What Happened to Technological Fixes?
By Walt Crawford
American Libraries Columnist
Senior analyst, Research Libraries Group
Column for June/July 2004
I recently ran into an old friend who was reentering the library field. He’d been reading my columns and noted that I seem to be much more humanistic these days than in years past. I appreciated the compliment—but I wonder whether readers who expected a continuation of my old “E-files” series on personal computing and technology (AL, Oct.–Dec. 2001) are a little befuddled.
Maybe they should be. Maybe we all should be. For years, many of us have delighted in the wonders of new technologies and believed they would solve our problems. Technological advances have improved library services in many ways—from shared cataloging and powerful search engines to full-text access and in-house wireless service.
But there have always been prices for new technology that go beyond dollars. First there’s the sometimes-forgotten maxim: Every new solution carries with it new problems. Your best hope is that the problems solved (or situations improved) will outweigh the problems created. Unfortunately, technological fixes (and most other solutions) cause problem deflection: The new problems tend to be in different areas than the old ones and may not be obvious to those whose old problems seem to be solved.
There’s another price: attention. Some of us, some of the time, get caught up in technological possibilities at the expense of overall service issues. We fail to see the importance of library-controlled collection policies, blinded by thousands of full-text journals in big deals. We focus on wonderful new services we can offer to the most advanced users, sometimes at the expense of those who need public library services the most. We fail to assure that books get to the shelves based on user needs, swayed by the ready availability of shared or vendor-supplied cataloging for less critical books. In short, we can fail to see the library’s mission for the WiFi hotspot.
Loath as I am to focus on generational differences, maybe this is a case where the kids these days can tell us something. For many of them, the technologies that fascinate us are simply part of everyday life; the interesting issues are uses of those technologies. Personal computers became boring when they became highly capable and fairly reliable: For sensible people, the focus turned from the machine to what you do with it. At this point, maybe that’s what should happen with most technology.
Policy, not technology
Cory Doctorow, a science-fiction writer and outreach coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation who is also the prime contributor to the Boing Boing weblog (boingboing.net), offered this formulation in December 2003:
"The last 20 years were about technology. The next 20 years are about policy. It’s about realizing that all the really hard problems—free expression, copyright, due process, social networking—may have technical dimensions, but they aren’t technical problems. The next 20 years are about using our technology to affirm, deny, and rewrite our social contracts: All the grandiose visions of e-democracy, universal access to human knowledge . . . are dependent on changes in the law, in the policy, in the sticky, nonquantifiable elements of the world. We can’t solve them with technology: The best we can hope for is to use technology to enable the human interaction that will solve them."
Cory Doctorow is no Luddite. His weblog, his science fiction, and his role at EFF make that clear. Although I sometimes have fun with the concept, I’m not a Luddite either. I make my living from technology. I love what technology has done for entertainment, libraries, publishing, and interpersonal communication—even as I wonder about what it has done to entertainment, libraries, publishing, and interpersonal communication.
By now you should be realizing that technology won’t solve the real problems that libraries face now and in the future. Technological advances provide useful new tools, but too many new tools come with unintended consequences (and sometimes-intentional consequences) that need to be coped with. In some cases, the costs of the tools may outweigh their benefits.
Libraries work effectively by integrating new technologies into an ongoing continuum of collection and services. The shape of that continuum should be driven by policy; that doesn’t mean ignoring new technological possibilities, but it does mean maintaining a different focus. Librarians work most effectively when they recognize that most users are less devoted to constant technological change than they are to the heart of libraries: Good people offering effective access to varied, worthwhile collections that center on books.
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