The incalculable cultural significance of The Library

Publishing in an age of change:
a collaborative project by Meanjin, Overland and if:book.

Posted at Thursday 24 Jun by Jacinda Woodhead.

Library memories
When I think back over my childhood, and how I spent time, I remember libraries. For a long time I lived in a country town, and during school holidays, the wait between the return of the mobile library seemed endless. Then it would return, I’d read the books in a couple of days, and the long wait would begin anew. In my recollections, I read everything in that van, except the Mills & Boon and Barbara Cartlands.

At school, primary and secondary, the library was my one constant, reliable friend, and the librarians appreciated me in a way, I felt, that fellow classmates did not. They went out of their way to foster my reading habits. We would exchange ideas, they would recommend books – they even purchased books with individual readers in mind – and would call parents if they were concerned about reading appetites. This relationship changed in university, but I was still completely dependent on the library for my research.

One of my local libraries

Yet I recently realised that I now rarely physically visit the library. I usually conduct my research from my home office where I can log onto journals and publications through my university library’s portal. And these days, I generally buy all my books, even the expensive research texts.

But this development worries me. It’s not just that technology has changed my relationship with the library, it’s that I no longer think of the library in the same way, as a place of sanctuary.

Well, this changes today.

In my quest to discover more about the contemporary library, I decided to take a survey around the Meanland office to gauge the relationship my co-workers have with their respective libraries.

What do you like about libraries, I asked Jessica Au. ‘The mood of them’, she said.

Big, stretching, overheated, dusty places, full of quiet chatter. The sound of the checkout machine, book carts bumping into shelves, computers humming ... And of course – all those books! I could (and do) spend hours lost in libraries, even if I tell myself I’m just there to return something or duck in for five minutes. It’s a kind of a kid-in-a-candy store effect. All those books are just there for the taking, at your leisure.

And did she have concerns about libraries being rendered obsolete by technology?

[B]ooks are books and reading is reading, whether this is in hardcopy or in digital form.

An online library for one would of course change the dynamics, but whatever we lose in space/mood, we’d gain in others. The convenience, the sheer wealth of knowledge, ease of access etc. Imagine being able to ‘borrow’ books free online...

A while ago I also read something about libraries making the change to digital books, and perhaps including POD machines etc. Again, some dynamics would change, but essentially everything you needed from a library – knowledge – would be there, just shinier and brighter.

‘Chetham’s Library was founded in 1653 and is the oldest public library in the English-speaking world’

Unsurprisingly, Jeff Sparrow, rather fond of research, also likes libraries:

Writing the two ‘Radical Melbourne’ books, I spent a lot of time in the archives of the State Library; later, with ‘Communism: A Love Story’, I haunted the National Library of Australia, the Mitchell Library and a bunch of other places.

Some of the best collections are simply the results of an individual’s private obsession. The SLV has, for instance, the awesome Riley ephemera collection, which consists of pamphlets, newspapers, posters and so on collected by Fred Riley over many years. Riley himself began his career as an anti-conscription activist in the Labor Party; he ended up as a stalwart of the (right-wing) Democratic Labor Party. In that sense, the collection becomes almost a biography in its own right, as you see his interests shifts.

That sort of thing could never be replaced by a digital collection. Even if all the items in Riley’s files were, some day, scanned or photographed or whatever, it would be difficult to replicate the experience of interacting with it as a collection of physical artifacts. Which is not to say that digitalisation is not important or wouldn’t provide a useful searching aid; it’s more that the objects themselves still have an irreducible value. I agree, for instance, with some of what Nicholson Baker says about the difference between reading physical newspapers as compared to simply looking at scans of them.

But the writer whose response most surprised me, when asked about her feelings for libraries, was Sophie Cunningham’s:

I’ve done research at a couple of libraries in Sri Lanka (Kandy and Colombo) and at the British Library in the rare manuscripts sections. There is a kind of visceral energy in these really old places, working with old manuscripts, that digital libraries could never give me. This is particularly important when, as a novelist, you are trying to capture the atmosphere of a place (ie. Sri Lanka), as well as the facts, in this case, reading an old ms by Leonard Woolf.

Having worked with an early diary of Virginia Woolf (British library), as well as the original ms of Leonard Woolf’s first novel (in Kandy), I felt a sense of connection with the authors that I can’t imagine getting in a more digital version of a library.

Handwriting in margin, tea rings on paper. Flick of old fans overhead. Even if this sense of connection is imaginary it says something about the way certain spaces and objects spark the imagination. It’s not just the words in a ms that inspire, but the spaces you read them in, the paper you read them on. I do think objects have energy, hold energy.

This is not just because she got to work with these actual manuscripts in exotic, romantic locations, but also because her response reminded me of the importance of place in the library experience. That is, libraries hold history, and allow you to immerse yourself in that history in a way that allows for intimate and profound discoveries.

The changing role of the library
‘What’s the point of a library or a librarian in the digital era?’ asked Rory Cellan-Jones, a BBC technology journalist, earlier this month.

Who needs a physical space for books and archives, and librarians to police their use, when all that material will soon be available to anyone with a decent internet connection at the click of a mouse?

Librarians are confronted with the same issues as many other industries: information is moving online, library patronage declining, and libraries are trying to adapt to new styles of research. Digital projects are one of the major ways libraries are modernising, resulting in vast collections being digitised.

The National Library of Australia is running the Australian Newspaper Digitisation Program. Earlier this month, they marked the halfway point of the project when they digitised an article from the Tasmanian Mercury in 1949, ‘Cardinal Mindszentry sought U.S. help to escape from trial’ – it was the 20 millionth article they’ve scanned and converted.

In a similar vein, though slightly more onerous, the Library of Congress has ‘nearly 150 million items in its collection, including at least 21 million books, 5 million maps, 12.5 million photos and 100,000 posters’, which they are currently scanning via quite sophisticated and difficult processes that Boing Boing documented here.

The National Library of Wales is another library involved in such a massive undertaking. Their vision is to provide the public with free access to ‘the printed heritage of Wales’. The process is fascinating and illustrates how libraries are actually rather revolutionary when it comes to technology, research and innovation.

The Wales project was inspired by the crowdsourcing approach documented by Rose Holley from the National Library of Australia in Crowdsourcing: How and Why Should Libraries Do It? The approach proved successful in the Australian Newspapers Digitisation Program, the FamilySearch Indexing project and Project Gutenberg’s Distributed Proofreaders.

While all of these projects are critical, digitising collections is a gargantuan undertaking. How are libraries supposed to move the history of the world online? As Cunningham observed: ‘I’m all for digital libraries – but not at the expense of the existing ones’.

Why we need to save libraries as they are
Libraries are not just warehouses that hold books. Libraries are hubs of learning and research, of interactivity and community – and this is what we have an obligation to preserve. How many free, comfortable places can one still go to to study? How many communal spaces are there in which learning, exploration and reading are fostered?

Jeff Sparrow articulated this same concern:

[T]here is a certain collectivity about libraries that is probably threatened by the drive to digitalisation. Most obviously, I guess, that community that forms around, say, the Domed Reading Room, where kids go to study together. But there’s also something that happens with archives. When I was in the Mitchell Library reading the papers of the poet Lesbia Harford, I ran into the feminist scholar Ann Vickery, who was also working in the same area. We had slightly different readings of some of Harford’s poems but we compared notes and discussed sources, and some of that conversation made it into her excellent book Stressing the Modern: Cultural Politics in Australian Women’s Poetry.

Those kinds of encounters happen all the time in libraries; they’re not going to take place on websites.

Libraries, moreover, have librarians – amazing people who help you find books, source information, make the photocopier work. Librarians are living libraries, experts in helping find information that’s hard to unearth or has been lost.

Perhaps, as recent studies have suggested, it is time for libraries, and librarians, to boost their public profiles. Obviously GalleyCat has this idea first, because they compiled a list of the Best Library People on Twitter. Despite the universality of Twitter, it’s still very US-centric. We should change that by starting our own list. These are the Oz librarians I know on Twitter:

Surely there’s more?

46 comments so far:

Lovely article! There are indeed plenty of library types on twitter.

I'm @susannenewton.

There's also:

@katykat
@Begin_Again
@emerald_j
@nomesd
@ahiskens
@libsmatter
@steve_mcquade
@librarianhoi

One of my favourites from across the Tasman is the National Library of New Zealand, who tweet and morning and afternoon tea time:

@NLNZ

Susanne
24 June at 05:35PM

I work as Media and Communication librarian at an institution not too far from the State Library so am interested in this kind of discussion. Really take your point about libraries being similar to range of different areas in finding their whole point for existing under question with digital technologies. Last I heard, Stanford University is opening a bookless library and closer to home Canterbury proposing to cut library positions quite dramatically as it amalgamates library with IT and facilities management (!) The challenge has always been not to stake out a position that is merely defensive or nostalgic. I've always liked working with that diverse and sometimes unquantifiable range of resources, systems, practices that link libraries into the needs and aspirations of their different communities. You are right about the strong role libraries are playing in those very technologies that might at another moment place them under question. I'm sure it will be the success or otherwise they have in integrating these developments within that changing and evolving practice that will be telling in terms of their ongoing relevance and level of support they receive into the future.

Gary Pearce
24 June at 06:29PM

and i'm @alisontsv on twitter, there's more listed at our library's twitter @townsvillelib and many librarians blogging http://librariesinteract.info/australian-library-blogs/

great article jacinda

alison
24 June at 07:24PM

List of wonderful librarians to follow on twitter here: http://twitter.com/haikugirlOz/library-folk-au-nz and on the Libraries Interact Blog mentioned by Alison

http://librariesinteract.info/2008/11/16/aussie-library-industry-twitter-users-list/

Thanks for sharing Meanland's love of libraries

Kim Tairi
24 June at 08:22PM

I loved this article. You don't realize the power of a library until you are in a place that doesn't have one. My husband and I volunteer in a school in rural South Africa, working with the faculty, students and families on literacy. Every child is supposed to learn English, which is their second or third language. It is not spoken anywhere in their surroundings, except for their English classes starting in 2nd grade. After our 2nd volunteer visit, the principal and teachers agreed with our suggestion that we need to bring a library of English books to the school. Over the past 9 months, my husband and I have been collecting, sorting and labeling books -- 25,000 of them -- to create a library for this school. We've had lots of help from schools and individuals committed to sharing the resources we have in the US with students who are just as bright, just as interested in learning our American students. The shipment left in mid-June in a purchased 40 ft shipping container, which will be transported to the school grounds and will become the library. When we return this August, we will indeed see the power of books and the power of a library! To read the impact this library has on the community, follow our blog at www.KuglersinSouthAfrica.blogspot.com

Eileen Kugler
24 June at 11:58PM

Loved your article. I also agree that we should not take a position on the role of libraries/librarians that is entrenched in past practices - move with the times. At the same time as pondering my role as teacher librarian in a school library, and whether or not it still has meaning, I have never been busier, due to the demands of the digital age. Bring it on. Every day a new challenge.

Margaret McKay-Lowndes
28 June at 12:19PM

Thanks for a charming and thoughtful post.

Bill Thompson who is a technology commentator for the BBC World Service program Digital Planet (and a colleague of Rory Cellan-Jones), presented on libraries and the future here at the State Library of Victoria's Big Issues forum in November 2009.

This is a link to the audio of his presentation -
http://www2.slv.vic.gov.au/programs/events/2009/big-issues/big-issues-in-libraries/big-issues-thompson.html

Andrew Hiskens (@ahiskens)
29 June at 06:26PM

fantastic post.
I too am a total library fan and agree with the comments on community. The physicality and tactility of connection is just as important as the growing hive network and the institution of the library and it's surrounding information is a beautiful way of maintaining it.

Klare Lanson
05 July at 02:09PM

I took my 16 year old daughter to the library the other night as she had some books to collect for a history essay. The group study area of the library was awash with HSC students, working, bouncing ideas off one another, reading, tutoring etc. Where else can they go, be together, get their work done, get free wi-fi and not be expected to buy something?

I also have a soft spot for the big, cultural institutions such as the NLA and various state libraries. Oh, and I'm an Australian librarian and I tweet too @newgradlib

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