I work in a library at one of the agriculture and technology colleges in the SUNY system. Assuming that our campus survives to 2020 (I think we will, but you never know), and given that we are currently under renovation (my office is being moved as I write, on my laptop, in limbo), I don't know how much our building will change in nine years. Services, to be sure, will continue to evolve.
I work in circulation and interlibrary loan. The migration to an online world has been continual; the catalog, indices, journals, and general workflow have all moved, in whole or part, to digital formats, and as ebooks proliferate, circulation adjusts.
It is possible that, in time, the only physical objects we will circulate will be equipment and realia. I don't think we'll reach that point in nine years. The reason is very simple: there are thousands upon thousands of books that are not yet in digital format, will not be in nine years, and may not be until their copyright finally expires. Google has killed its newspaper digitization project. Their book scanning project isn't faring well in court, either. Publishers are slowly moving their content onto various digital platforms, but older titles are hit or miss. C. S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower books only came out for the Kindle platform in the past three months; when I looked for them to read over Christmas break, I had noticed that they weren't there. (Not that I have a Kindle, but books I want to read not being available gives me a reason to procrastinate getting an e-reader.)
One of the comments from the Thomas Frey interview jumped out at me: "This may sound a bit odd, but libraries are really a life form."
No, no. It doesn't sound odd at all. That's Ranganathan's fifth law of library science: "The library is a growing organism." The fifth law is a good chunk of why I am so optimistic about the future of libraries. The people in them, although we sometimes get attached to and bogged down by "the way it's always been done," generally adapt to the changing face of information, figure out how to organize it, and help our patrons interface with it.
A lot of people, Frey included, seem to get hung up on the library as place. What's going to happen to the library building? Frankly, where we do what we do is the least of our concern. We can make the space fit what we do, and vice versa, whether it's by weeding and shifting the books around so we can fit in more people space, or by spending part of our time mobile across campus.
Frey saw the future of education as transitioning to extremely individualized programs, but just from what I've observed of college students from the past five years, many students of this generation seem to prefer to work in groups of three to six. The library is popular as a place for them: we have wireless access, we have the print materials if they need them, and we have large tables and group seating space.
The transition to digital materials is certain to continue, but as I've said, we won't be entirely digital in only nine years. Copyright law and the specialized nature of many academic libraries' collections will keep our print collections going strong for quite some time down the road. One of our collections that I anticipate remaining in paper form for quite a while is our juvenile book collection. Our students use the Caldecott medal books heavily every semester, and I can't imagine titles that rely heavily on color images moving en masse to digital formats soon. I have no doubt that publishers' new titles will start going digital only, or print-on-demand as the only paper option, relatively soon, but their backlists may take decades to fully bring into the digital world.
I'm one of those people who thinks old books still have value; at the same time, I'm a fairly aggressive weeder. If someone else still has a copy, and we're not using it here, let someone else get stuck with the last-in-OCLC copy. Some titles, sure, become obsolete and useful mostly to someone doing a historical retrospective of the development of a field. Others, however, become invaluable when you need a piece of information in the context of an era... or when you need to fix a car from the 1960s.
I think of it in terms of the institutional knowledge you lose when someone leaves your organization; there is invariably something about a process or policy that only that person knew, and if enough people leave from one department, you may have to reinvent a couple wheels to get stuff done. The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project comes to mind. Something more relevant to what we do here at Cobleskill, perhaps, is heirloom varieties of vegetables and breeds of animals. How do you know what something is if it hasn't been widely grown in a hundred fifty years and no one still has a description of it? (I'd think that would be important for patent law, too.)
I'm not sure how resource sharing is going to change as more and more books go digital. Journals have a fairly standard lending system, given the CONTU guidelines and how Title 17 of the copyright law works. Copies of books is fairly straightforward too: one chapter only. This will be a problem when there isn't a physical book to send, and a library has electronic titles that don't work on the readers another library's patrons use. Publishers aren't likely to be worried about how libraries lend their ebooks to each other, because I very much doubt they want us to be doing so at all. If a library is licensing its ebooks, rather than purchasing them, there may be all kinds of other restrictions.
Ideally, libraries will be able to treat their ebooks the same way they do their physical books. Our Springer ebooks here at Cobleskill are not, as far as I know, limited by number of simultaneous users. They are all in PDFs by chapter. They don't get checked out to use them; you just sign in through the proxy server to authenticate yourself as a member of the campus community. This system actually works quite well for scholarly materials; it's more like a database than an ebook collection. (If my public library (SCPL) has ebooks, I can't find them on their website.)
From what I have heard secondhand about popular title ebook collections, they get checked out and have a limited number of simultaneous users. This model has the potential to supplement physical book interlibrary loan, although there would need to be some improvements in the cataloging in OCLC; attaching differently formatted items to the same record (for example, print book and ebook) would have to be extirpated. I've run into numerous problems with this habit when trying to borrow audiobooks for visually impaired patrons; we will request off the audiobook record and get sent the print book. If we reached a point where we could send each other access or the file for limited-use lending (similar to what OCLC is working on with ebook lending, no?), the records would have to be clean enough that we could tell what format we were going to be getting sent. (Save the time of the reader. And the staff processing the ILL requests who may have to ship something back that wasn't what we asked for. Can you tell this is one of my pet peeves?)
One of the facets that gets neglected in a lot of "Where will libraries be in [year]?" articles written by people not from the library world is that, regardless of what format materials end up in and where or how they're stored and accessed, people need help searching and interpreting what they find. Reference isn't going to die. Search algorithms certainly will continue to improve, but the secret to research has always been asking the right question. Sometimes you don't know the right question to ask until you've been searching a while, but, for example, it took me probably ten minutes to figure out how to phrase my query to find that link to the Lunar Orbiter Data Recovery Project, and it wasn't even the link I had in mind (I don't know which article I read on it now), and that was despite knowing that I wanted to find the article about how they converted the pictures of the moon that had been on old media that very few people still knew how to manipulate to recover it.
We have a lot of students who come here not familiar with citations. The whole Author. Title. Publication location: Publisher. Year. thing (or the APA style equivalent) didn't get drilled into their heads in high school, apparently. If you don't even understand the relationship between the creator and the work that you see in the bibliography for an article you read, how are you supposed to follow the citation trail? They do eventually get it, but they need someone to show them how, and it many cases here, that's us, the librarians. You can have an independent student on a highly individualized course of study, but someone's going to have to teach them at some point how to navigate research. Even if they were introduced to it in high school, it may not have stuck. It really doesn't matter how comfortable they are with the technology; students still have to be taught how to learn.
So, to stop rambling and come to some kind of summary:
What is this library going to look like in 2020?
Collections
- The print reference section will continue to shrink as the resources move online.
- Our print periodicals may or may not do the same, depending how many of them move to electronic (or electronic only) subscriptions. Some of them we will continue to get because print is the only option for them.
- Our popular reading collection will continue to gain in, ahem, popularity, but as ebooks and e-readers become more widespread, we'll probably have added a parallel electronic collection.
- Our print collection will change some: many titles we will keep or purchase because there is no digital equivalent, while other areas may be able to begin transitioning to higher percentage of digital titles.
- The juvenile book collection will likely be much the same.
- Hopefully by nine years from now we will have ditched VHS and be fully digital for our videos. (Hopefully we will have found the money to add streaming subscriptions for scholarly video content.)
Services
- Reference and instruction will continue to be in high demand; our students are not, some year, going to come here spontaneously knowing how to do research. (If they do, it will mean there have been huge changes in the secondary schools.)
- Circulation will continue its gradual decline for the print collection, and if we hit the point in the next nine years that most of our students come to school with laptops, our equipment circulation may actually decline as well.
- Interlibrary loan will probably tip back away from the article-favoring drift it has taken as, hopefully, we will be leveraging our SUNY consortial deals to pick up more database coverage. (If not, article borrowing and lending will probably be much more automated by that time, so it may not be as much of a workload issue as it would otherwise be.) Book interlibrary loan will probably begin evolving as ebooks proliferate. If e-readers become as popular as I keep hearing, there will be a huge demand for electronic books that the patron does not wish to purchase, but which their local library does not own. Libraries can't individually buy everything; that's part of why we have interlibrary loan. Whether ebooks become friendly to ILL (via license, through check-out models that limit accessibility if the title is "out" on ILL, etc.) or whether libraries will join new consortia or make new ebook purchases through existing consortial arrangements in order to have a larger number of titles available remains to be seen, but we will have to find some solution for the eventual day when popular titles become born-digital only and print is not an option - preferably before that day actually gets here.
- Cataloging will remain important; without good cataloging, finding anything quickly becomes difficult or impossible.
Spaces
- Our building probably won't change much from how it will be in August to what it will be like in 2020. We may move the floor plan around to make more space for students studying or working in groups, but we're probably still going to be here in nine years.
The format may change, but it's still information. And we're information scientists, right?
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