Evolution, the death of librarians and the end of history

Today aspiring book restoration librarian @hanmunn alerted me to a back and forth in the LA Times about libraries, librarians and whether one can survive without the other.  These two opinion pieces fairly neatly sum up a larger series of skirmishes that have been occuring on the margins across at least the English speaking world, but particularly in the UK and US as their governments seek ways to cut spending in economic recession.

Libraries versus librarians

The original piece by Regina Powers complains that politicians keen to cut spending on libraries but wary of the political ramifications of closing libraries have chosen to cut professional staff (staffing being the largest cost in most library services).  Thus the service level is compromised, but the buildings stay open.  Dan Terzian counters that now that we have Google and the internet librarians are outdated and libraries should just hire liberal arts undergraduates.

In my view they are both a little right but in the medium to long term both wrong.  Powers is  right to point out that a library without librarians is ‘like a hospital without doctors’, but Terzian is right when he says that libraries need to change in the digital era.  Strangely, however, Terzian’s example of why librarians are no longer needed (the success of the New York Public Library) is a long list of projects best planned and implemented by librarians - whose training and experience is directed exactly towards such things as “e-publications, crowdsourcing projects and a user-friendly online library catalog”.  These are indeed the sort of thing that libraries should now be concentrating on, and the best people to lead and implement such projects are librarians.

There are two basic flaws with the argument that libraries no longer need librarians because we have search engines and the internet:

The filter bubble

Firstly there is the issue of bias, echo chambers and what has come to be known as ‘the filter bubble’.  Exclusively relying on computers and, in particular, the same search engine/s to seek information can trap people within one particular view of the world or at the least obscure relevant information.  Relying on automated ‘spiders’ to categorise information does indeed help us to answer simple questions quickly; but if the purpose of libraries is to ‘spread knowledge’ as Terzian claims, or to ‘expand minds’ as I wrote in my last post, then the abilities of Google, DuckDuckGo or any other search engine to find ‘facts’ quickly is not nearly as relevant as one might first imagine.

The end of history

Secondly, there is the question of what librarians do ‘behind the scenes’ and where search engines and other discovery tools find their content in the first place.  Google’s project of digitising thousands of books could never take place without the prior thousands upon thousands of librarian-hours spent organising, cataloguing and storing the books in the first place.  Database products like ABI/Inform or General Onefile need information professionals to compile them.  “Crowdsourcing projects” need professionals to direct and lead them.  User friendly library catalogues need professional information organisation and retrieval experts to design them.  The problem with the argument that the internet is an adequate replacement for librarians is its myopically arrogant assumption that we are living in the end of history - or at least the end of the history of information.  As if no new work is necessary to record, store and organise information, culture or history.  As if somehow the birth of Google was ‘Year Zero’ for information management.

Better librarians

Terzian and others seem to think that library science students are still just taught the Dewey Decimal system and Library of Congress cataloguing rules.  I went to library school eight years ago and learned neither.  Instead, we were taught XML and Dublin Core, along with theories of information management and access.  These days students are being taught Java. What Terzian (without realising it) is really demanding is better librarians and better librarianship.  The traditional ways of provid