Technolust - the fifth column of the information counter-revolution

I'm going to start with a story about growing up in Tasmania in the 1990s.

The economy wasn't great, with unemployment at around 11%, no economic growth to speak of and a high State debt. In these formative years, I was surrounded by both the defeatists and the hopelessly optimistic. Many said that the Tasmanian economy had no hope and had been on the downward slide since the end of Transportation. Others dreamed of the One Big Project that was going to save us all: the Mt Wellington cable car, the Oceanport cruiseship terminal, the enormous pulp and paper mill, the largest catamaran factory in the world.

The Oceanport company turned out to have $1 to its name, the catamaran company went bankrupt, the pulp mill dream ultimately saw a prominent businessman gaoled for bribery, a Premier resign in disgrace and the state's largest company fall into receivership. The cable car dream quietly slinked away, only to return recently as the economy again started to go sour.

But in the intervening decade, Tasmania's economy flourished. There was no One Big Project that achieved this. There were however lots of small projects. There was the ongoing success of the King Island Dairy. There were dozens and dozens of independent bed and breakfasts serving a growing tourist trade. There was the ever expanding Taste of Tasmania and Ten Days on the Island festivals. There were interstate expansions of home-grown beer and seafood brands Boags and Tassal. There was no one big project, just one big vision – a vision based on contested but broadly shared values of wholesome clean produce, pride in work and lack of pretention. Tasmanians still complain about their economy, but the improvement is obvious to someone like me who left 12 years ago.

Tasmania's problem wasn't a lack of big projects, funding or infrastructure.

It was a failure of self-belief.

We are in an era of unprecedented change for libraries and the life of information. Bookstores throughout the western world are closing down. Libraries in the USA, UK and some in Australia are being defunded or closed. Many question the relevance of libraries, including some librarians. I am again surrounded by defeatists and the hopelessly optimistic. Many librarians appear to be searching for One Big Technology to save us. I believe that just like in Tasmania in the 1990s, this is a flawed search.

I am not here to tell members of the Victorian Association for Library Automation that librarians should not embrace technology. But technology by itself is not the solution to the problems of libraries, because technology is not the cause of the problems of libraries. New technology is simply a fact of contemporary life.

When we introduce a new technology or program into our libraries, we need to be clear about why we are doing it, what it will achieve, and how we will measure its success. To do this we have to return to some basic ideas about libraries and information.If librarians are to successfully position libraries for the future, we must think about not just what libraries could do, but what they are, and what they are for.

A system for sharing ideas

I think it is useful to think about libraries not as buildings or collections or even as services but rather as a systems. A system that combines different practices, approaches, concepts and strategies into a unified whole.

At its heart, a library is a system for sharing ideas.

Each library system works in a slightly different way, but over the centuries four principles have underpinned the way libraries operate:

• Preservation
• Openness
• Freedom
• Privacy

The reason for their primacy is that these four principles are crucial to the efficient and effective sharing of ideas.

PRESERVATION is the thing that ensures we can continue to share ideas between generations. Effective sharing of ideas requires that ideas remain easily discoverable and sharable. We might also call this 'findability'.

OPENNESS or EQUAL ACCESS ensures that ideas spread as far as possible. The more people exposed to an idea, the greater chance it has of being useful, even if it is only useful because it enlivens discussion or brings together a society in mutual disgust.

INTELLECTUAL FREEDOM works together with equal access when it comes to encountering ideas – it is not enough to provide equal access to approved or worthy ideas, we must provide access to ALL ideas. If such access is to be possible, of course, we also need to defend the right to create and record controversial ideas in the first place, otherwise we will have nothing to which to provide access and less ideas will be shared.

PRIVACY is crucial if equal access and intellectual freedom are to be effectively defended. Intellectual freedom means nothing if citizens are constantly looking over their shoulders. The chilling effect of the possibility that a future employer or a government official could discover ones reading history is enough to inhibit intellectua