They say every relationship has its ups and downs. As librarians prepare to gather in Philadelphia, March 13–17, for the Public Library Association 2012 meeting, libraries and publishers are in something of a down period.
The questions surrounding library e-book lending have devolved into thornier questions about the future of collection building, and equity of access—fundamental missions for libraries.
In the past few months, as the e-book question heated up, one publisher casually expressed to me a view of libraries as little more than an old-school provider of print books on metal shelves. Another did not know what Readers Advisory was. In this increasingly wired, get-it-all-online world, perhaps some in publishing have lost perspective on the work of libraries, of their benefit, of their importance. Maybe it would be helpful to reconnect.
Earlier this month, I took advantage of a gracious offer from PW contributing editor Nancy Pearl and traveled to Seattle, to meet 11 of Nancy’s students in the Information School at the University of Washington. I wanted to see who is choosing to go into the profession, and why. What are their thoughts on the way the information world—and the publishing industry—is developing?
One of the leading information schools in the nation, the University of Washington’s mission goes beyond what you may think of when you think of libraries and librarians. “We prepare information leaders,” the UW mission statement reads. “We research the problems and opportunities of information. We design solutions to information challenges. We make information work.” Making information work is no small feat. Each year, UW officials say, the world creates more than 161 exabytes of new information—enough to fill 2 billion 80GB iPods.
We’re happy to introduce you to 11 librarians with bright futures, and to share some of their thoughts on the future of the profession.
Meet Our Panel
Amy Mikel: I’m a second-year residential MLIS student, and I’m tracked to graduate in June. I’m from Chicago, originally.
April Martin: I’m from New Orleans, and I graduated last June with my MLIS. I am looking to work in a public library, but am also on the fence about academic libraries. I plan to return to New Orleans this summer.
Cherl Petso: I grew up in Idaho, but I’ve lived in Washington for eight years. I was convinced I wanted to go into special libraries until I started interning at Ballard, a branch library in Seattle. I’ve completely fallen in love with it.
Althea Lazzaro: I graduated last year and work at a community college library. I’m originally from upstate New York, but I moved to Seattle from Portland, Ore., where I worked in a bookstore. I also have a master’s in literature.
Denise Douglas-Baird: I was a legal aid attorney, until I began looking for a better career for raising kids. I don’t think you can be family friendly and be against public library funding. I graduated in June 2011, and I’m looking for a job in a public library.
Tim Cahill: I grew up in Montana, but I’ve been in Seattle since the late 1980s. I have a degree in Arabic. I’m interested in reference and instruction, probably in a community college or a university library.
Grace Chung: I’m originally from the southeast, but I moved to Seattle in 2008. I am enrolled in the both the MLIS and the China studies master’s program, and I’m really interested in special libraries.
Lillian Dabney: I grew up in Pennsylvania, but I’ve lived in many places. I am coming to librarianship as a second career—my first was physical therapy. The public library is where my heart is.
Zach Zelinski: I am from Tucson, Ariz., and I moved to Seattle around 2008 and started working for tech startups. I’m not really sure what I want to do with my MLIS. I’m interested in everything.
Jen Malczewski: I’m from Wisconsin, and I come from an art background. I’d like to work somewhere at that intersection between art and museums and libraries.
Andrew Brink: I’m originally from Wisconsin. I studied creative writing and have worked as a writer and editor. I’m doing an internship in an architecture library, and having so much fun I’m considering work in special libraries.
Why Librarianship?
Amy: For me, the decision was partly selfish, partly noble. I was in a career that made me unhappy, even though I was financially secure. I had the luxury of languishing at a job while I thought about what I really wanted to do, but still, it’s a scary moment when you realize that what you did your undergraduate work in, and the job you’ve had for the past five years isn’t what you want to do. So I bumped into the library as an idea, and I consistently feel I’ve made the right decision. Librarianship brings together everything that I care about. It makes me happy in terms of what I have to offer, what I feel I need to be doing, what I have to give back. It’s really fulfilling.
April: I feel like I’m a bit of an outlier when it comes to why I wanted to be a librarian, because I decided a long time ago that this was what I wanted to do. I’ve always spent a lot of time in libraries. I’ve always enjoyed learning about things. And I’m really nosy—although I’ve been told that you have to call it intellectual curiosity when you’re a professional! My path actually started with my undergraduate degree in history, I would get really excited about finding informational treasures. That progressed to being excited about helping others to get excited about pursuing their interests. And I love to serve my community.
Althea: I didn’t go to libraries a lot when I was a kid, and I never really thought about libraries much as an institution. Then I started working in a bookstore in Portland, Ore., a kind of higher-end academic store, and I loved it. I loved being around books, around people, I loved helping people figure out what they were after. But the books we sold, mostly from academic publishers, were really expensive, often $60 or more, and the customers would always end up facing a crisis. It was so hard, and I didn’t know what to do, because I liked my work a lot, but I was really unhappy with that experience. Working at a community college library is the exact opposite experience. When students realize they can get these resources at no cost, beyond their time and curiosity, this light of happiness breaks over their faces. It is so gratifying.
Andrew: In high school, my adviser was the school librarian, and she was great. But one experience I had with a library really drew me to librarianship. When I was going through the coming-out process, after high school and before college, my family had moved to a new town, and it was Gay Pride Month. I went to the public library and they had a suggested reading guide on display. That reading guide led me to a bunch of books and that allowed me to learn a lot about myself that I couldn’t anywhere else.
What Do They Teach in I-School?
Zach: I know what a lot of people think librarians do, but I just want to say that I don’t even know the Dewey Decimal System. That’s not something that this program feels it needs to teach, which is great. It’s more about dealing with information in all its forms. It’s a very service-oriented, conversation-oriented program, and that’s emphasized in pretty much any class you take, even the tech classes.
Andrew: We learn the traditions of librarianship, and then are asked to imagine: what’s next? Right now, I’m taking a cataloguing class, and an XML class, and it’s an interesting conversation between the two, because, on one hand, I’m learning to create bibliographic records based on description standards that have been around for a long time. And then I’m learning markup language, which we’re using in a totally new Web environment. That’s a bridge we’re asked to cross all the time. We also have to take a management class, and an instruction class. I wasn’t really interested in taking those classes, but it was great, because those things, learning how to manage a budget or communicate with colleagues or your employees, round out the experience.
Tim: A lot of our classes are very theory based. In my second quarter, I took a course called Knowledge Organization, and after that I actually quit school for about six months. I just had this ambivalence, because I thought maybe library school really was all about this kind of tedious organizing of information. But I eventually understood that the program is a multilayered, diverse education. Part of my ambivalence was because library education just feels so eminently practical—like you can get a really good education by working in a library. But I’ve come to find the theory is important.
Cherl: The required classes are really theory based, and they were tedious for me, too. But when you get into the practical stuff, like an internship, it makes sense. [Andrew Brink] and I went to San Francisco over the summer, and lived at the Zen Center and did archiving, which was really cool. And [Jennifer Malcewski] and I went to the Netherlands and saw libraries and research centers, and because of those concrete experiences all that theory makes more sense now. Our profession is very much in flux, and I think understanding the theories behind what we do helps us develop a better understanding of the profession that will be important as we move into the future.
Althea: I appreciate the diversity of classes we have to take because I’ve found, so far, that librarianship as a profession is very diverse and very collaborative. Being able to at least marginally speak the language of your colleagues, who are often doing very different work than you, makes it easier to come at the work from a holistic position.
Jen: I think one of the valuable things about having such a range of classes is that we all come to libraries and the Information School with very different backgrounds. The program gives us all a baseline to work from, and I think that is slightly different from other professions or programs, where people often arrive with similar skills.
What’s Your Favorite Subject?
Zach: If I had to choose a favorite class, I would pick Adult Readers Service Advisory. For me, growing up, I have to say I didn’t really love libraries. They always felt clinical to me—the books had to be in a specific spot, you weren’t allowed to eat or drink, if I talked too loud I got yelled at. With that mentality, I’d never once asked a librarian what I should read next. So taking an entire class on how to recommend books was amazing.
Lillian: I agree, Readers Advisory is the best class, and, I think that’s inherently a librarian skill. It is so important and can’t be underrated, and I think it’s going to keep us librarians working for a really long time.
Amy: I know this is for Publishers Weekly, so we might be veering more into the reader stuff. But I think to the credit of the Information School, they don’t make those kind of classes a requirement, because they realize many people interested in library science are not interested in making book recommendations or even working in a library. But what they do teach, in a general sense, is how to have a dialogue with someone. Whether you’re a genealogy librarian, or you’re helping someone do research, or if you are going out and doing community analysis, that all is generally the same skill.
Althea: Being able to dialogue with people and listen to them carefully is so important. I studied literature in a lot of different ways and from a lot of different perspectives, but it always felt relatively prescriptive; we were taught to think about books in certain ways. But in our Readers Advisory class, the students did most of the talking, and I found that very useful. Being able to listen and dialogue has become a very valuable skill for me. Sure, there are classes like XML and cataloguing, where information is treated in a more objective fashion. But Readers Advisory broke open the world of books for me in a way that all of my previous English studies had not done.
The Future of the Library?
Denise: I don’t think the role of the library in the community can be replaced by anything. I believe human contact is still important, in fact, even more important because we can do so much in our lives remotely now. You don’t have to go to the grocery store anymore. You can shop online. More people work from home. You can go to school online. But the library is still a place where you can actually go and meet people.
Amy: I think the library is different things to everybody. The library wants to be in your pocket, on your smartphone if that’s what you want. It wants to be the place you go to check out a book or a DVD if that’s what that you want, or to get help with your homework. We want to bring the library to where people are, and bring people to the library.
April: There is an endless amount of information on the Internet, and there often comes a point where an outside influence is needed to get what you’re searching for exactly. The library provides that service. You could search on the Internet for something all day long, but if you’re not connecting with the right terms or whatever, you’re spinning your wheels. So having the opportunity to talk with a professional helps, and we have access to all these resources. We not only help people find what they’re looking for, in a lot of cases, we help them figure out what they really want.
Zach: Coming from the high-tech startup world, when I told people what I was going to do, they were like, “You’re going to do what?” I can understand that reaction. A lot of people think of libraries as book repositories. But that’s changing, and it has to, because if that’s all libraries are, then they’re going to turn into warehouses, storage, then go away. But as a place, I think libraries are really important. As good as technology is now, it doesn’t have anything on real, actual one-to-one human interaction.
Lillian: The library is still a sanctuary for so many situations. I mean, just think of Hurricane Katrina and how the library served as a place for people to get in touch with other people. During the recent snowstorm, which, you know, always paralyzes Seattle, I decided it was prime reading time. So I went to the library in the middle of the snowstorm to pick up my holds—and it was closed. So I went to the bus stop to take my bus home, and there was a gentleman who worked at the Federal Building who had come to work in the middle of the snowstorm only to be told, go home. He was bemoaning that, but when I told him my story, how the library was closed, he just couldn’t believe it. “That’s crazy,” he said. “The library should not be closed!”
Cherl: I worked at the Ballard branch on Super Bowl Sunday, and it was also a lovely day, so you wouldn’t expect many people to come to the library. But people were shaking the doors five minutes before opening, and they were lined up into the parking garage. We had 200 people in 10 minutes, just running in, literally. People wanted to use the computers, they wanted room to study; kids needed stuff for their reports for school. And I think libraries are especially important in the current economic downturn. A lot of people don’t have computers to look for jobs, and, we have that, as well as resources for finding jobs.
Jen: When Cherl and I went to the Netherlands, we really saw a lot of the library as a community center. They even served beer at some of them. There were small libraries in small towns where you walked in and it felt like a bookstore. People spend hours browsing in Barnes & Noble, right? This had a similar feel. There were tons of magazines, couches, comfortable places. They had ways to consume different types of media, you could listen to records, or whatever, it was beyond the idea of books, which I thought was very cool.
Grace: I’m going to disagree with just about everyone here, because I don’t think the library as a physical place is that important. And I feel like the longer we cling to the library as a physical place, the longer it will take us to innovate and to change with the times. We’re not being trained to enter into a place—we’re being trained to provide a service. And I’m speaking as someone who loves the library, the physical place. When I was applying to library school, I called the director of my county library system in Virginia for advice and he said: “If you are determined to be a librarian who works in a physical library, don’t do it, because the jobs may not be there, and that’s not what being a librarian is about.” But, he said, “If you’re interested in public service and information, then definitely go into this field.”
Competing in the Google/Apple/Amazon World?
Grace: I think libraries have been notoriously crappy at marketing themselves. It might be us being modest, but marketing is something we need to do a lot more of. I mean, look at Yahoo! Answers—you have people asking questions, and then crazy people who don’t anything answering them, and the answers get voted up, by other people who don’t know anything! Then look at Slam the Boards! where these librarians in Indiana are making this effort to get their service out there. I think we need to do a lot more of that.
Zach: Libraries don’t think of themselves as businesses, but we are competing with businesses. And businesses advertise, right? So that’s a mentality that has to change, because I think we are crappy, to use the phrase, at advertising, at getting the word out. And that may be because we haven’t had to prove our worth to the public quite as much in the past. Over the past few generations, libraries mostly had to prove their worth to budget managers, government officials, whoever funds us. Now, we need sell ourselves to the public.
Amy: Libraries aren’t competing against iTunes or against Google—we’re not against Wikipedia. We’re about figuring out ways to work with those technologies. At a very basic level, it’s a matter of teaching people. I think we can market that better—yes, Google can help you find so many things, but there are so many things that Google can’t find for you. Just helping people understand that, and then taking the next step and actually showing them a tangible example is important.
E-Books and the Digital Transition
Denise: I think of reading books as an addiction, and there are so many different ways to get what you need. Whatever it is you’re addicted to, the more avenues there are to get it, great!
Amy: I think it’s important to know that libraries are not partitioning people off as e-book readers or print book readers. To us, they’re all readers, and we’re trying to do whatever we can to give readers what they want.
Lillian: I agree—I have a friend who will listen to an audio book, and then she’ll go read the book because it was so good. Now she has a Kindle, and she reads on the Kindle, and she still reads print books. There’s just a variety of options, and how we provide service depends on what people want.
Andrew: I think digital allows for spontaneity and serendipity. The other night, my partner and I were in the living room, and he told me he’d never read Ann of Green Gables. I was like “What!” So I found a free copy on the Kindle, it’s a public domain book, and we started reading it right there. I mean, that’s really cool. Also, I think there are really some interesting social aspects of the e-book, too, as far as sharing with friends. And you know, when you check out an e-book, the next time you check it out it will still have your underlines. I think there’s a great future for marginalia with e-books, and for sharing with people in new ways.
Grace: For public libraries, e-books solve a lot of problems, especially access problems. For example, large print books aren’t very cost effective for publishers, and it’s hard to get technology for people who are blind. So those are huge benefits of e-books.
Denise: A lot of the space in libraries is taken up with hold shelves, and with e-books you could certainly lessen that issue and open up more space in the library to do more innovative things, especially in small libraries where there’s not a lot of space.
Cherl: With e-books there is the problem of whether you own what you pay for. I think one of the big issues is that we are comparing a physical book with a digital book and talking about how many copies you have and how many times those copies can be used before you have to buy it again. What’s the publisher that limited the number of lends—HarperCollins? We had to watch a video with librarians talking about physical copies of books and how many times they had been checked out and the condition they were in. An actual, well-made hardback book can last 200, 300 uses, if it is treated decently. So it’s definitely not a good thing for libraries in financial terms to have to buy something over and over that you don’t ever really own, or where the company you’re licensing it from has the right to take it away from you or change the terms whenever they feel like it. It’s not that easy to use OverDrive, either. People come in every day with their devices and ask how it works, and many of them can’t follow the 25-step directions or whatever it is to set it up. And that’s pretty much the only way you can get an e-book lent to your device, which is ridiculous. It’s not fair that that’s the only thing the library has to offer when it comes to e-books, because people are struggling.
Zach: Here’s an experience I had recently. I had to buy a book for a class. So, I went on Amazon, because I have Prime, and I can pay $4 and it comes the next day. The paperback version of the book was $11. That’s cool, I thought, but I wondered, what would it be to just get it right away on Kindle? It was $26! Now, there’s absolutely no reason that I can see for the e-book being more than twice as much as a paperback being overnight shipped to me. So right now, I’m kind of feeling like we’re just waiting for parts of the old publishing industry to be replaced by people who have grown up with a different mentality. Because there have been some actions by publishers recently that show a desperation to preserve an old model, rather than a willingness to adapt.
Amy: I know ALA is having conversations with publishing houses that won’t lend e-books, trying to smooth out those relationships. And right now it’s on the library to explain to people, “Well, we don’t have this book digitally, but not because we’ve chosen not to.” But I think e-book lending goes to a bigger issue: that libraries and publishers have to work together. That’s the real issue.
