At the Zócalo/WeHo Reads event “Do Libraries Have a Future?” on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the opening of the West Hollywood Library, three librarians were challenged by Zócalo Public Square publisher Gregory Rodriguez to shake off stereotypes and misconceptions about their professions—and predict what’s next for their places of work.

Rodriguez opened the conversation by asking the librarians to share their childhood library memories “before I go anti-library on these people,” a comment that elicited shock from the full-house crowd at the West Hollywood City Council Chambers.

The library is “one of the first places you go as a child where you have a certain degree of responsibility,” said Miguel Figueroa, director of the Center for the Future of Libraries at the American Library Association. He recalled his first laminated library card as “this tangible expression of growth and opportunity and responsibility. It’s a pre-driver’s license of sorts.”

Then the grilling began. Rodriguez recounted a few of the things people complain about in the library, including a large homeless presence and a confusing mission where a library can sometimes seem like a community center.

Susan Hildreth, former director of the Institute of Museum and Library Services and professor of practice at University of Washington Information School, said that dealing with such a broad customer base is a challenge. But librarians want to help everyone, and have rules to keep patrons safe.

Susan Parker, deputy librarian at UCLA, cautioned that assumptions are in direct conflict with libraries’ missions. “Libraries are a place where we’re trying not to be judgmental on those levels,” she said. At UCLA, when a budget crisis caused the rollback of library hours that had been open 24/7, many librarians were surprised to learn about the crucial role they played in the lives of the community, including providing a nighttime support system for homeless students. “Libraries traditionally are about helping people in a private way,” she said. “As a child it was important to me to look up information that was maybe kept from me at home. For young people who are gay or trans—it’s a safe space for them to find out for themselves.”

Are libraries, asked Rodriguez, diluting their purpose by taking on the responsibility of social ills that other segments of society should have to deal with?

Figueroa pointed out that a lot of social services have been stripped away, and libraries are “one of the few civic assets still open to a lot of different people.” At the San Francisco Public Library, where Hildreth used to work, there’s now a social worker on staff. The best libraries become part of the solution, in part by teaming up with other organizations. Plus, Hildreth said, their mission is to share information, including civic information.

One of the classic purposes of libraries, said Rodriguez, is that they “exist to enlighten and nurture the electorate.” He asked the panelists: “Is that still true?”

“One of the challenges we’re now facing is there are multiple spaces where people are segmenting themselves,” said Figueroa. “The public library hopefully remains one of those civic spaces where you encounter people from different perspectives, where you have a level playing field.” By contrast, private spaces—even if, like Starbucks, they mimic the library in providing work and communal areas—ask for something in return.

Libraries are also finding new ways to convene people, like “maker spaces,” where children and families can be creative together and community events. The librarians on the panel agreed that flexibility is the key to fulfilling these many roles, whether it’s helping people switch between traditional books, eReaders, and audio books or transforming multipurpose spaces from one day to the next. It’s not an “either-or” situation but a “both-and” one, they said.

The demise of libraries is “a trope that’s very easy to put in a tweet,” said Parker. “If you are fortunate enough to be able to buy the book you want to read today on Amazon, have a laptop, subscribe to Internet in your home, maybe libraries are not obvious to you.” But they are a crucial resource to people who don’t have all those things. In fact, Hildreth said, more than 20 percent of the population doesn’t have private Internet access.

Before turning to the audience for questions, Rodriguez asked about the old “bun in the back of the head” librarian stereotype. “Is the public’s perception of librarians accurate?”

No, said Hildreth. “The perception that we’re very quiet, we’re unassuming, we just want to shelve the books” is totally inaccurate. “We are people who are engaged in our communities,” she said. “Most of the librarians I know, know their communities, know where they need to be—and they are seen as key players in their communities.”

The audience question-and-answer session featured a few fellow librarians and a number of library lovers asking about the future of the library—including the future of fines.

“We know library fines and fees are serving as a barrier for a number of users, particularly youth,” said Hildreth. At the same time, many parents and caregivers say that fines help develop a sense of responsibility. “Do we want to take that away from our young people?” Lots of libraries are considering changing their fine system or even eradicating them entirely.

We need to have an open dialogue about both fines and how libraries are funded, the panelists agreed. It’s a conversation.

Another audience member asked how libraries could address disparities in their communities. The best-funded libraries are usually in the neighborhoods that rely on libraries the least. Can libraries with more resources help those with fewer?

It’s complicated, said Figueroa, by the fact that libraries are locally funded. But national projects that encourage information sharing and program sharing have the potential to move toward a solution.

“We find ways to collaborate,” said Parker, adding that libraries are well-versed in moving collections around. But when it comes to other ways of working together, “there’s a lot of work to be done and it’s hard work.”

The post If You Think Libraries Are Redundant, Read This appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That’s why the NLM’s two-year-old Global Health Events collection archives born-digital material—webpages, blog posts, social media streams—published during outbreaks and other health crises. The archive includes items like blog posts from doctors in the field, tweets from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and situation reports from international organizations. In the Global Health Events collection, you can read a cached post on the Doctors Without Borders blog, written by Liberian clinic staffer Amie Subah in February 2015, in which she describes the social stigma she faced after surviving Ebola; tweets posted to the hashtag #NepalEarthquake in May 2015; and the March of Dimes’ advice to parents concerned about Zika in February 2016.

The library’s paper collections are typically centered on people or organizations, and offer incidental perspective on any epidemics or outbreaks those people or organizations might have experienced in their lifetimes. (Christie Moffatt, the archivist in the library’s Digital Manuscripts Program who serves as the point person for the Global Health Events collecting project, cites the papers of former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s as an example.) In making new collections of born-digital material, Moffatt and her fellow archivists can make the decision to center their collecting around an event or a theme instead. So the Global Health Events collection contains material on Ebola and Zika, as well as the 2015 earthquake in Nepal.

The web is huge, and there’s a lot of information out there. How do archivists decide when to start collecting links, and which links to save? The NLM team started collecting records for Ebola months after the initial epidemic began. The group learned from that experience and decided to start accumulating digital material whenever the World Health Organization declares a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. The library’s Disaster Information Management Research Center, which maintains pages with links to official information from international organizations and major authorized social media feeds, provides a starting point for the archivists to find official information. The archivists use these links to push outward and begin collecting items like blog posts written by practitioners working in the field—the digital equivalent of the paper journal that a 19th-century doctor might have kept during an outbreak. Using the Internet Archive’s service Archive-It, the team captures a link, and decides how often the software should return to re-crawl the page and save new versions. The result is a collection that’s been fairly selectively curated by humans, with a vision for what’s worth saving.

Captured official material, like pages of the WHO’s website, gives one perspective on the way information about an outbreak spreads, letting us see how organizations have chosen to word their warnings and advice to people visiting their websites or social media feeds looking for information. But what about rumors, innuendo, false information—the fog that social media is so good at spreading during a breaking news event? I told Moffatt that, to me, that stuff was almost more interesting than the official record. She agreed, saying, “This is all just part of the story.” While being careful to make sure that browsers know that the information in a given saved link is not necessarily correct, the team makes a point of saving links that show how muddled up facts can get when traveling online.

Moffatt pointed me to a couple of links the NLM team has saved that offer a peek at that kind of shaky information. In 2014, the Food and Drug Administration published a warning it had issued to an entrepreneur peddling a cure for Ebola; the NLM captured that warning, which contained details about Natural Solutions Foundation’s pitch to consumers. (“Nano Silver is the world’s only hope against Ebola and the other antibiotics/antiviral resistant pathogens.”) To illustrate public perception of the way Ebola news was spreading, the team grabbed an Oct. 7, 2014, New Yorker Borowitz Report column (“Man Infected With Ebola Misinformation Through Casual Contact With Cable News”). And the team saved a February 2016 Huffington Post debunking of a claim that Monsanto is responsible for Zika.

By setting Archive-It to periodically crawl hashtags like #Ebola and #EbolaResponse, the archivists hope to capture some of the picture of the way information spreads over time. In the future, researchers might use those saved tweets to carry out projects like the one described in this 2014 paper. A team of researchers at Virginia Tech used tweets sent during the Ebola crisis to map the spread of disinformation, tracking rumors like “Ebola vaccine only works on white people” and “The new iPhone 6 is infecting people with Ebola.” In the decades to come, people interested in the way Zika news worked its way through social networks might tap the NLM’s archived tweets to do so.

One of the most interesting tasks the team faces is imagining what uses future researchers might make of this information, and adjusting what they collect accordingly. To some degree, this mission is impossible. “We see so many examples now of collections of digital materials that have uses you never imagined,” Moffatt told me, referring to a project that looks at old ship’s logs to study changing weather patterns. “We try to collect as broadly as possible and as many perspectives as possible.” Who knows what future historians of medicine and public health may need?

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So rather than dwelling on that topic, which has become a favorite pastime of armchair futurists, let’s focus on the people affected by libraries instead of the collections contained within them. Whether individuals prefer paperbacks or reading on a mobile device is trivial compared to the fact that American society is becoming highly unequal. The trend suggests a Dickensian future—albeit one filled with smartphones. The real question is: How will the mission of public libraries evolve in a world filled with such gross inequality?

The gap between the rich and poor is reaching historic highs in the United States, with the rich getting richer while wages stall or fall for lower-income Americans, threatening to hollow out the middle class. The last time the U.S. experienced this level of inequality was in the late 19th and early 20th centuries—around the same time that public libraries first started catching on because of the efforts of Gilded Age industrialist Andrew Carnegie, who donated $60 million to fund more than 1,500 across the country.

Yet the library patrons of the future might be more sympathetic to the cries of Carnegie’s most vehement critics, striking steelworkers who wanted higher wages and demanded to know: “What good is a book to a man who works 12 hours a day, six days a week?” And those grueling 19th century hours might even be preferable to the impermanent shift work of the gig economy (think Uber) or to the troubling trend of jobs being eliminated altogether by technology (think driverless Uber). What happens to all those people without stable employment? Will public libraries become their government-subsidized third space? Will public libraries be to temp workers what Home Depot parking lots are to day laborers? Probably. Increasingly, people will flock to libraries to access resources they can’t easily afford, but which they need to find work: a decent internet connection, computers with licensed software, and private meeting spaces for video interviews and conference calls. Maybe they’ll just want a place where they can socialize with others in similar situations, an outlet to stimulate their imaginations, or a place to escape and access entertaining content. After all, today’s libraries not only nurture the mind, but the soul.

To meet the needs of this vulnerable population, public libraries will need more staff equipped with strong technical, pedagogical, and community organizing skills. What if adult patrons could identify the types of projects they wished to work on and libraries in turn provided them with the resources to allow it to happen? Could libraries help users gain valuable experience that prospective employers would appreciate—in computer programming, cross cultural communications, and virtual collaboration?

If that sounds far-fetched, consider that this is precisely what many public libraries already do … for teenagers. Instead of looking to build bookless libraries or yet more maker spaces filled with dusty, unused 3D printers, library leaders should seek the advice of teen services gurus for inspiration. For example, in 2015 the San Antonio Public Library inaugurated its highly successful Teen Library, a new 6,000-square foot space that is designed much more to inspire and aid its users than house books and other materials, with plenty of room for teens to hang out in groups and explore high-dollar technology they wouldn’t otherwise be able to access.

At the same time, because so many of the underemployed will be seeking refuge in public libraries in between gigs, government may start deploying more of its other services through these facilities since it’s more efficient to centralize activities into as few administrative units as possible. In Aarhus, Denmark, for example, the public libraries double as “citizens’ services centers” where locals can register a change of address or apply for a pension. The same will be true here in the U.S. One day you might dispute your speeding tickets and apply for gun permits at your local public library.

But perhaps the greatest test for public libraries in the 21st century will be providing these services while still appealing to the more fortunate members of the new economy. Apart from the quaintness of the experience, why would wealthy people voluntarily visit a public library—one that, if improperly managed and under-resourced, could devolve into a dystopian, Apple Store version of the DMV? If the attraction was access to books and other content—whether digital or physical—then surely emerging technologies will provide more attractive alternatives over time. Without incentive to use these public spaces for themselves, wealthier Americans could oppose using their tax dollars to support libraries, or they could continue to support such funding, but under conditions that would take out much of the pleasure that comes from using this venerable institution.

Public libraries of the 21st century might end up looking a lot like the libraries of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It may surprise readers to know that there was a time when public libraries debated whether it was appropriate to lend popular fiction to borrowers—imagine not being able to check out Harry Potter novels from your local neighborhood library! The idea that taxpayers would fund reading for pleasure was scandalous, and certainly not what Andrew Carnegie intended. He wanted libraries to focus solely on providing access to edifying materials that would transform the uneducated masses into a more productive workforce. When Carnegie famously called on his fellow rich folk to give away portions of their wealth to benefit humanity, he clarified that such assistance should only be directed to those who were willing to help themselves—using the upper crust’s narrow definition of self-sufficiency. If financial inequality persists, don’t be surprised if public libraries start further restricting the content patrons can access, treating certain types of reading as more appropriate than others.

No doubt the future still holds a lot of promise for public libraries. In particular, advances in technology and the adoption of Smart City practices—using data to track how well the public sector is doing its job and inform policymakers—should improve service delivery and greatly enhance the convenience, and therefore the perceived value, of public libraries. Growing inequality has the power to tear apart our society. Hopefully, public libraries will remain a common ground—for education, employment, and enjoyment—during a time when the gap between the rich and the poor is larger than ever.

The post How Will Public Libraries Serve an Increasingly Unequal Society? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I get where this perception comes from. Google and Wikipedia can answer a lot of basic questions that we librarians used to tackle. Issues arising from unglamorous arguments over budgets or the government have also made times difficult for libraries, librarians, and other information professionals. But now that we’ve acknowledged those truths, it’s important to mention another: That librarians today influence the cutting edge more than ever before. We use our skills to bring pieces of the future to wherever you are.

Perhaps that’s why ours has become one of the professions that fixed-gear, bike-riding, tattooed hipster types have moved to in droves, as reported in an obnoxious style section article in the New York Times. Maybe that’s why some of our profession’s lingo, words like “metadata” and “curation,” have now found their way into the popular culture and lexicon. Seriously, you can’t throw a stone and not hit someone who is a “curator” of some obscure material or pursuit.

In any case, the idea of the librarian just sitting there in a quiet large building, wearing a cardigan and waiting for you to visit, is the only thing that is caught in the past. Even though we do love a good visit, and always have a cardigan ready for when the building’s climate control inevitably lets us down.

This might even be a golden age for librarians, sometimes now categorized as “information professionals.” Our culture seems to have reached peak curation, where almost every form of content is carefully chosen and presented for consumption, and the tech world is rushing to organize (and monetize) the insane amounts of information available at our fingertips. We librarians are right at the middle of it all, collaborating on all sorts of new projects and applications.

Look no further than Spotify, the streaming music application used by millions every day. It collects and provides access to millions of songs, features a searchable catalog, and curates quality choices that cut through the maddening amount of material that’s available. That sure sounds like the kind of things librarians do every day.

So it shouldn’t be a surprise that companies like Spotify and Facebook do in fact have librarians (more than one even!) on staff who collaborate with developers and other bright people to cultivate an experience that has become embedded in your daily internet habits. Of course, they may or may not be called “librarians” in these positions, but the skillset is the same. Cataloging, curation, metadata creation, data management, programming. From the visual presentation of the app, the extensive organization of the information, down to the algorithm that selects songs for your Discover Weekly playlist—our fingerprints are appearing in the core of these new media applications.

Librarians are also innovating via new initiatives within more traditional spheres, pooling our resources and brainpower to build systems and applications that bridge past ideals with current trends and future possibilities. One result of these efforts has been a push to build portals that harness existing digitization efforts to make archives and special collections materials more available to people where they live, via mobile phones and the internet. This offers researchers the information equivalent of one-stop shopping.

Take the creation of the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), a major leader in this realm. Using metadata records as its engine, this portal brings together millions of items from museums, academic libraries, and public libraries from all over the country in one searchable site. For example, if you were searching for information about the Gold Rush, you could pull whatever materials are available via your local library or university catalog, but DPLA gives you the opportunity to find materials documenting different experiences via libraries in California, Washington, or beyond with one search.

Furthermore, all of the data is open-access, which means any librarian anywhere can grab it and transform it to develop new applications and unique experiences for users. Omnia, for instance, merges all of DPLA’s data with all the entries from another large European library portal, creating a searchable timeline.

Silicon Valley companies have enviable research and development budgets, but they often lack the collaborative spirit and greater-good mentality that drives public-sphere librarians. In the meantime, many libraries, especially in public and academic institutions, have money to keep the lights on and provide key services like reference and outreach, but don’t always have the means to innovate or build new projects. We have to hunt for outside funding opportunities, competing to score grants to push new initiatives. A frustrating number of good ideas can’t find funding and miss their window of opportunity.

Burnout from this battle for dollars is one of the most significant threats to public sector librarianship as it currently stands, dis-incentivizing librarians to dream up creative ways to make knowledge and information available to the wider world. Yet we’re a more resilient bunch than you think. We’ve already survived the transition to the computer age, Google, even e-books—what’s another set of challenges?

It’s officially time to toss those old jokes into the vortex where Borat impressions now reside and allow our perceptions of the librarian to evolve. We’re constantly adding new skills, services, and technologies to our expansive toolkit, even if sometimes we have to implement them in the scrappiest way possible. This gives us the ability to move across various industries and shape them with our influence.

I’m not sure where it’s written in the ancient library tomes just how much flexibility and evolution this profession actually requires. But the nature of our work ensures that, despite claims to the contrary, we’ll never be stuck in the past. For librarians, the future is always right now.

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