Conference Envisions Library of the Future

By Phyllis Albert-Mitzman

Special to the Gazette

"Finding Common Ground: Creating a Library of the Future Without Diminishing the Library of the Past" was the theme of the weekend-long conference sponsored by Harvard College Library at the Charles Hotel on March 30 and 31.

The search for common ground extended beyond the physical boundaries of the library: the conference featured major panels that included publishers and Harvard faculty members, as well as librarians from near and far. Focusing on the future, most of the talks and papers envision the library's role as increasingly collaborative, working with different individuals and groups, as well as selecting, organizing, and preserving access to human knowledge in both print and digital formats.

From the welcoming statement by Richard De Gennaro, Roy E. Larsen Librarian of Harvard College, which emphasized the library's need to find common ground between print and digital resources, to the final panel on Sunday, in which Susan Martin of Georgetown University reiterated the need for coordinating traditional collections and electronic information as "parallel paths that will need to be supported for years to come," the major discussion centered on how to coordinate and manage print and digital information cost-effectively.

Nevertheless, there was clear recognition of the need to collaborate between faculty and librarians, and to facilitate communication among people, as well as to support new interdisciplinary models.

In his keynote address, Clifford Lynch of the University of California touched on just about every area of major relevance: mission, culture, community, geography, expectations, and values. Lynch began by characterizing the library as an organization with several missions in a context of changing organizational cultures. What had been the critical library technology issue of the '50s, creating an automated catalog, has, in the '90s, has become the much more complex issue of how to add content to electronic information in an arena in which geography and place no longer define community.

A Networked Community

For example, HOLLIS (Harvard's On-Line Library Information System), created initially for the Harvard community, is used by scholars across the world. This new community, the networked community, is defined by common interests rather than institutional or local concerns.

In this new international, networked community, those responsible for acquiring, cataloging, and preserving access to knowledge need to be aware of the many different cultures and viewpoints, as well as the new cultural content, of the materials they will be working with.

Lynch said, "Libraries will need to support instruction and instructional content in new ways," and "they will need to add value to this content rather than being gatekeepers." (Bending this image somewhat was the characterization by Patricia Schuman, a participant in the publishers' panel. She described the publishers as gatekeepers, and thought of the "librarians more as gateways." )

In the 21st century, Lynch envisions university libraries as being very diverse places. In addition to fulfilling their classic roles of housing and organizing paper information, they will also maintain electronic catalogs and pointers to many different kinds of electronic materials. He cautions, however, against the growing tendency, especially among students, to view paper materials and information as superfluous.

Despite the vast quantities of electronically available information, not everything can be obtained from the Net. Most important, he said, will be the added value librarians can bring to information: more than providing coherence and management of comprehensive collections, their unique role of preserving the integrity of content, their "truth in labeling" and quality control of electronic materials will be invaluable as the boundaries between information services, libraries, and computer "boxes" become more and more blurred. These functions are especially important as older electronic media and formats become difficult or impossible to read with the rapid changes in technology.

Debunking Technology Myths

In his talk on "Uncommon Knowledge: Myth Breaking for the Future," Walter Crawford of the Research Libraries Group focused on debunking many of the existing myths related to technology.

He pointed out that most of the people who made these prophecies were really pushing their own agendas to create a future they wanted. Some of the common myths Crawford included in this category were that within "5 years," or as some say, "10 or 20 years" everything will be digital, so the libraries had better digitize, digitize!

Or, he said, "How about the belief that the Internet is free, or essentially free? Nothing is free; it is really institutionally subsidized and is phenomenally expensive, even though the incremental charge is small."

"And what about the myth of universal technological acceptance?" Crawford asked "The 'build it and they will come' assumption?" Most innovations fail, he added, and there is no sure way to predict what will succeed. His characterization of the Internet as a "stuff swamp" rather than an information superhighway evoked a very sympathetic response from the audience.

Although there are no magic bullets and no one has a crystal ball, Crawford was reasonably confident that libraries will continue to carry out necessary and useful roles, continuing to provide a range of functions and services.

He pointed out that "people and their preferences do matter, and just because it is possible to communicate digitally doesn't mean that that will become the only way. Diversity is inherently a good thing. Digital collections enrich libraries but do not make them digital libraries."

In addition to the full-conference addresses, there were a variety of special panels and papers from librarians, publishers, and service vendors from across the nation. These ranged from discussions of organizational structure to tools and strategies for creating an effective library environment, from suggestions for electronic information retrieval for helping patrons to collaborative models for integrating technology and information skills across the curriculum.

Overall, the model was seen as partnering and collaborating to build better working relationships, to help the many communities libraries now serve, and will serve in the future. As publisher Patricia Shuman put it, "Academic librarianship today is exquisitely challenging, and we need to build together to find the common ground toward an enlightened, equitable information age."