What we have and what we do

This morning I gave the keynote talk at the ALIA WA Symposium.

Below are the text (more or less) and slides from my talk: What we have and what we do.

Last year I was at the ALIA National Advisory Congress in Melbourne. We were discussing the future of libraries (of course) and I posed the question - "Are libraries important because of what we have, or are libraries important because of what we do?"

Today, I'm not going to talk about the future of libraries. If we want libraries and librarianship to be different in the future we have to change them now. So I'm not going to talk about the future of libraries, I'm going to talk about the present of libraries. I'm going to talk today about what we have, and what we do.

What we have

So what do we have? Here's a non-exhaustive list:

• books, newspapers and journals
• historical documents and realia
• specialised databases and information products
• internet access and public use PCs
• space and buildings - this is increasingly important in inner-urban areas where space is at a premium, but importantly it's also space where it's ok to loiter.
• money - even if it sometimes feels like we don't have enough
• staff who are good at organising things and finding connections

What we do

If I was to summarise how librarians tend to describe what we do, it would be two things.

1. connect people and ideas by making knowledge findable

This first point is of course why some people say that librarians aren't needed any more, because we have Google. Indeed, many in our profession tacitly agree with this. This is evident in the overwhelming prevalence of commercial catalogue and discovery software solutions within libraries. These tools are not built by librarians, with the particular needs of our communities in mind. Instead of building them ourselves, we spend our time trying to train our patrons to use generic tools that usually aren't intuitive or well suited to their needs. Little wonder then, that many librarians focus more on the second task:

1. solve group-action problems by providing access to knowledge as a public good

Kathryn Greenhill and Con Wiebrands call this 'free and easy access to content'. They also point out that when it comes to digital information, services like the Pirate Bay and Bi-torrent do a better job of it than libraries do. Super cheap copying and distribution of information is a feature of the internet, not a bug. If the only difference your library makes is providing an inconvenient legal way of accessing information that can otherwise be accessed conveniently and illegally, you're in trouble.

Empowerment

You're probably thinking at this point that I'm making libraries sound somewhat irrelevant. Not at all. We're in the knowledge business, and the reason there are so many other entities in this space is that with knowledge comes power.

Last year statistician Erin Jonaitis summed up what this means for librarians in one of the most important sentences ever tweeted. She wrote:

If knowledge is power, then a key part of professional ethics for information professionals should be: Who are you empowering?

The tricky thing with Erin Jonaitis' question - "who are you empowering?" is that it doesn't quite go far enough. A couple of months ago I mentioned this quote in an article for In the Library with the Lead Pipe about privacy, technology and empowering our users. Bobbi Newman wrote a very considered response, emphasising that libraries need to be approachable and noting that:

anything that could be interpreted as “come to the library, we’re smarter than you” might not be the message you want to send.

So the challenge is to work out how to help your community to empower themselves.

This is the real driver behind things like the Maker Movement and libraries building hackerspaces. I've always disliked the use of the word 'consumption' in relation to cultural works and information. A novel or TV show is not something you consume like a hamburger. That