The DPLA and the Risks of Gentrifying America’s Public Libraries TeleRead: News and views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics

abernard102@gmail.com 2013-09-03

Summary:

"Jim Duncan, now executive director of the Colorado Librarian Consortium, offered some needed candor about the Digital Public Library of America for NPR reporter Laura Sydell’s August 19 segment on the DPLA. The reaction from certain NPR commenters online? Nasty bashing of Duncan and other public librarians. One listener, for example, accused public librarians of 'hopping on board the ‘library patrons only read trash and would rather make this a rec center’ train.' Now back to reality. Duncan himself used to be an academic librarian, and he hopes that the DPLA will succeed hugely and offer a wealth of cultural and historical riches, in line with his own interest in this kind of content. But he warns that the organization so far has not done enough for typical public library patrons, who tend to want 'contemporary content, best-sellers. That’s what they’re coming to the public library to check out.'  Exactly! The public librarians I know say that just a fraction of patrons care for out-of-copyright books, historical documents and other items high on the DPLA’s list. May this change someday! But don’t count on instant miracles.  For more proof that the DPLA and typical public library patrons live on different planets, just look at the Alexa graph to the right—showing how how few people are now visiting the DPLA’s Web site.  Granted, Alexa numbers are very unscientific unless sites run server scripts from the service, and the DPLA site is just a start, a demo with more content to come. But, significantly, traffic has fallen off steeply since the initial bursts of publicity when dp.la officially debuted this spring. Even allowing for the summer slump from students and teachers’ being on vacation, numbers are far from stellar. The global rank as of this writing is 178,494 based on three-month measurements, worse by 71,943 than the previous period. The one-month U.S. rank is a mere 72,943, compared to 22,636 for a one-man e-book blog run by a friend of mine.  Notice, too, that the DPLA’s shown demographics, whether fully accurate or not, are starkly unrepresentative of Internet users at large and probably of the U.S. population as well. Viewership is skewed toward the academic elite and toward women. While the typical U.S. public library probably draws more female patrons than male patrons, DPLA leaders should still remember how far boys can lag girls on reading tests. Might the DPLA’s gender gap be even worse than in the brick-and-mortar world?  Yes, of course: We’d like K-12 students and other learners to be comfortable with classics and with source materials of the kind so dear to the DPLA; we urgently need for the past to be universally accessible. But America’s public libraries exist for recreation and other purposes, not just education and research, however essential the latter two activities are. This multi-faceted mission is perfectly in line with the wisdom in the Five Laws of Library Science. Academia must not boss around the public library world—a very strong possibility in the end, as digitization continues, if the current DPLA vision prevails.  The brilliant people now running the DPLA aren’t out to crush popular culture, not deliberately. But this could change: we are talking long term about an ambitious project out of Harvard and not merely the present leaders, whom I like and admire. When I saw Web comments from NPR listeners slamming Jim Duncan for telling the truth about the library preferences of typical taxpayers, I grew all the more convinced that the DPLA should turn itself into the Digital Academic Library of America or something similar while encouraging public libraries to establish their own system, ideally through COSLA, a group of state library administrators. Both systems could share not just content but also a common catalog for patrons wanting it, an infrastructure and technical services organization, and overlapping board members—while hewing to the systems’ respective priorities ..."

Link:

http://www.teleread.com/library/the-dpla-and-the-risks-of-gentrifying-americas-public-libraries/

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.comment oa.libraries oa.librarians oa.ch oa.recommendations oa.glam oa.dpla

Date tagged:

09/03/2013, 11:33

Date published:

09/03/2013, 07:33