the big picture: reflections on the future of libraries and librarians
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The Big Picture: Reflections on theFuture of Libraries and LibrariansEric Wainwright Deputy Director-Generalaa National Library of AustraliaPublished online: 28 Oct 2013.
To cite this article: Eric Wainwright Deputy Director-General (1996) The Big Picture: Reflections onthe Future of Libraries and Librarians, Australian Academic & Research Libraries, 27:1, 1-14, DOI:10.1080/00048623.1996.10754950
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The Big Picture: Reflections on the Future of Libraries and Librarians
ERIC WAINWRIGHT Deputy Director-General, National Library of Australia
ABSTRACT This is an edited version of a talk first given to the AUA University, College and Research Libraries Section, ACT Group, on 20 Apri/1995 and repeated on 17 August for staff of the National Library of Australia, and transcribed from that second presentation. It examines the probable impact of technological and social developments between now and the year 2010. All organisations will be subject to radical changes, with libraries facing more challenges than most. Librarians will have to unlearn some of their present attitudes and to realise that they are in the 'information understanding business', rather than in the business of supplying information, and be generally more flexible and adaptable.
The 'Big Picture' questions have always interested me. If there is any skill I have, it is being able to process a lot of information that wheels around in my head and out of which sometimes patterns come. That is one of the advantages of reading a lot and roaming over the network when I can find the time. And out of that non-purposive immersion in information, sometimes some different perspectives emerge. But it is dangerous to assume that there are any simple answers to complex issues and that we really do understand. I have been reading a couple of books recently; one was Paul Davies' Mind of God (1992) (before it was covered in the Weekend Australian Colour Supplement). There he reflects on the nature of science as explanation-there is a real question as to whether we have invented science as a convenient mechanism for describing the world, rather than it having an underlying explanatory function. It works beautifully-the amazing thing is that maths and science appear to explain everything. It is so convenient that you wonder whether it is simply an artefact of our minds that we have constructed so as to explain an inexplicable world. I am now half-way through John Taylor's When the Clock Struck Zero (1993) which is about the origins of the universe, superstrings and much more which I do not fully understand but find very interesting. Again, it goes back to the really difficult questions about 'who are we, where do we come from, why do we exist, how does consciousness exist'. If you think about all of these questions for more than a moment you will find that they are, of course, unanswerable but fascinating. It does force me to suggest to myself that I should be careful about saying anything very definite about the future.
Trends are easier and there is a lot of trend analysis in books of the type popularised by Naisbitt, the Tofflers and so on. That kind of book simply takes a global view of what is happening around the world and tries to make sense of it in terms of what Naisbitt calls megatrends, or big shifts. These are then held up as explanations rather than simplified descriptions of what is going on. And so we have a lot of talk these days about things like the rise in mobility, or north-south population shifts towards the equator and warmer climates, and what impact these have on nations. Another 'megatrend' is the clear mass customisation trend. Just to give one simple example, compare the number of products that you see in your supermarket now with, say, 20
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years ago. The increase is enormous, indicating the ability of technology to make a small amount of product efficiently for a very large market. And this then leads to the niche markets of various kinds-people are able to become very much more discriminating in the products and services they choose. They do not have to take the 'one size suits all' attitude that we used to have to put up with. Now all of these things are obviously broader trends which are going to have an impact on us as librarians and on the services we offer. In the little worlds of our own professions, we tend to forget that almost everything that is happening to us is happening to every other service industry all around the world. It is just that the way the broader trends are impacting is different in each place. We tend to think of our own problems as being different. When you look at some of the megatrends, you find that it is really not the case. However, it does not necessarily help to do all this analysis, because how fast change is going to happen, exactly the way in which it may happen in a given place, in a given nation, in a given industry, or in a given service like libraries, is much harder to predict.
The Impact of Technology We cannot avoid technology, of course, and there is a tendency for all of us in libraries to feel that we are technology-driven-and we are. We like to think that we have at least some say in how we control it, but technology is just rolling over us at the moment, and has been for some time, and we really have no option but to try and use it in the most effective way to improve services, rather than for its own sake. There are some technologies for libraries that are, in my view, absolutely key to what is happening :
• multi-level user interfaces (including GUis) • substantial workstation capabilities at user level • fast retrieval from massive data stores • national/global interoperability • standard search/retrieve protocols • transaction capabilities.
All these things are absolutely necessary for any kind of transition from a print to an electronic world. There has been much talk about technology changing libraries, at least since about 1950. Certainly the Royal Society Conference on Scientific Information in London in 1948 said a great deal about how print was going to be replaced. Of course, it has not happened. There is more print around than ever, there is vastly more information in general around. But one thing is clear: to date the electronic revolution, such as it is-and I hardly think it is a revolution so far-has not had much impact on the way most people interact with information and what lies behind information, knowledge and understanding. The reason is very simple if you look at the above technologies: they are not actually here yet. They have been promised in one form or another for a long time.
To take the first, what does a multi-level user interface mean? It means that any member of the public, from a four-year old child through to our oldest and most venerable citizens, should be able to interact with an electronic information source. Have you seen one interface yet that you actually like interacting with? Probably not. They have not been here in the form that even professionals like ourselves can use easily, let alone members of the general public without training. There is a long way to
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go. It will be very interesting to see whether Windows 95, with all its hype, does in fact present an interface for the mass of the public which will have a real impact upon the spread of networking in the population as a whole. Only a very small proportion of people have experienced any impact to date.
Substantial workstation capabilities at the user level-almost none of us have that. I have a reasonable 486 PC on my desk, and it is not good enough for what I want it to do. And I am one of the privileged. Almost nobody in the community yet has what they need to do this at the local level. We do not have enough storage capacity, we do not have enough manipulation capacity, we do not have the line speeds, and so on, that we need.
Very large cheap data stores are obviously very important to libraries because we handle huge amounts of information. It is absolutely no use throwing a computer at masses of text until we can do parallel processing, which is what is going to be done in the National Library's new service, World 1. Unless we can search masses of text in parallel, we cannot get real time retrieval. So we have not had the capability we need-even now we do not have it.
Global interoperability is obviously coming, but how many people in the world have Internet access at the moment? A very small proportion-in the Australian community my guess is that no more than 20%-30% of people have a PC at home, almost nobody has a modem at home, and even if they have a PC and a modem, it is not a combination that can usefully run something like the web browser Netscape, and unless it can do that, real Internet access is not possible.
Standard search and retrieval protocols-we are making progress on these. There is still quite a long way to go, as those of you concerned with preservation will know. The whole metadata area, the standards needed for long-term retrieval of electronic information, is at a very early stage of development. Inter-library loan protocols are hardly used anywhere in the world. There is much talk about search and retrieval protocol and Z39.50-but how many libraries have actually got a working operation?
Transaction capabilities-we have hardly started yet. By transaction capabilities I mean the ability to order and pay easily. These are only just coming on to the net. Operations like ABN have had to build their own crude billing capabilities for each system. Nobody should have to do that. We cannot interact with most of the public that way.
So it is hardly surprising that we have not experienced much effect on libraries so far through technological advances. You may think we have, but the process has hardly started because we have not had the technologies to do what we want. Full replacement of print will not occur until the following requirements have been met:
• All researchers are producing information in electronic form. • The electronic information produced can be accessed globally, regardless of the
particular way the information is stored. • The communication networks have sufficient bandwidth and protocol
standardisation for transmission of text and visual images at the rate required by users.
• Potential users of the information have the ability to access it effectively and also the capacity to continue to store and manipulate it locally.
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I personally doubt whether some printed publications will ever be replaced. It certainly will not be in my life-time, and I doubt whether in the life-time of anybody in this room There are some materials that nobody in their right mind would actually use in print form A lot of reference materials, such as abstracts and indexes-why would you use them in hard copy if you had an electronic form available? But I think that anything that is to be read serially, like a philosophical text for example, which is both complex and requires reading through rather than hopping about, is unlikely to be replaced. Probably novels also. For materials like that it is going to be very difficult to get the technology to the state at which we have a better format than a printed book: I mean the portability, the readability in any light, all those things.
The Effects of Networking Some broader technological changes that I think are important: networking does change the game. Global networking is going to have major effects in ways which are very difficult to predict. I do not know how long it is going to take-for most of us probably about another ten years before essentially we can reach anybody that we know in the world through networking. Librarians tend to think that networking is about access to information. It is not. Networking really is about communication, about putting people together in interest groups. If you look at the things that have been really successful on the net so far, they are email and discussion groups-various forms of group work facilitation. The net breaks down the geographical barriers between people who feel they have something in common which they can explore together. The telephone did the same, but because a telephone is only basically a one-to-one channel even now, net discussion groups and group work facilitation have much more power since they can bring people together in a group.
I think we will find that the most significant impact of the network is that not that it improves our access to information-which it will, and is doing to some extent already-but that it allows everybody to publish. All of us automatically become publishers the moment we connect our machine to the network. What does this do to publishing, in the old sense? We do not know how to deal with this just as we have never been particularly good in libraries in dealing with manuscripts. We have always had to be highly selective. How does one select publishing of lasting value when every individual has the potential for world-wide distribution of what they produce? How do we get at it, how do we organise it in terms of distributed access, how do we select? Do we want to select? The answers are not obvious.
As an aside, networking is not about lines being laid everywhere. My guess is that the majority of networking in the next century will have no cables at all. It will be through mobile communication. We are finding ways of splitting up the spectrum digitally much more effectively than we have been used to with analogue radio. My guess is also that the costs of trying to get universal cable access world-wide are such that we cannot possibly lay all the cable that would be needed to do that. If we look at what is happening in the developing countries, many are going straight from nothing to radio, satellite TV and mobile-they are simply not laying telephone systems, and it is clear that a lot of networking will be mobile-based. Just coming on to the market in Australia is the capacity to link a PC into a digital phone. Then the signal goes up from the digital phone to the satellite, and comes down that way, so that you can retain network access in your car. Why you should want it in your car is another question, but you can have it there or wherever you are on fieldwork.
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The other impact of networking is that it clearly forces a change in the product, because for something to move over a network. it has to be digitised. What we are seeing is the gradual digitisation of everything, not just the text that we have been used to, but a whole range of multimedia, and indeed multimedia representations of artefacts. This is very significant for museums, galleries and such like, and of the broadcast industry generally.
Economic and Social Trends We need to realise that there are many other trends which are affecting us too, which are basically economic rather than technological. Information itself is becoming an economic driver. When we talk about 'clever countries', about benchmarking, about world best practice-behind all of these buzz words is an implication that we need information to be able to make judgements. What we are seeing for the first time is what I would call the mainstreaming of information. Libraries and information service providers are moving out of their little comers to becoming very important, because the ability to obtain, analyse and distribute information effectively is underlying government and commercial operation. It always was important, but most people did not realise it. It is not surprising that we are seeing a huge interest in information issues starting to come through in government and in the private sector. There are, broadly speaking, several reasons for this :
• information as an economic driver: 'mainstreaming' of libraries/information providers; commoditisation of information: intellectual property right struggles and the standards battles
• leisure time as a major marketplace: entertainment value; importance of home delivery and the critical ease of use
• changing balance of time vs cost: self-service vs intermediaries and 'one-stop' services
• rise of consumer choice: mass customisation; niche marketing and customers as development partners
• global networking effects: no geographical monopolies; virtual organisations; staff empowerment and role blurring for all in the information chain.
The very survival of most private sector organisations is becoming dependent on how well they deal with the information problem The efficiency of government and its ability to reduce taxes is becoming more and more dependent on how well it handles its information and delivers networked services. The value of information is rising in people's perceptions. This has side effects, such as the copyright wrangles. Intellectual property rights are becoming important, whereas in the past they were a little sideshow for authors, whom nobody worried about because most of them never made any money anyway. Today intellectual property rights are mainstream and we are seeing the start of the economic battles over information. Libraries are not going to be immune from this, and we shall need to question all the old assumptions about what we can do with information.
Another area which is perhaps overlooked in libraries is standards. Libraries have always done their own thing about standards; we virtually invented standards for moving information around, with the creation of MARC formats. Library-based standards are now going to be forced into higher level international standards which
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suit everybody, not just the library sector. We are not going to be left alone and will have to fit into that wider environment. And we are not used to it-we are not used to playing in those pools where we can have a limited effect. We may pride ourselves that we know more about such standards than everybody else, but that will not get us anywhere.
Another economic driver is the rise of leisure time. There is no doubt that leisure is a major marketplace. This is partly to do with the ageing of the population and partly with the increasing number of people not in formal work. The rise of the cultural industry itself is a reflection of this. The business we are in, as part of wider cultural services, is having to compete for part of the time that people have available to do things other than formal work. The huge amount of money that goes into sporting activities is another reflection of the same issue. These are industries which did not exist in a serious sense a couple of decades ago. We are seeing entertainment becoming of high value. Therefore network delivery of various services to the home becomes very important, and we are going to have to ride on the back of these. Libraries will have to deliver to the home just like any other service-bread, milk, broadcast services and so on. Ease of use starts to become critical when people are weighing up uses of their leisure time. They only have so much of it. And the value of time versus cost is changing. Why the move from the little stores to supermarkets? It is the value of time. People only want to shop once a week if they can get away with it. What we are seeing is a move towards self-service right across our lives. Libraries are going to be affected by this, since we are not going to be able to sell our services unless we make it easy for people to use them Any library that claims its services have been easy to use has probably been fooling itself. Put yourself on the other side of the counter and find out how easy it is to use your own library.
I also think of the increasing impact of consumer power. This goes back to the mass customisation issue mentioned earlier. People now expect a choice between a range of providers and services. This is so in many areas where monopolies have existed, even natural monopolies like telecommunications or electricity. People are expecting a choice. Governments are forcing developments this way because they believe that giving people choice means more competition, therefore lower prices. In fact, the evidence does not show this always to be the case. But policy makers believe it to be so. So we are going to be working in a world where we have no natural monopolies. This is important to those of us at a national library, but probably important for most libraries, since they tend to assume they have a natural monopoly in relation to their own organisations.
Convergences Within institutions, there is a lot of blurring going on because of all of these trends. I do not claim to understand it all, but it does seem to me that there are a number of convergences going, particularly between:
• creator I publisher I distributor I organiser • separate formats • libraries I museums I galleries I archives • mass communications I individual information channels • communication I information access • public I private information channels
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• local/ remote-internal/ external.
Changes in the Publishing Chain Clearly the whole publishing chain has started to break down. The idea that there are clearly separate roles for the author, the publisher, what I would call a primary distributor like a bookseller, a secondary distributor-which is what a library is-and the user, has become untenable. With the network situation, we can put the author and user directly in contact with each other, and they both have the capacity to fill the gaps in between. They do not need any intermediaries-or do they? What is it that the intermediaries add? What do we as librarians add that provides value between the author and the user? They are often the same people anyway, as in most fields people are both consumers and providers of material.
Separate Formats There used to be a clear distinction between the roles of the library, the gallery and the museum If we are all just producing digital objects which may be accessed over the same network, by the same people all around the country, all round the world, what is now the difference in roles? Are we really in different businesses? If we go 20 years forward, is there going to be an Australian national cultural organisation of which the National Library is simply a sub-set? It seems that this question is going to impact on the whole range of cultural institutions. We are going to have more and more in common with people that we have not really had a very close relationship with, as everything becomes a visual object-a manuscript can be digitised, a picture can be digitised, an artefact can be digitised, and so on. We have tended in the past to build systems to process those things differently. We have to think very carefully as to whether the reasons why that happened are intrinsic and necessary, or just because of the accidents of different physical formats in the past which are no longer relevant. There obviously is not a yes/no answer, but the question must cause us to think about what we have been doing to date.
Mass Communication and Individual Information Channels This is the big battle at the moment. This area is what the pay TV wrangles are all about. What we are seeing is a move which has gone a little way in radio. Those of you who are older, think how many choices of communication media you had 20-30 years ago. Possibly, if you had been brought up in a small place as I was, you had two radio stations and no TV. Today in a large city in the United States, you possibly have over 100 TV channels, and perhaps 500 radio stations that you can pick up quite easily. What do you do with so much choice? What we are seeing is the ability of the consumer to choose from a very much wider range of communication/information services. We are seeing a move from the media with which we have been brought up ourselves, which have been essentially broadcast (we just sat there waiting to receive material that two or three organisations decided to give us), to being able to choose from a huge mass of offerings. Australia may try to prevent the rest of the world coming in, but it is going to happen. The global satellites are going to beam into this country and people will use them, regardless of how we try to control them Radio has already started to move that way, and it has become more interactive through a wide range of talk-back programs. As true interactive technology comes on stream, the dependence on one-way broadcast is going to break down further. Communications are going to be more individualised
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and more interactive. If you want weather, you will have a 24-hour weather channel. While nobody actually wants to watch the weather for 24 hours a day, what they do want is an immediate answer any time of day to their question, 'I wonder what the weather will be like?' We want to be able to turn on to the right channel, get the information, get off again and go on to something else. That is what choice and niche marketing are all about.
Public and Private I believe that the public and private sector division is starting to break down. As one example, look what we are seeing in the multimedia, with all the hype of the Cultural Statement. Almost everything in the Cultural Statement is designed to force public and private sector organisations to work together in the development and distribution of products and services. Organisations like libraries are going to be working more and more in alliances. Similarly with outsourcing in the public sector. What is our core business? Get somebody else to do what is not our core business, because they do it better? Almost certainly it will be a private organisation of some kind. Relationships form which suit all parties. The idea of distinct public and private sectors has been suspect for a long time, but it is becoming more challengeable for a range of economic and technological reasons.
Local/Remote-Internal/External Local and remote convergence is very important to libraries. If distance is not a barrier to the use of our services, our first thought is 'great, we can reach many more people'. It is happening with some other organisations much faster, but globalisation and international competition applies to us as well, because delivery is just as easy down the next street or across the rest of the world, once a service is networked-and the cost is the same. I predict that within about five years telephone charges will be subscription-based, as the online information services are moving to now. We will pay so many dollars a year, no matter how much we use the telephone, because the band width is sitting in the ground there unused. We are going to move from an era where communications have been regarded as expensive and in short supply to one where there will be more telecommunications capacity than anybody can use. And communication costs will become an insignificant part of our total costs, with easy distribution anywhere in the world.
Effects on Organisations I am not sure what all this does to organisations. Professional people have always tended to be in two minds. Most of us work for an employer, but we are in professions as well. Sometimes these two sets of loyalties pull us in different directions, and there can be strains. Probably the best examples are university academics. Most academics do not feel a primary loyalty to their university, but to their professional academic grouping, their peer group. They regard themselves as wandering economists or wandering historians. They do not say 'I'm a member of the University of Melbourne'. I suspect this attitude is already spreading to other groups. Those of you who have become regular users of network discussion lists probably are starting to build up closer relationships with people outside your own organisations, and this is happening at all levels of organisations. What the long-term effect of this is on those people-whether it builds peer group 'like-mind' loyalties which run right across organisational boundaries-! do not know, but I suspect it is going to go that way. Many organisations are going to be virtual rather than located in
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one place, with staff all over the world who see themselves as an organisation at a particular point in time. What we are starting to see on the net is organisations that have no location at all. There are some good examples in the USA of small businesses that have established as a group of people in different cities, simply working as a networked group, building web pages and a service behind that. They have no offices and no structure; there is simply an agreement that they will work as a collaborative group to sell a range of services. In some cases they may not even have met, they just know that they can rely on the others to do the job. This starts to make some of the old certainties about what constitutes an organisation questionable.
I also think generally network access does a whole lot of things to staff within institutions. Most organisations had a hierarchical nature to their information flows. Printed information comes in at the top-a huge volume of mail that comes onto the boss' desk every day and then gets distributed. Usually then it will go down to the next level, and some of that goes down to the next level, and so on. That is how paper-based information systems within organisations worked. With an electronic system information flow cuts right across levels. I suspect this tends to make everybody better informed. Whether it makes us all wiser is another issue, but it certainly means that we have access to more information than we used to, and we are more capable of being upto-date with what is happening, almost up to the minute. That potentially makes anyone an expert. What it does to relationships and authority chains and so on, I do not know. We have not had enough experience yet.
Effects on Libraries However, let us look at libraries. As I have said many times in different places, a library is a mechanism not a place; its function is to link people with the information they need. I keep stressing this because for most people, including perhaps librarians, the idea that a library is a place is very strong. But that is not what it really is. It has been a place because it dealt with printed books. Now books have certain qualities :
• they may be used only by one reader at a time • they are physically bulky • copies are relatively expensive • they can be related physically only in a linear sequence.
If you think about the book as a physical object, then a library is a natural consequence. Because with a book only one person can use it at a time. That leads to requirements such as space for reading, as a reader cannot take the whole library home. He or she needs a certain amount of space, usually a desk and a chair, and enough room not to fall over somebody else. Books are bulky and therefore any sizeable number of books leads to a sizeable amount of storage for keeping them, so we need to have a large collection storage space. Because of the bulk of printed books, their storage facilities automatically must be remote from where most users are, because you have to build a large facility and people are not likely to be living or working in that space. Libraries are expensive because once they have any sizeable collection, you have to put some kind of protective system around them, because books are quite expensive to produce, even today, and in the past were relatively even more expensive. They were hugely expensive items for most people before this century. Therefore we
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needed to protect them. so a lot of the things that we built around us in libraries arise from a past when books were very valuable items. Most books are not valuable today. In fact, most people throw them out of their houses regularly.
Because books were expensive items, resource sharing became very important. Each book bought had quite a significant purchase, processing and housing cost. Also, books can only be related to each other physically in a linear relationship. You have to put each one on a shelf, with one on one side and one on the other. With electronic information and hypertext links, none of that is relevant. With books, we had to invent classification schemes. We went wrong in trying to do two separate things with classification schemes-to make books findable at the shelf, and also create a general subject retrieval device. The schemes usually failed miserably to do both effectively.
The end point of starting with a printed book is that you finish up with a library as a place. But this is based on the book technology and not an intrinsic necessity. There are a number of other reasons why we had libraries. Because of the expense of books, and the distribution mechanism for physical items, the point of use is usually a long way from the point of production of a printed item. Therefore most people relied on a system whereby somebody filled in the gap between where the book was produced and where it might be used-often in another part of the world at a much later time. Libraries have performed that role. The expense issue is obvious, as people could not afford to buy all the printed items they needed. The problem of remote supply has also created a whole series of processes which libraries have developed to try to solve that problem-from purchase in advance through to better on-demand document supply systems. The library is the link which overcomes the gap between the time at which a book is produced and the time at which it is used, as well as the gap between the place where it is produced and the place where it is used, and the cost barrier that most people cannot possibly purchase the number of print items that they actually want. That is basically why we have libraries in their traditional form.
If the role of libraries has been to close those gaps, the real question now is 'how do we perform that role in an electronic environment, as well as with print?'. Because print is not going to go away. But we know fairly well how to provide print-over the years we have learned quite a lot. What we do not know yet is how that gap-filling role is best played by an intermediary organisation like a library in an electronic world. Essentially we have two systems running in parallel at the moment, as illustrated on next page.
We have the old print system running as it did before, and then we have this Internet cloud, directly linking the user and the producer of information together in a productive way. As you know, the Internet works brilliantly sometimes, and absolutely fails at others, depending on what you are trying to do, and what kind of information you are trying to get together. Very few librarians have had much impact on the Internet. We should have had an impact earlier, and we are going to have to from now on. Otherwise we cannot put our clients in touch with electronic information in an organised way. The present tools are simply not good enough to do that.
Unfortunately, this is going to be much more complicated than in the past. If you think about it, until recently we usually had only one choice for the item that we could provide to somebody, that is, a printed item. But now we may have several different choices of how we give users access to the same text:
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• print acquired ahead of demand • print acquired on demand (loan or copy) • electronic copy acquired ahead of demand
- within library (eg licensed CD-ROM) - on campus network (several formats) - on national network (eg current contents)
• electronic copy accessed on demand - via commercial document suppliers (eg Uncover) - via Internet servers (usually free).
POTENTIAL USERS
0
0
PRESENT SITUATION
INTERNET
Reasonably standard Interlinking and search/retrieve protocols
Distributer&
Wainwright: The Big Picture
PRODUCERS OF
INFORMATION
We can do what we have always done-buy the journal, have it on the shelf, let users come and read it. If we cannot buy it, we try to get it through the document supply system when wanted. The relative costs of the two alternatives have been changing over many years, and article-on-demand systems have become much better. But we also have a range of electronic alternatives. We can buy a stand-alone CD-ROM version, or network a CD-ROM version for which we have a license to distribute up to five, ten, or perhaps 20 people simultaneously. We can have the same item on our local area network for the institution, just sitting on magnetic disk, because it is worth buying for the institution as a whole. We can make national network arrangements like the National Library's World 1 or the universities' datasets service, and so on. We are seeing a range of commercial document suppliers coming into the market, both print and electronic-based. And then we have the Internet, where a lot of material is available for free anyway, because it is sitting on somebody's server. The problem for us of trying to link the user with the material is which method do we use, when the economics of this and the options available are changing daily. It is a much more
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complex world. We now have to give users not only what they want but in the form they want it. For some, it may be that they want it immediately because they have to have it-the key factor is speed, and cost does not matter. Or the user may be somebody on the other end of the spectrum, for whom it does not matter how long supply takes but who is not prepared to pay anything for it. We are trying to meet an increasing range of demands. Again, this is the expansion of user choice that I mentioned earlier. We cannot just say 'oh, we only do this', otherwise clients go away, because there is no longer a natural monopoly, somebody else gets the business.
While their strength has been the speed of local supply as against alternatives, the current weaknesses of print-based libraries are:
• their dependence on producers for materials • their role as a secondary distributor • users have to visit the library.
Libraries are now in quite a weak position. As a secondary distributor, we are dependent on how the print production system works. We have been a secondary distributor relying on authors, producers and usually some kind of primary distributor such as a bookseller. Our strength has been rapid local supply, but as print costs relatively have been going up, our local supply ability has been coming down. So our traditional strength has steadily weakened. A real killer for us is users having to visit the library. A trend right across all forms of service is increasing convenience. To go five or ten miles to a library across a busy city is not a fun thing and is likely to be a barrier, unless you happen to be doing it because you are also doing some shopping, or something else. If this is the case the location of libraries becomes a crucial issue, too. It always was, but it becomes even more crucial now because a lot of library use is going to occur only because people are doing something else as well in the locality.
The Way Ahead What do librarians do about all this? Just selecting some of the things that I have mentioned so far is enough to make you realise that it is a difficult time. The old solutions are not always going to work, and we really have to think very hard about what are the key values we can provide to people. What are the key skills, what are the things that we add to the whole process when other organisations will be competing across everything that we do? If we go ahead ten years I can guarantee that everything libraries do somebody else in Australia will also be doing. In addition, it is also likely that others will be coming in from outside Australia into what we might regard as 'our' market place. One thing we have to think about is the kind of people we are. Many of us are librarians because we actually have some affinity with books and the print culture in general. We may even be here because we are more interested in working with books than with clients, that is we actually enjoy working with materials more than working with clients who have service needs that we really wish we did not have to supply. In some cases, we may be very hopeful that somebody else will come and offer the same service! I think there is something in that. Many librarians, I suspect, have a somewhat elitist attitude towards print, as compared with multimedia, which has meant, up to now, film and television. It is very easy to be supercilious about television, but much less easy to be supercilious about some really wonderful multimedia content that is coming on stream, and to argue that clients would be better
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Wainwright: The Big Picture
off reading a book. We are not going to be able to say that any more. We will have to think very hard about the whole self-service, client orientation issue if we want to remain in business. As librarians we are generally not very good at promoting ourselves. Many of us work in libraries because we do not like working in salesoriented roles, and yet if we are in a competitive situation, a certain amount of promotion and sales-related attitude becomes necessary.
The kinds of skills that are very good for organising information are not necessarily good for dealing with people. Some of these issues are going to have to be addressed harder than they have been in the past. When there is more and more information, the extent to which one can be a generalist as opposed to an information specialist is another issue we will have to face. Is the major role of the 'librarian' going to be as a subject specialist support person for a particular market place or particular group of people? Do we all have to become special librarians or whatever the modem equivalent is? And while we have always prided ourselves on being neutral, I wonder whether that also may need to be looked at. Certainly, with more and more complex information sources out there, people are going to be wanting somebody to have done the preprocessing in a useful way for them Pre-processing can mean a whole lot of thingsan exhibition is pre-processing of collections, a publication is pre-processing of material brought together in a convenient and more accessible way for a different audience. Publishing and exhibition are really no different from cataloguing. lbey are organising materials for different market places. The purpose is very similar, but very often people do not see it that way. The extent to which librarians will have to be engaged in analysis of information, or even advocacy, needs careful consideration.
At the end of the day, I do not know what we should do. I think most successful libraries will probably continue to be successful because they do the things they have always done. They have to focus on the people they are trying to serve and be extremely service oriented. We have always worked collaboratively, although in future collaboration is likely to be with other organisations and perhaps different types of organisations to those that we have been used to. Flexibility is going to be important. Developments are moving very fast. Anybody who tells you that they really know what is it is going to be like in five years' time, does not even understand the issues. So we are going to have to be flexible. That may be a problem-many libraries have a number of inflexibilities. What pays off is openness of mind. It means all of us acquiring the skills that are necessary to wrestle with all this change, find ways through it, take decisions and be motivated to deliver better service with the new opportunities available. These are things that apply to all organisations of course. But it seems to me that they become more important when developments are moving so fast. The importance of a technical skill seems to me to become less in the environment that we are in, because the underlying techniques and technologies are changing. I see the main future roles for librarians being three:
• interface construction. • training • guidance (navigation)
These are what we have always done. but in different ways. Interface construction we used to call cataloguing-that is putting a system in place which fills the gap between
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the person and the material. How we now do this is quite difficult. We have always liked to deal with whole works in libraries, that is, we catalogue a book as a whole. We have never been involved very much in indexing at levels below the whole work. The world is going to be so complex to most people, and so many more people are going to be wanting information in a much more structured way, that guidance and training, or at least ensuring that training is available, are going to be much greater priorities for the library than we have been used to in the past.
Just to finish off, two thoughts. We are in the information understanding business. That is a sentence borrowed from Richard Saul Wurman's wonderful book Information Anxiety (1989). But exactly which part of that business is the question we have to decide. I think the answer is quite simple-as I said, it comes down to good service. If libraries are still in business in 20 years time, it will because of that. In order to survive, we will have to learn a whole lot of new things because what we will be doing in 2010 will be quite different from what we are doing in 1995. This is a lame conclusion, but there is a huge amount of uncertainty at present. Nobody understands fully, so do not worry if you do not. All of us need to be aware of the changes affecting us, able to make good guesses, be flexible, and perhaps also understanding of what may appear to be other people's wild ideas.
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