogoshere) related to the future of the library in this digital era.

• There was the Espresso book machine that prints books on demand on location, which led to questions like: “apart from influencing publishing and book shops, what does this mean for libraries?“.
• There was a Twitter discussion about “will we still need library buildings?“.
• There was another blog post about the future of library catalogs by Edwin Mijnsbergen (in Dutch) that asked the question of the value of library catalogs in relation to web2.0 and the new emerging semantic web.

This made me start thinking about a question that concerns us all: is there a future for the library as we know it?

To begin with, what is a library anyway?

For ages, since the beginning of history, up until some 15 years ago, a library was an institution characterised by:

© Mihai Bojin

• a physical collection of printed and handwritten material
• a physical location, a building, to store the collection
• a physical printed or handwritten on site catalog
• on location searching and finding of information sources using the catalog
• on site requesting, delivery, reading, lending and returning of material
• a staff of trained librarians to catalog the collection and assist patrons

The central concept here is of course the collection. That is the “raison d’être” of a library. The purpose of library building, catalog and librarians is to give people access to the collection, and provide them with the information they need.

Clearly, because of the physical nature of the collection and the information transmission process the library needed to be a building with collection and catalog inside it. People had to go there to find and get the publications they needed.

If collections and the transmission of information were completely digital, then the reason for a physical location to go to for finding and getting publications would not exist anymore. Currently one of these conditions has been met fully and the other one partly. The transmission of information can take place in a completely digital way. Most new scientific publications are born digital (e-Journals, e-Books), and a large number of digitisation projects are taking care of making digital copies of existing print material.
Searching for items in a library’s collection is already taking place remotely through OPACs and other online tools almost everywhere. A large part of these collections can be accessed digitally. Only in case a patron wants to read or borrow a printed book or journal, he or she has to go the library building to fetch it.

All this seems to lead to the conclusion that the library may be slowly moving away from a physical presence to a digital one.

But there is something else to be considered here, that reaches beyond the limits of one library. In my view the crucial notion here is again the collection.
In my post Collection 2.0 I argue that in this digital information age a library’s collection is everything a library has access to as opposed to the old concept of everything a library owns. This means in theory that every library could have access to the same digital objects of information available on the web, but also to each other’s print objects through ILL. There will be no physically limited collection only available in one library anymore, just one large global collection.

In this case, there is not only no need for people to go to a specific library for an item in its collection, but also there is no need to search for items using a specific library’s catalog.

Now you may say that people like going to a library building and browse through the stacks. That may still be true for some, but in general, as I argue in my post “Open Stack 2.0“, the new Open Stack is the Web.

© Nicole C. Engard

In the future there will be collections, but not physical ones (except of course for the existing ones with items that are not allowed to leave the library location). We will see virtual subject collections, determined by classifications and keywords assigned both by professionals and non-professionals.

On a parallel level there will be virtual catalogs, which are views on virtual collections defined by subjects on different levels and in different locations: global, local, subject-oriented, etc. These virtual collections and catalogs will be determined and maintained by a great number of different groups of people and institutions (commercial and non-commercial). One of these groups can still be a library. As Patrick Vanhoucke observed on Twitter (in Dutch): “We have to let go of the idea of the library as a building; the ‘library’ is the network of librarians“. These virtual groups of people may be identical to what is getting known more and more as “tribes“.

Having said all this, of course there will still be occurrences of libraries as buildings and as physical locations for collections. Institutions like the Library of Congress will not just vanish into thin air. Even if all print items have been digitised, print items will still be wanted for a number of reasons: research, art, among others. Libraries can have different functions, like archives, museums, etc. and still be named “libraries” too.
Library buildings can transform into other types of locations: in universities they can become meeting places and study facilities, including free wifi and Starbucks coffee. Public libraries can shift focus to becoming centres of discovery and (educational) gaming. Anything is possible.

It’s obvious that libraries obey the same laws of historical development as any other social institution or phenomenon. The way that information is found and processed is determined, or at least influenced, by the status of technological development. And I am not saying that all development is technology driven! This is not the place for a philosophy on history, economics and society.

Some historical parallels to illustrate the situation that libraries are facing:

• writing: inscribing clay tablets > scratching ink on paper > printing (multiplication, re-usability) > typewriter > computer/printer (digital multiplication and re-usability!) > digital only (computer files, blogs, e-journal, e-books)
• consumption of music: attending live performance on location > listening to radio broadcast > playing purchased recordings (vinyl, cassettes, cd, dvd) > make home recordings > play digital music with mp3/personal audio > listen to digital music online

From these examples it’s perfectly clear that new developments do not automatically make the old ways disappear! Prevailing practices can coexist with “outdated” ways of doing things. Libraries may still have a future.

In the end it comes down to these questions:

• Will libraries cease to exist, simply because they no longer serve the purpose of providing access to information?
• Are libraries engaged in a rear guard fight?
• Will libraries become tourist attractions?
• Will libraries adapt to the changing world and shift focus to serve other, related purposes?
• Are professional librarian skills useful in a digital information world?

I do not know what will happen with libraries. What do you think?