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Mile High Vision of Libraries

The advent of a technology assisted, composite reading mode is transforming the library as a physical place, the use of its physical print and analog collections, the future of scholarly communication and the future of library reference services. It is also transforming everything else including library preservation. The adoption of a composite reading mode, by readers old and young, has been immediate. The notorious speed of the digital revolution is actually the less than instantaneous lag in the transformation of institutions involved with the transmission of knowledge.

The ACRL presentations tested the premise that the future of the library is linked to the advent of a composite reading mode. In this scenario, technology has enabled the integration of an oral/visual reading mode, the reading mode of writing and the reading mode of print within a single interface and the libraries must transform services to this new way of reading.

A composite reading mode explains away a lot of stuff including the apprehension that the rate of change is too fast. If access technologies dissolve thresholds between reading modes the reader’s adaptation is instantaneous. No one using the early telegraph thought to desire a transmission rate for a written message that was, say, half of the previous overland time.The telegraph removed a threshold between modes of orality and writing and communicators surged forward. In these terms the present rate of change in technology assisted communication is surprisingly slow.

This technology assisted reading mode is engaged by real people in real places but these places are not necessarily related to the physical locations of library collections or library reader services. Yet there is evidence, at first inertia, but increasingly novel, that the brick and mortar library is acting as a portal for the on-line reading mode.

The challenge is to direct librarians and their infrastructure to the service of a technology assisted composite reading mode. Many of the sessions at the ACRL considered the transition of reference services from front desks to realtime on-line services. One of the observations that continued to pop up was that realtime on-line reference services are not just used by off-site patrons. Quite frequently the queries come from digital researchers just a few feet from the reference desk. This phenomenon is explained with the assertion that the students are simply reluctant to risk losing their work station by getting up to go to the reference desk. Another interpretation is that the reader, engaged in a composite reading mode, never considered getting up at all.

In a composite reading mode the engagement of an oral mode of query associated with face to face reference service is seamlessly integrated into research using the writing mode of e-mail and the print reading mode of collection investigation. The “chat” exchange of realtime reference interfaces illustrates this multi-mode behavior. Meanwhile, traditional front desk reference services, exemplified by oral exchange are going extinct. Those that remain require swivel mounted terminals. The students need to see the terminal display in order to sustain the conversation.

Closing down the physical reference desk to swing reference librarians to work on-line service carrels appears to extract human contact from library reference service but the opposite is achieved via technology assisted composite reading mode. For the on-line reader, all of librarian expertise is also a collection. Librarians need to classify themselves within the new reading mode and the surge of on-line queries will begin. Ask Jeeves gets four million questions each day.

On the other side the librarian in on-line reference exchange is engaged in an authoring process in the oral mode, in a keyboard writing mode and in a cooperative, distributed content service in a print mode all across the same interface. The infrastructure building in the Collaborative Digital Reference Service coordinated from the Library of Congress illustrates this authoring process. A commentator at the conference mentioned that students love such digital reference service because it breaks the “constraints of time and space”. Another version of this remark is that students love to use an interface that dissolves partitions between traditional reading modes.

Assuming, that the technology assisted composite reading mode is here to stay and assuming that even enclaves of the traditional, separate reading modes will be augmented with composite mode access, its clear that library transformation occured yesterday. Only a few dodads remain to be done.

notes

profiling the new composite mode reader:

* 24/7 everything * echo net aware * independent & entreprenurial * day trading live during class * TV viewing time way down * cyber cafe habitualite * real time/world obsessed * boundary dissolver * libraries & computing fully merged * pro-reintermediation * something comes up everyday * up on peer-to-peer exchange * into recommender systems * software cannot decide in advance the motive for query * images are equivalent to text * on the question of technology making us happier the snag is the happier part * public libraries confer cyber annonymity * build environments of informed consent * purchasing behavior is the surrogate for rating * no single dominant technology * avoid arms race between those building tech and those trying to shut it down * private reading on the way out * destiny has a 2-3 year time frame * habits of users rule

(to be continued)