Institute For The Future

The Future of Libraries as Places

Being the only IFTF staffer based in New York City, I've been taking a "maker" approach to office space. Why carry thousands of dollars per month overhead in this overheated real estate market, when there are any number of wireless parks and coffee shops to set up shop at?

 

One place I've been spending a -lot- of time is NYU's Bobst Library, Philip Johnson's chocolate colored monstrosity lurking at the southeast corner of Washington Square Park. For $150 annual alumni donation I can work there 24/7. They have pay-per-page printers, reservable conference (aka "group study") rooms, and first rate research services.

 

As part of this experience, I've spent a great deal of time watching how students use the library. What's surprised me is just how vigorously the library is used when most of its resources are actually -more easily- accessed elsewhere on campus. Since all the journals are electronically acessible (and very quickly with good search tools), its probably easier to print articles in your office or dorm room than to come read a print copy or print a PDF (at 10 cents/page) in the library.

 

Yesteday, I found a very good treatment on the topic, "Library as Place:

Rethinking Roles, Rethinking Space "published by the Council on Library and Information Resources (http://www.clir.org). The first chapter sums up the state of things nicely:

 

While information technology has not replaced print media, and is not expected to do so in the foreseeable future, it has nonetheless had an astonishing and quite unanticipated impact on the role of the library. Contrary to the predictions of diminishing use and eventual obsolescence of libraries, usage has expanded dramatically—sometimes doubling or even tripling. These increases are particularly common at libraries and institutions that have worked with their architects and planners to anticipate the full impact of the integration of new information technologies throughout their facilities. At institutions where such collaborative planning has occurred—for our ?rm, at the University of Southern California, Emory University, and Dartmouth College, and more recently, at Fordham University, Illinois Wesleyan University, and Lake Forest College—new library usage speaks for itself: The demand for services and technological access to information, regardless of format, is beyond expectations.

 

 

So libraries are more popular than ever. Another unanticipated outcome of the end of cyberspace. But what's most interesting is just how different the activities of these 21st century undergrads are from what I used to do in libraries during the 1990s. Whereas most of my peers looked to libraries as a place of solace and quiet focus, for these students they are intensely collaborative spaces.

 

The powers-that-be seem to be responding to this on some level. A few years ago, NYU invested a significant amount of money in revamping the two lower sub-surface levels of the library. These spaces are buzzing around the clock, bringing together the three catalysts of creative, collaborative knowledge work - snacks and coffee, computers and networks, and deeply motivated men and women.

 

That said, to step out of these subterranean, in the future learning spaces and take the elevator up to the 10 floors of stack space and reading rooms - beautiful soaring glass-enclosed rooms surrounding a monumental atrium - is to take an elevator ride back to the 1980s. Stack after stack of moulding books, government documents, and other functionally inaccessible archives abound. Power plugs, large-format printers and visualization studios, and ultra-high speed networks are scarce.

 

I don't think the Bobst library's successes are the cutting edge, nor are its neglected spaces the worst in class. But its the juxtaposition that's jarring, and in response students are reshaping the space to their own needs. Reading lounges that I remember quiet as a monastery during my grad school years in the mid-90s now resemble a Starbuck's, with groups of co-eds digging into intense discussions of course materials and assignments, careers, and the not-too-occaisional Facebook gaffe.

 

Thomas Frey of the DaVinci Institute has an interesting article that among other forecasts, argues that "libraries will transition from a center of information to a center of culture":

 

With the emergence of distributed forms of information the central role of the library as a repository of facts and information is changing.  While it is still important to have this kind of resource, it has proven to be a diminishing draw in terms of library traffic.

 

The notion of becoming a cultural center is an expansive role for the future library.  It will not only serve as an information resource, but much more, with the exact mission and goals evolving and changing over time.

 

A culture-based library is one that taps into the spirit of the community, assessing priorities and providing resources to support the things deemed most important.  Modern day cultural centers include museums, theaters, parks, and educational institutions.  The library of the future could include all of these, but individual communities will be charged with developing an overall strategy that reflects the identity and personality of its own constituency.

 

Finally, the spatial relationships between collaborative practices and archival technology aren't the only driving forces. The library as a warehouse of printed material may be a massive ecological liability-in-the-shadows for universities. A full and broad-reaching carbon accounting of any institution of higher education would inevitably finger the library as a major carbon load. The Internet may not have displaced our desire for the printed page, but amassing so much of it in one place may prove to be a luxury that a society seriously committed to reducing energy consumption can ill afford.

 

I'm not recommending that we burn all the books. But we're going to need to seriously rethink the way we make printed material available over the next decade, since its an insanely energy-intensive activity. If we measure success of an archive as the ability to deliver information on demand at the lowest carbon footprint, stacks will have a very hard time justifying themselves against network-enhanced alternatives.

 

REFERENCES

 

Council on Library and Information Resources. February 2005. "Library as Place: Rethinking Roles, Rethinking Space " [www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub129/pub129.pdf]

 

Frey, Thomas. "The Future of Libraries: Beginning the Great Transformation" [www.davinciinstitute.com/page.php]