Director of technology for the Shenendehowa Public Library in Clifton Park, New York.
kgs@bluehighways.com
Column for November 1999
At least every hundred years, this column will ask the question: Where are we going, and where have we been?
John Kupersmith maintains the “Internet Branch” of the Washoe County (Nev.) Public Library—an imaginative, attractive Web site chock-full of resources and information. He sees the rate of change accelerating, and e-mail has played a major role. “I think librarianship has changed more in the last 10 years than in the preceding 90,” observes Kupersmith. “Ten years ago, the network of connections with librarians in other places had begun to develop . . . but there was nothing like the river of communications we swim in now.”
But, Kupersmith adds, “In the midst of all this change . . . people still come into libraries and find things there that expand their lives. Children still discover books and experience storytelling. Librarians still help them learn and grow.”
Joyce Latham is Chicago Public Library’s director of automation. The resources she has helped introduce include a huge, well-equipped computer lab with a dazzling quantity of machines—“The line to get in goes around the corner,” she said.
Latham may be an optimist in practice, but she believes we have abandoned some of the core values of librarianship. “While I think [libraries] began as education centers they developed into agents of social change, particularly in the ’60s and ’70s. . . . Now, I think public libraries serve primarily as entertainment centers, because entertainment is popular and easy to fund.”
Rory Litwin, who lives in San Jose, California, is an extra-hire librarian in the Santa Clara County Library. You may know him as the editor and manager of Library Juice, a free electronic newsletter about librarianship delivered by e-mail and available on the Web.
Litwin, like Latham, isn’t happy with the winds of change, and believes “the values of librarianship have weakened owing to financial pressure.” However, he sees the potential for positive change. “If we can sustain the unity of the concept of librarianship, we may be able to expand the influence of the values of librarianship.”
Monica King is young adult services coordinator for Ouachita Parish Public Library in Monroe, Louisiana. She also developed a tool to allow patrons to log in to value-added databases from home, school, or work—anywhere they can access the Web. King had shared her tool for free, but applied for an Internet patent when she read an article talking about patent factories in Silicon Valley and thought, “Why not?”
Viewing her authentication method as simply a traditional response to a service need, King says, “It is librarians themselves who often have the best solutions to our problems. It may be unrealistic to believe that little librarians can compete with the corporate giants, but I am eternally (yet not foolishly) optimistic about the pool of talented people working as library professionals.”
King sees the librarian becoming Super-Librarian, capable of leaping over tall formats with a single bound. “We will be recognized as knowledgeable leaders in educating our public on how to gather, use and organize information. . . . We can embrace the traditional roots of our profession while continuing to adapt and improve for the future.”
Jerry Kuntz wears many hats, but outside of the Ramapo-Catskill Library System in Middletown, New York, where he’s electronic resources consultant, he’s best known as the guru of KidsClick, an advertising-free search tool that’s a great place to point parents who are dismayed by the commercialism of sites such as Yahooligans and Disney.
Jerry refused to reflect on the past—perhaps he was afraid that if he looks back he’ll turn into a pillar of dumb terminals—but he had plenty of prognostications for the future. “Books won’t go away for another generation; but on-demand printing will start to replace wholesale distribution in a few years. Even without storing large collections of physical artifacts, there will still be the recognition that public spaces devoted to the culture of lifelong learning enhance a community.”
However, Jerry also thinks that the cost of technology will severely impact those tiny “Barbie Dream Libraries” we all love to visit, as long as we don’t have to actually work there. “Many small public libraries that stay open now due to the generosity of volunteers and lowly-paid nonprofessionals aren’t going to survive.”
A win-win future
Mignon Morse, the director of Smith Public Library in Wylie, Texas, saw her first computer in 1984, in library school. Later she stepped into a vacuum to make her library a local leader in information technology issues.
Reflecting on the last decade, Morse commented, “Within the last four years, we have started offering Internet for the public, learned to use e-mail rather than phones as a means of communication, and I became the city’s Webmaster because I was the only one in the city two years ago willing to accept the challenge and began searching online databases on a regular basis.”
Morse sees the future as win-win for traditional and new services. “I think the book will always be around and that computers will become more popular within the 21st century.... I hope that parents will acknowledge the need to sit and read a picture book to a child, and adults will always want to read the best-selling fiction title.”
Next stop, 21st century
Despite the Disneyfication of the mad ’90s, many of us have values—and some of us, including the librarians interviewed for this column, put our values into practice. No matter what changes, if we can stick to what we know is true and good about librarianship, in another thousand years we will be happy to say: same old problems—same old successes, one new reader at a time.