Who needs a library?
Seriously. When was the last time anyone went to a library? I heard a conversation recently about some caller to talkback radio who was inquiring about IF there was something like a video store where you could go and like borrow books. The mind boggles! And today I was re-reading my daily Crikey and in was a little news gem relating how parts of the Fairfax media conglomerate (Fin Review and Fairfax Business Media) have decided that they don’t need their own in-house library service, specifically opting out of paying their contribution for a group wide delivered service. Predictably this appears to be a piece of management inspired enlightenment as it is reported that “AFR bosses Michael Gill and Glenn Burge have decided that journalists can be “self-service researchers”" and then it is also noted that “Business Media reporters have accounted for twenty per cent of the work of the library.”
As is noted elsewhere this has interesting implications for material generated by journalists. But it seems to reflect some popular thinking, that the rise and rise of a universal database called Google has claimed yet another scalp. Of course if material isn’t available in on-line form then Google won’t help you and despite the understated charm of interfacing with the very stylish and attractive Google receptionist, I can’t help but think that losing the quaint little human interface to your very own library is something that deserves special consideration.
Yet in that sense the AFR is just jumping on the bandwagon, albeit one that they don’t appear to be actually contributing to. One of the things that makes it possible to use Google as a research tool is the availability of data. Worldwide a number of significant libraries have committed to digitising their assets and making them available to the general community. Despite the concerns of copyright owners, there seems to have been a bit of an avalanche of digitalisation in recent times, at my local university for example, entire collections have disappeared to be reborn as digital assets and of course even borrowing a book if you can find one, has been automated. You still can’t borrow the latest bestseller from Google, or even micro pay for it like iTunes but that would seem to be the next logical step. Why else would you bother trying to create eBook readers unless you could see a market?
So it appears that globally we are heading in the direction of an on-line only repository of information, the world wide electronic library. There are risks of course, in the past libraries although somewhat revered were not an entirely protected species. The odd burning or ransack was out of the question if things got a little out of hand, yet today’s modern electronic library has built into it a rather naive belief that the technology that supports it is immune to any major disruption. This is rather a simple concept but difficult for some to grasp so consider this; you can still see in some places the actual books made by people hundreds of years ago. That’s right, hundreds of years, and there is even remnants of ancient Egyptian papyrus in some museums. As a storage medium for information and ideas, books are hard to beat. The only thing that the modern age has come close to in terms of durability is the vinyl record used by the music industry which fell out of vogue when the digital age arrived.
The strength of the book as a method of information storage is that provided it is reasonably well made, and our modern paper technology is pretty good, then it requires nothing more that to be stored in a dry place. It will work without power, it doesn’t require a login to open up and all that it requires is someone with some basic literary skill to pass on the ideas and information it contains. Pretty simple huh? Of course they take up space once you start to collect the little beasts and getting back to the Fin Review, after a while you ending up employing people to look after your collection of printed material, people called librarians. But by and large, the system has stood the test of time. It is a brave act of faith to dump such a time honored method in favour of something that has only been with mankind for the last couple of decades.
Finally, borrowing from the IT world, you often hear the term redundancy employed by geeks talking about their wonderful systems. They have a spare of something running that is meant to provide you with some sort of guaranteed level of service, be it a storage system or a network connection or the physical processor. I think there is a very strong argument to maintain redundant systems of information storage just in case the world wide online system ever catches a cold.
