Young Librarians, Talkin' 'Bout Their Generation

Up-and-comers discuss what will change and what needs to change

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Audio: Young Librarians Discuss the Future of Their Profession
(Photograph by Jessamyn West)

Joe Sanchez, U. of Texas at Austin
Libraries in virtual worlds will join physical libraries.

Susan Gibbons, U. of Rochester
Library schools need to update their curricula.

Nick Baker, Williams College
Companies like Google will bring "new blood" to libraries.

Casey Bisson, Plymouth State U.
Libraries need to be more than community centers.

Jessamyn C. West, Librarian.net
Librarians are not very "change oriented" as a culture.

Sarah Kostelecky, Institute of American Indian Arts
Diversity is important to the library profession.

Char Booth, Ohio U.
There will always be a need for librarians.

Brian Mathews, Georgia Institute of Technology
There's too much "bandwagon jumping" with new technology.

By SCOTT CARLSON

Most people are familiar with the stereotype of librarians. They are twenty- or thirtysomethings, with tattoos, cat's-eye glasses, and vintage clothes, schmoozing with famous authors, and playing DJ at parties in Brooklyn.

Wait, that's just the stereotype in The New York Times. Last summer the newspaper declared young librarians hip — and, in the minds of some librarians, actually reinforced the other stereotype: that older members of their profession are reclusive bookworms and cranky old ladies.

Whether young librarians are hip or dowdy doesn't matter. What matters is what they think about the future of the library, particularly at academic institutions.

Libraries are facing a series of immense challenges: the explosion of information, a rapidly changing technological environment, shrinking budgets, pitched battles over copyright, a new world of information literacy, and continuing deficiencies in old-fashioned literacy.

On top of it all, academic libraries face a crisis of graying leadership. Young librarians, hip or not, will eventually be the people dealing with these issues.

This month The Chronicle contacted eight librarians under 40 and asked them a series of questions about the future of their profession, including: What will happen to the book? How will battles over copyright play out? What do you love and hate about librarianship? Here is what they said:

What is the future of the book?

Well, its longevity speaks to its usefulness. It won't go away for certain purposes, like sitting down to read a novel. It won't be replaced in my lifetime, certainly — people enjoy books. But when you start to look at scholarly inquiry, people are relying less and less on them. The University of Michigan has a papyrus collection; the papyrus hasn't gone away, but the ratio of papyrus to books is pretty low. Going forward, I think the ratio of books to electronic resources will similarly be skewed, so that a lot of the scholarly inquiry will be taking place online. Of course, there are copyright issues to be worked out and other sorts of long-term preservation issues.

A book is a wonderful storage medium when you are dealing with centuries' time frames. You can open it and still read it, if it's properly housed. I don't think we have solved those issues with the electronic medium. But I think that is definitely where it's going — the books will be less used on a daily basis and more like that papyrus at the University of Michigan. You might still refer to [books], but you might be working with digital versions more often.

Will there be a reference desk — yes or no?

I personally hope so. I think there is a lot being done to offer a really broad range of digital reference services, and I have a lot of personal and professional interest in that. My system right now is doing a lot of experimentation with Skype to provide reference services that use chat and video at the same time. Those experiments are absolutely crucial to offering users a range of different access points. A lot of people in the future, even 40 years hence, may find that face-to-face personal contact is the way that they want to have their information help, but at the same time, if we don't offer another range of services, we are going to lose people.

What information services will be performed by libraries in the future, and what information services will be performed by companies and nonprofit groups?

As we look at what is going to be performed by academic libraries and what is going to be performed by Google and Amazon, just to put two companies out there, what Google can do better than so far any library can do is that search function, that discovery function. Although we have been working on it for years with metasearch and federated search engines, we just have not gotten anywhere near to what Google can do.

So I think what would be in our best interests is to drop the fight, to let Google take over that, and instead to focus on the value add that only we can do, which is that in-depth research that we can do with our users. Only we, the librarians here, know what our faculty expectations are. We know what our faculty research interests are. We can see a whole bunch of new articles and books coming through the door, and we can say, This would be great for Professor Smith or Professor Jones.… Amazon and Google just aren't going to get to that level.

Should the relationship between libraries and publishers change? If so, how?

Of course it should change. When you do the numbers, librarians have this incredibly insane, crazy amount of purchasing power. Who buys all those scholarly publications that scholars create in order to get tenure? Libraries do. Who else? No one — or almost no one. So libraries are this big dumb market for a lot of this material, and I only mean dumb in that I don't think they're aware as a homogenous group of just how powerful they are.… You wouldn't think then that they would be on the butt end of all of these terrible, terrible licensing agreements with any nonprint information that they buy from publishers, and yet they still are. I think what we are seeing is publishers of print are trying hard as hell to not make as much print anymore, because paper costs real money and electrons don't.

We're only seeing a couple really clueful people enter the marketplace, and we're seeing a lot of the same tired old you'll-buy-it-because-you've-always-bought-it business model.… I'd like to see libraries take more of the upper hand in terms of buying some of these products that reflect the actual purchasing power they have as a giant buyer of things, and less of, "Oh, my gosh, Elsevier gave us this contract, … but it's got all these restrictions, and what can we do?" Well, tell them to stuff it, and tell them to come back with a better contract. Theoretically we have the power to do that.

Does the library profession need to diversify and draw from different populations?

Yes. I was part of the American Library Association's Spectrum initiative to bring in new professionals from underrepresented groups and different cultural backgrounds. That has been a major force in bringing diversity to the profession, but I still think that we need to extend more, to reach out more. That's part of how we stay relevant, because of the cultural competencies people bring when they are from different backgrounds. That only helps us provide better services to people, because you may understand some of the needs and the best practices to get to these people.

What is one thing that libraries are doing right, and one thing that libraries are doing wrong?

One thing that we are doing right is a shift more toward a user-centered approach, where we are really trying to understand not just how we fit into something limited, like writing a term paper, but where we fit in the 24-hour life cycle of the students. If a student comes in during the day, they are going to have certain needs, and if they come in at night, they are going to have different needs, and at the beginning of the semester it's different than the end of the semester. Really looking at it with an anthropological approach, which the University of Rochester has done, is a way that libraries are shifting.

One thing I don't think we do well is play nice with others, or really partner with other service units on campus.… I think we need to understand how we play with housing, how we play with the bookstore, auxiliary services, and all these others — admissions, the registrar — and how we can maybe help them succeed with their mission as well.

How well did your library-science education prepare you for the field today?

I don't have a library-science education. I have an IT background. My undergrad was in English, but I have been employed as an IT person since then and have slowly made my way to libraries. I'm not sure that library science is as technically demanding as it should be for the challenges that new graduates will face. That was a discussion that was on a number of e-mail groups that I'm in. We face recent graduates who don't have any experience in relational database design, and we expect them to understand how to choose a technology plan or choose technologies that will control their ability to serve users, and there is not enough knowledge in libraries to build that.'

We've done no research and development in libraries — over the past 18 months there has been a blossoming of research and development, but before that we outsourced that to vendors.… We've outsourced the innovation. And because we only compare libraries against libraries and not against Google or anything else, we think we're doing great. And Google says, "Yes, they are," then takes all of our users. We need some very, very skillful new blood.

What will the academic library look like in the future?

The academic library in the future is going to be a continuation of what we see now, with more multimedia integration. [It won't be] limited to just providing access to materials but also providing access to the creation of different types of materials. For instance, it's not just providing access to DVDs, but maybe providing access to video cameras or DVD burners in order to make digital storytelling, or maybe going so far as to provide games or immersive environments in virtual worlds.