Future of Libraries

A few thoughts from Harvard academics on the future of libraries in digital times:

Who has the most scientific knowledge of large-scale organization, collection, and access to information? Libraries. A librarian can take a book, put it somewhere, and then guarantee to find it again. If you've got 16 millions items, that's a very big guarantee. We ought to be leveraging that expertise to deal with this new digital environment. That's a vision of librarian as specialists in organizing and accessing and preserving information in multiple media forms, rather than as curators of collections of books, maps, or posters.

Peter Bol, Harvard Professor of East Asian languages and civilizations

Internet search engines like Google Books fundamentally challenge our understanding of where we (librarians) add value to this process. Librarians have worked hard to assemble materials of all kinds so that it is 'not a random bunch of stuff,' but can actually support and sustain some kind of meaningful inquiry. What we're seeing now with mass digitization projects and the Internet generally is, 'Everything's out there.' And everything has equal weight. If I do a search on Google, I can get a scholarly journal. I can get somebody's blog posting...the notion of collection that's implicit in 'the world is at my fingertips' is diametrically opposed, really, to the notion of collection as 'consciously curated and controlled artifact.'
Even the act of reading for research is changed, Scholars poring through actual newspapers could see how [an item] was presented on the page, and the prominence it had, and the flow of content throughout a series of articles that might have to do with the same thing - then differentiate those from the books or other kinds of materials that talked about the same phenomenon. When you get into the Internet world, you tend to get a gazillion facts, mentions, snippets, and references that don't organize themselves in that same framework of prominence, and typology, and how stuff came to be, and why it was created, and what the intrinsic logic of that category of materials is. How and whether that kind of structuring logic can apply to this wonderful chaos of information is something that we're all trying to grapple with.

Dan Hazen, associate librarian of collection development for Harvard College

The role of the librarian is much greater in this digital era than it has ever been before. [Law students] try to use the same natural-language search techniques they learned from using Google, rather than thinking about research as a series of structured queries. It's not that we don't need libraries or librarians; it's that what we need them for is slightly different. We need them to be guides in this increasingly complex world of information and we need them to convey skills that most kids actually aren't getting at early ages in their education. I think librarians need to get in front of this mob and call it a parade, to actually help shape it.

John Palfrey, Ess Librarian and Professor of Law

The digital world of content is going to be overwhelming for librarians for a long time, just because there is so much. Therefore, librarians need to teach students now only how to search, but 'how to think critically about what they have found...what they are missing...and how to judge their sources.

Mary Lee Kennedy, executive director of knowledge and library services at Harvard Business School (By the way, we we can reconsider my title, I'd happily accept this one.)