A friend of mind attended RLG’s Discover to Delivery in New Contexts Conference in New York this past week, and sent me these (heavily paraphrased to protect the innocent) comments:

The conference covered a wide range of issues, and was very interesting. I think the consensus opinion at the close was that discovery has moved to the network layer and libraries should stop allocating their time and money trying to build better end-user UI, and concentrate instead on delivery, and their niche or customized services such as digitizing special collections, providing innovative end-user tools for managing information, and so forth.

This sounds like a great conference, and I would generally agree with these directions. In fact, they sound strikingly similar to those that a friend in the publishing industry has reached about trade publishers (which prompted me to relatedly inquire whether or not for certain classes of libraries, and certain types of bookstores, these organizations might merge in the future – but that’s another story).

These trends in libraries toward niches and communities of engagement suggest some tentative conclusions:

1) Libraries have been the archivists for around 350 years of active human historical documentation. The era of the production of cultural and scientific artifacts that are solely physical in nature is ending, and coincident with this, the existing role for libraries must change. As this record is digitized and described, we must develop new skills and services so our accumulated expertise can shift elsewhere. The future, as we know, is not only born digital, but born networked, and in great floods of interconnected data that will not stand well disposed for monopolistic, controlling efforts at curation and selection on behalf of an audience that has been empowered to develop its own expertise in information triage and review.

2) Libraries should begin to downsize, probably both physically and in staff. They should start shaping the production and licensing of digital books (by engaging directly with book publishers to help establish this channel, instead of letting it be defined without their input), and be smart about what material is worth cataloging, and to what extent. The majority of bibliographic metadata description and enhancement should be left to the national libraries and consortia such as OCLC, or in the hands of agencies and users submitting content to repositories. As discovery services move to the network there is less reason why libraries should maintain duplicative local data caches. It's time to start letting go of our technical and cataloging departments; many of these staff have valuable skills and are thirsting to make a contribution elsewhere; they see the world being transformed around them. We must echo this direction in the physical world: we must either re-allocate our under-utilized physical spaces, or tear them down. So much better a green lawn with benches and cherry trees than an under-utilized concrete monolith of a building.

3) We need to admit openly that the types of expertise we need in our future, smaller libraries are dramatically different than what we have heretofore valued. Indeed, change has been so fast, that some of our existing staff will not be able to be effectively re-directed. The salary savings can and should be re-allocated elsewhere, providing us a flexibility to invoke new initiatives that is now often beyond our grasp. In our future, smaller libraries, we must be network savvy, digital/analog amphibians. We need more the kind of graduates that our i-schools are producing (regardless of where they are produced), with a hefty dose of the public services and advocacy that are the highly valued morale heart of libraries. Engagement in the development of curricula for the skills for network driven information services must be an urgent priority.

4) A lot of the core battles that define how people are able to access and use information, and under what terms, are increasingly political engagements. Libraries will need to understand their worlds well enough to take clear positions, and assume an advocacy role for their users in an environment where the definition of privacy and fair use have been torn asunder and are in an active process of re-construction. Libraries have often seized this role: but now we must do so with more aggressiveness and assertiveness than ever before. Now is the time for our voices to be heard, and to help others to speak.