Convergence of Libraries and Technology Organizations: New Information Support Models

me.

1

Context for convergence: Arriving at the delta

Abstract:

Chapter 1 provides an overview of how library and technology organizations have evolved and responded to changes in economic and information systems that have historically supported and defined them. This analysis creates a context for understanding the market forces in play that create an environment conducive for convergence in information organizations.

Key words

information economy

service economy

history

evolution

professions

disruption

change

technology

assumptions

work processes

organizational structures

information

competition

Stereotypes – most people will deny having them, though we all do. The term librarian will often evoke an image of someone who is fastidious about organization, bibliophilic, scorns food and drink, loves peace and quiet, has hair in a bun, and yes, is pretty smart, but also potentially a little on the nerdy side. The term IT guy (or gal) quickly conjures a picture of someone who is obsessed with command lines, technophilic, loves Mountain Dew and cold pizza, avoids end-user interaction (or just about any social interaction at all), cares little for their hairstyle, and yes, is pretty smart, but also skews geek.

The terms information economy¹ and service economy² rattle around both the mainstream and business media as indicators of the underlying fuel upon which our overall economic engine runs in the twenty-first century. If you put two and two together, that means the nerds and the geeks have found themselves with an opportunity to sit in the captain’s chair during an information revolution (or at least the first mate’s chair). Librarians have excelled at collecting and describing information, while our new cousins the IT folks have provided the communication tools that make our collections and metadata useful in unbelievably powerful ways. And while there may be some sweet justice in this realization, many others are pulling at the rudder trying to take control of the direction we’re headed in. These new forces upon our profession will require us to think differently about how we do our jobs and how we relate to information itself. The business models upon which traditional print-based libraries have been founded are not continuing to function predictably in a digital world. We are undergoing fundamental disruptions that must redefine our organizations, workflows, services, and scholarship now and in the coming years if we are to remain at the controls of the digital information revolution.

Are the days of libraries numbered? Will Google, Facebook, Twitter, and the rest of the Internet corner the market on information services in the twenty-first century? No, not necessarily. Yet libraries need to confront our past, present, and future in very critical ways to ensure that we do not abdicate our role in providing information services to our constituents. Missteps may not spell the immediate doom of libraries, but they can relegate us to the information backwater of irrelevant or superfluous information providers, in a position of weakness and having to justify our very existence to those who pay our bills. Technology organizations are not in immediate danger of disappearing, though they are increasingly called upon to define themselves in the terms of the mission of their host organizations and are less and less important in their own right. For libraries to avoid the fate of increasing irrelevance, and for technology organizations to become better integrated in their host institutions, twenty-first-century library, staff, managers, and organizations must do the following:

1. Understand the evolution of the economies that drive information service professions, especially the implications of current service and information-based economies.

2. Identify, observe, and harness disruptive technologies in the field of information service, while investing resources in research and development of our own disruptive technologies to better influence the future of information services.

3. Rethink assumptions about work processes, organizational structures, and service models in designing library service organizations that are uniquely nimble, evolutionary, and innovative.

The library profession collectively wants to find a moment of stasis where we can catch our breath, and regain our bearings. However, the reality of our environment is that change is here, and will now always be a central tenet of our profession. We must be change agents for information, technology, and information technology. Technologists may be better positioned to live in this world, having experienced the rapid explosion of technology over the past forty years, yet expecting and managing change is a challenge everywhere. In our quest to become experts in all areas of information service, our skill sets quickly and routinely become out-of-date.

Imagine for a moment a picture of our stereotypical librarians and IT folks out for a whitewater-rafting excursion together. It is an entertaining thought – three worlds (libraries, technology, and the network) colliding in certainly unanticipated ways. The metaphor, however, holds true when considering the collision of traditional library/IT mindsets and the disruptive technologies that reinvent information dissemination economies today. We truly are shooting the rapids, looking for the sweet spot in the river, while trying to navigate a safe ride and stay on the raft, hoping to reach the calm river delta far ahead. The ride may not always be smooth, nor necessarily dry, but if we learn to adapt to our constantly changing surroundings, it won’t be fatal, and we might even have a little fun along the way. However, if we don’t watch the water, recognizing our relationship to it, we’ll no longer be shooting the rapids, and instead be shooting a waterfall. It could be a long, hard fall indeed.

A new economy with information as currency

Human society has been on a long and winding road in the development and evolution of our economic systems. The history of this economic evolution has been well studied in business and economics-focused literatures. Unfortunately, the social sectors, including libraries and education, often have not followed this literature closely because of an assumption that their service models are fundamentally different from those found in the for-profit or corporate worlds. In fact, social sectors need to pay quite close attention to the lessons learned by our corporate counterparts in understanding the marketplace, product development, and our consumers. It is precisely these businesses that are using this theory and history to capitalize on and profit from our information economy. Information has always been a currency, and one that libraries and technology organizations alike have directly benefited from because

they controlled access to information. In our new economy, this control has shifted to the for-profit sector through innovation and development. As we work to design information service organizations in all sectors of our economy for the future, shouldn’t we read and pay attention to what these market drivers are reading?

Our institutions of higher learning have historically accepted without controversy or debate the value and importance of libraries. Yet, with the rise of the Internet, and new corporate competitors to libraries, institutions have already begun to ask the questions Why can’t we outsource our library collection to Google? or Why can’t we subscribe to and index our journals through Google Scholar or the open web? or Why can’t we offer reference services through Yahoo! Answers or just point people to Wikipedia? or Now why do we need a library again, especially one filled with books that are all (or soon will be) digitized? This risk is not confined to the academy. Public libraries and special libraries face their own versions of this crisis as citizens and employees also have new options delivered via the Internet to access information. There are many excellent responses to these questions that strongly support the current and future role of libraries, and we need to improve our ability to respond and make the case for information support in higher education.

Our libraries have long been at the heart of our institutions (civic and academic) both literally and figuratively, and we must not take for granted our role as information providers on our campuses. If we don’t rethink how to fill this growing and changing role, we run the risk of forfeiting our position to someone with a new model for providing these services. We must think of ourselves as competing directly in the free marketplace with our services and our scholarship. All it takes is one look at our cousins in bookstores to realize how Amazon has brought about a whole new way to do business, and we cannot dawdle in preparing a response. The consequences can be significant. We already have traded much of our privacy and autonomy to corporate information-based companies, principally on the Internet. We do so willingly to gain access to innovative, useful, and valuable services – some of these same services that libraries have long offered. Yet libraries have not innovated to develop those services to the next level. In their defense, doing so is an incredible challenge in a diverse and broad culture of different institutions with different missions. Yet organizations such as OCLC do have frameworks that offer opportunity for greater engagement, development, and cooperation. Others have stepped in to meet demand (aided by our technologist friends). They will continue to do so, increasingly bringing access to all information under corporate control. Inherently, this may not be always bad, but without a foil to ensure the long-term interests of public access are being met, there are disturbing tendencies in the corporate information economic model.

A glance over our shoulders: evolution of an information economy

Today’s information economy has everything to do with perhaps four events in the history of information: creation of language (oral communication), derivation of alphabets (written communication), the invention of printing and the printing press (mass communication), and the innovation of networked information through computers (electronic communication). In the age of oral communication, individuals took on the role of libraries through their ability to retain and recite massive epic stories from memory. With the transition to written communication and the ability for information to exist independently outside of those who created or received it, an opportunity for libraries was born. Not only could these collections gather information from many people into one physical place, but they could also for the first time allow information to transcend generations in its original form. The form of the media on which the information was stored is not relevant, though it certainly changed over time through various stages from clay to papyrus to parchment. Much of the control of this manuscript-bound information remained with the religious organizations, and over time with universities as well. Production was time-consuming, though eventually became more consistent as literacy grew and markets opened for