Open Platforms and the Anti-Fragile Library

Earlier this week I gave a short talk for IFLA's New Librarians Global Connection: best practices, models and recommendations webinar series. They had asked me to talk about my ideas on 'technolust' and antifragility, but of course my thoughts have moved on a little since my first blog posts on those subjects.

A recording of the webinar will be available on the IFLA New Professionals SIG website soon. I have also published the text of my talk below, including the slides, if you'd prefer to read it. This also makes it a lot easier to click through to the links to the ideas I referenced!

The danger of techno-lust

Tech industry veteran Jon Udell wrote a blog post in January called "3D Printing isn't the digital literacy that libraries most need to teach". This is something I also wrote about early last year, for much the same reasons as Udell. He asks why public libraries are so obsessed with maker spaces and 3D printers, instead of teaching digital literacy.

Often we think we are teaching digital literacy when we are actually just showing people how to make a particular device or program function. But if you are simply showing people how to use new technologies without explaining what the technology is doing to them then you have failed as a librarian.

Digital literacy is about surfacing the invisible. It's about strategies, not tools. We need to equip our communities with the 'soft tech' of invisible assumptions and effects more than the 'hard tech' of particular interfaces and products. Rather than installing 3D printers and explaining how to do truncated searches in particular journal databases, there are far more interesting and useful things libraries can do to equip our communities to navigate the information landscape. The idea of 'anti-fragility' is one interesting model for thinking about those things.

Anti fragility

In 2012 Nassim Nicholas Taleb published a book called Antifragile. The idea of 'Antifragile' is that the typical binary opposites of fragile and robust is actually an incomplete way of considering how the world works, particularly in unstable or rapidly changing environments. Taleb posits that 'robust' actually is a midway point between the opposites of 'fragile' - where things are damaged by instability - and 'anti-fragile' - where things benefit from instability.

Taleb has written for some time on problem of using averages and historical data to predict risk profiles, particularly when considering unlikely but catastrophic events. Building anti fragility so that you are likely to benefit more in unstable times is a better long-term strategy than optimising for current or average conditions. Ultimately his idea of "anti-fragility" can be simply described as "having lots of positive options no matter what happens."

Taleb recommends what he calls the 'barbell strategy', where one avoids investing too heavily in the 'average' and instead spends time, money or effort on both things that seem to be very low risk and things that seem to be very high risk but have a potential payoff that is also very high.

An example in the financial world would be the 90/10 split Taleb recommended in his earlier book The Black Swan where you invest 90% of your money in very safe things like Treasury Bonds and gold, and then spread the remaining 10% amongst a bunch of very risky stocks or currencies that will probably fail but have the potential to make an enormous return.

Considering we are in one of the most unstable and rapidly changing information and professional environments librarians have ever faced, the idea of 'anti fragility' seems rather attractive.

So how do we do this in practice?

Antifragile collections

Wilkin profiles are a concept explained by Dan Cohen in 2012. Named after John Wilkin, a 'Wilkin Profile' essentially shows how unique a library's collection is compared to any given group of libraries.

A library with lots of titles that are only held by a few other libraries in the set will have a 'left leaning profile'. A library with mostly titles also held by many other libraries will have a 'right leaning profile'. A library that has a few unique titles and a few popular ones but mostly an average sort of collection will have a 'rounded profile'.

If we took the Taleb 'barbell' approach to collection management, the Wilkin Profile would look like a left-leaning barbell. This is something we have started doing with our hardcopy reference collection at my library service. In public libraries a hardcopy non-lending reference collection is really used for two things - quick ref