By Andrew K. PaceAmerican Libraries Columnist
By Andrew K. Pace
American Libraries Columnist
Head of information technology,
North Carolina State University Libraries,
Raleigh
andrew_pace@ncsu.edu
January 2007
A brand-new year. A brand-new place for my column. A time to talk about being hip and modern. And a chance to start a column with four sentence fragments! But seriously, there’s nothing like working in technology to make this 30-something librarian feel like he’s over the hill. Still, as ever, I am confident that there is a surge of technology interest in the profession that will propel us forward.
I’m extremely humbled to be joined in this new “Information Technology” section of American Libraries by Joseph Janes, whose writing both amuses and inspires; and I am excited that Meredith Farkas, whom I admire as a great writer and pragmatist, is joining us to take a look at putting technology into practice.
This is a fun start to the next 100 years of American Librariesin general, and library technology in particular. Of course, before looking forward, I must first look back.
There’s been a fair bit of beating up on 20th-century library technology. The advent of 21st-century technology—the blog—has even provided a great bully pulpit from which to complain, place blame, and even suggest (less frequently than I would like) an actual way forward. (I’ve done my share since June at the Hectic Pace blog.) I have been pretty vocal from the library technology pulpit myself, with both successes and failures in the last decade trying to wed thought and deed.
Born at the University of Texas in Austin in 1936, punch-card circulation debuted at the University of Missouri in Columbia after librarian and innovator Ralph Parker moved there from UT in 1947.
We have often been first among public service sectors to adopt new technologies. (The very first piece of library automation—the University of Texas’s punch-card circulation system—appeared in 1936!) MARC records were ahead of their time in data transfer, and the OPAC was likely the very first computer-database interaction many people had. Feel free to send cards and letters of more examples, and I will someday finish that book on the history of library automation—as long as someone promises to buy it.
Ironically, despite our tradition as early adopters, librarians have been slow to adapt either the technologies they created or those that came from outside our historically insulated world of library automation. The OPAC languished as an adequate pre-web computerization of the card catalog, microfilm started deteriorating before our eyes, and integrated library systems were bogged down by expensive and glacial changes that often reflected the arcane policies and outdated business models of libraries as much as they did the relatively inexpensive nature of library enterprise software.
As a result, we are now playing catch-up. The ILS, though still monumentally important to basic library operations, is no longer the center of our technological advancement. Vendors, at least the ones looking to still exist at the end of this decade, are trying to innovate again. Libraries, in turn, are adapting to the vendors’ new business models, new strategies, and new partnerships.
Change is in the air—a change for the year or the next decade, if not the next century. Library technologists are anxious to adapt, reacting nimbly to change rather than trying to always be on the bleeding edge of technological innovation. As the saying goes, the early bird may get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
Nevertheless, there are still a lot of newbie librarians who think that “good, fast, and cheap” are always attainable. All three rarely are, in my experience. Pick two, I say, and put some extra effort into getting all three if it’s important to you. Nimbleness, however, can quickly become just a euphemism for impatience. It is only with gross overgeneralization (and a touch of condescension) that someone can suggest that only new professionals are equipped to adapt to new service expectations, new technologies, and change as the only constant.
I admit to being an obsessive-compulsive multitasker, which is, of course, just another way of saying that my attention span is getting shorter. But how could it not be, with the current acceleration of technological change in general and the adaptive change of library technology in particular? I am looking forward to the next 100 years.
The International Digital Publishing Forum, formerly known as the Open eBook Forum, has created a technical standard for the sale and distribution of electronic books. Dubbed the Open eBook Publication Structure Container Format, the standard was created by a team of interested parties, including Adobe, the DAISY Consortium, eBook Technologies, Harlequin, HarperCollins, Amazon’s Mobipocket, netLibrary, OverDrive, Random House, Simon and Schuster, and many others. A significant step forward for the e-book industry, the standard is not without its critics; nevertheless, what the e-book industry still requires is more viable business models and significant buy-in from publishers, some of whom were involved in this long process.