Page 169 - Building Digital Libraries

CHAPTER 7

The Evolving Role of Libraries

The members of the library community have traditionally been early tech-
nology adopters when it comes to the world of information distribution.
But as the current information ecosystem has evolved, so too has the library
community’s role within that ecosystem. In the not too distant past, the
library community was the information ecosystem, representing the central
location for trusted content within its user community. The library was the
warehouse of information, and its physical materials were its single larg-
est tangible asset. How valuable this asset was, however, depended on the
size of the library—meaning that user communities were served unequally
depending on the size and scope of the community’s library. Interlibrary
loan changed this paradigm, as libraries made materials available for inter-
institutional borrowing. Interlibrary loan effectively made every small
library a giant, by providing its users with access to various research col-
lections around the country. Moreover, as new digital capture technologies
developed, libraries have been able to integrate these new processes in order
to speed document delivery and provide new and exciting levels of access.
And throughout each of these changes, the library remained its users’ central
repository for information.
This changed with the Internet, and the trend has accelerated with the
availability of low-cost mobile data access. The Internet has expanded the
researcher’s universe. No longer is access to primary resources limited to
one’s physical proximity to an object. What’s more, information companies
like Facebook and Google have developed a new form of currency around
the exchange of personal information, obscuring the true cost of informa-
tion access. Libraries have struggled to engage in this environment, given
the high value that their community places on the patron’s right to privacy.
Ironically, though, it has been this value and the community’s cautious
engagement with this new information ecosystem that have greatly con-
tributed to the library’s shift away from the center of the user’s information
universe.
But is this evolution a negative one for users? It doesn’t have to be. Users
today have access to a much wider breadth of information and opportunities
to collaborate, as well as to access and remix data in ways that would have
been hard to imagine even a few years ago. These new methods of access
have opened new research opportunities and have democratized access to
primary data. For the first time, access to primary resources housed in loca-
tions that restrict access are being viewed by new eyes. Additionally, these
changes have forced libraries to look at how they interact with the larger
information communities. As cultural heritage organizations, libraries
and museums cannot remain on the sidelines, and so they have looked for
areas of collaboration and ways that they can participate within this new
information infrastructure without compromising the library community’s
core values.

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