On relevance, standards and collaborative leadership

Regular readers of this blog will have noticed an absence of posts over the last few months. After a recent promotion I’ve simply been so busy with work that I have neglected you all.

I would like to continue a conversation from the comments in my post on platform neutrality, A failure of imagination, where I suggested that librarians have a responsibility to ensure our communities have access to information in a ‘container’ or format that is user-friendly and flexible. Kathryn Greenhill argued that librarians should avoid trying to duplicate content providers like Facebook and Wikipedia and instead focus on providing access and understanding  of these tools. Kate Davis disagreed, writing that rather than librarians building our own software and online tools, we should partner with existing providers.

This exchange highlighted the complexity of these issues for libraries and librarians, and the difficulties the profession is experiencing in defining what we do and why we do it. Are we collectors, curators, or creators? How much of our role is about education, and should we hold particular ethical positions regarding what we provide or teach?

As increasingly shallow as the concept of ‘innovation’ seems to be, what is needed for librarianship to remain useful and relevant is a spurt of real innovation. Innovation not in the sense Aaron Tay warns of, where using the latest online tool is branded ‘innovative’, but the creation of better solutions to real problems. The distinction between being a Librarian, and simply working in a library, is one that librarians like to draw. But it is meaningless if librarians don’t take responsibility for developing new tools and techniques for the storage, retrieval, discovery and dissemination of texts and informational artefacts. Taking responsibility means not just keeping a sharp eye out for tools that others have created - it requires us to be part of the creation and development process.

Librarians like Melville Dewey, Charles Cutter, Henry Bliss and Sirkali Ramamrita Ranganathan were not the sort of men to ‘innovate’ by purchasing or copying the latest trend. They were real innovators and inventors - creating new ways to organise information and collections and new ways to store them. We need librarians with that sort of passion now.  The difference however is that we now live in a world of instant global communication and collaboration tools; in an “information age”. Librarians are no longer alone in thinking about how to organise information. Some see this as a threat, worrying that the Googles, Amazons and Microsofts of the world will kill libraries and library science. If librarians sit like rabbits starting at the oncoming headlights, these prophesies will indeed come true, but there is another, more exciting prospect. Kate Davis’ proposal, that librarians partner with others to develop tools and expertise, is exactly the approach we need to take. Jason Puckett proposes in a recent Georgia Library Quarterly article, ‘Open source software and librarian values’, that librarians need to support and promote open source software since we share many of the same values as the open source community. I would go further - librarians need to become part of the open source software community. There has been an ongoing low-level discussion in the profession about the need for librarians to learn to write code, and even an organisation dedicated to collaborating across GLAM and coding professions. It's high time this became a mainstream concern for librarians.

Open source software has all sorts of interesting applications for libraries and already achieves some surprising goals. To take a fairly recent example, David Rothman recently asked Should libraries start their own, more trustworthy Facebook? Personally I think the answer is ‘no’, but what interests me for the purposes of this post is that the Wordpress developer community has essentially already created the means to do it, with BuddyPress. If Rothman wants to build his own Facebook for free he can do it tomorrow.

Librarians can become part of open information and open software development without even knowing how to code. The Wikipedia Loves Libraries project for example, encourages libraries to organise ‘wiki-meetups’ where subject experts meet at the library and spend a day together contributing and editing articles to Wikipedia. Library staff could easily contribute local history articles to Wikipedia in paid time, assisting the public to access this information from a widely recognised and used source.

Commercial online services are not all bad