
What Libraries Can (Still) Do (2015) - diodorus
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2015/10/26/what-libraries-can-still-do-bibliotech/
======
idlewords
One admirable thing about librarians is the committment to patron privacy as
part of their professional code of ethics. They take that stuff _seriously_ ;
the new Librarian of Congress famously fought Ashcroft over provisions in the
Patriot Act that required librarians to violate it
([https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/15/carla-
hayden...](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/15/carla-hayden-
librarian-congress-first-woman-african-american-post-interview)).

The Library of Congress has some remarkable collections and APIs available
online; it's worth poking around their site
([http://www.loc.gov/library/libarch-
digital.html](http://www.loc.gov/library/libarch-digital.html)).

They also have an "Ask a Librarian" service that connects you with expert
research assistance in any domain, for free, over the Internet.
([http://www.loc.gov/rr/askalib/](http://www.loc.gov/rr/askalib/)).

~~~
analog31
As a teenager, I had a part time job at my local public library, shelving
books and working at the front desk. The librarian was an absolute privacy
freak. A couple of anecdotes:

Once I commented on a patron's choice of books, and he went into a fifteen
minute tirade about his topic of interest, an elaborate Communist plot against
the US. The librarian pulled me aside afterwards, and said: "You're not even
supposed to notice what they're checking out. It's none of your business. Hope
you learned your lesson." To this day, it kind of bugs me when the library
workers comment on my kids' book choices when they check out, even if it's
harmless chatting.

This was during a time when an organization called Moral Majority was
reportedly going to libraries and asking for circulation records, pertaining
to some book that they considered to be offensive. Some people showed up while
I was on desk duty, and asked to see the records. I invited them to sit in the
librarian's office while I fetched her from the stacks. She went in, closed
the door, and you could hear her hollering from down the street, then the
visitors quietly left.

My other duty at the library was sending out the overdue notices, so I had
access to the circulation records. They were kept in a bizarre way, and I
filled out the "overdue" postcards by hand. We disposed of records after they
were no longer needed for that process. After the incident, I commented to the
librarian that I didn't think it was even possible for someone to figure out
who was borrowing what books without a pretty elaborate effort. She said: "Now
you understand."

Her career lasted well into the computer age, and she was always opposed to
electronic circulation systems.

The experience influenced my thinking fairly deeply.

As a side note, libraries can (still) serve as a physical access point for
bringing together people who need certain kinds of help, and staff /
volunteers who can help them. When I worked at the library, things like the
civil service exam study guides were in heavy circulation. Today, at the same
library, there are several computers, and a bunch of volunteers who can help
people use them. My mom maintains them.

~~~
qznc
That sensitivity to privacy seems to be a US phenomenon? At least, I never
noticed that in Germany.

~~~
jbaiter
I work as a developer at a German library and privacy is taken _very_
seriously here. We're not allowed to store full IP addresses in the logs (they
have to be truncated to /16). Google Analytics is out of the question (we have
to use self-hosted Piwik), as are direct social media buttons, we have to use
wrappers that only load the JS after a user clicks on it, and even that has to
be approved by the "Datenschutzbeauftragter". Even external links have to be
explicitly marked as such so users know when their Referral information is
leaked to other websites.

~~~
qznc
That mostly is just implementing EU law. Good to know that it is taken
seriously. Maybe others are more relaxed about it.

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neilsharma
I live in the Bay Area and never understood the coffeehouse work culture.
Libraries have better internet (usually), more available desks, are quieter,
often have better parking, don't have a coffee tax just to use it, and doesn't
reek of coffee.

I recently discovered the local library, and it's probably my favorite spot in
the city. It's brand new, and internet speeds hit 200mbps. I shelved my unused
kindle and picked up reading real books -- got nearly 50 books in the last 2
years.

There are lots of perks to having a free membership too -- I get free online
access to dozens of magazines, the NYTimes, ridiculously cheap book sales ($5
per bag full). Plus, there are the occasional exhibits with 500K+ year old
human remains, artists sharing their work, and live local orchestras playing
inside.

The best news I've heard all month is the city allocated another $400K/year to
increase its hours/week by ~14.

Disclaimer: I didn't read the article. I just wanted to share.

~~~
dazc
This sounds like a kind of library utopia I'd readily pay for. But, from my
experience in the UK, our libraries have evolved from a quiet
reading/reference resource to 'everything for everybody' places that are the
exact opposite of what you describe.

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niels_olson
What libraries are, really, is reading rooms. Even in college, in the 90s, I
never went to the library for access to the books.

I love the UCSD Medical Library. They tore out literally tons of shelves and
it is now effectively a vast reading room with 20-foot ceilings and huge
amounts of soft, natural light coming in through windows and skylights.

Look at the old libraries, how they obsessed with high ceilings and walls
lined with books. Not deep warehouse shelving, but glorious, spaces _lined_
with books.

The reading rooms. It's about the reading rooms.

Museums would do well to understand this better also. The National Portrait
Gallery in DC does a pretty good job of it.

To sit among the cultural artifacts as you make your own artifacts, or wonder
about others, is the beauty of the thing. That's what these post-WWII
cinderblock-and-steel-shelving libraries got wrong.

Look at the reading room of the National Library of Medicine. Go to the
Library of Congress. The reading rooms, people. It's not about the musty old
stacks. It's about the reading rooms.

~~~
toyg
While I understand where you're coming from (and deeply enjoy marvellous
spaces like the Rylands Library in Manchester), I have to recognise that
libraries have a multitude of uses, of which "providing reading rooms" is just
one. For many lower-class folks, _free_ access to information is actually more
important - and that's where the "shelving" comes in. A beautiful reading room
with little to read for free, wouldn't be very useful to a lot of people. When
I was a kid, scavenging my local library for fantasy and sci-fi, the most
assiduous patrons were lower-class, the elderly and the borderline homeless,
who would come in every day to read newspapers and check out books _for free_.
They wouldn't have come otherwise, regardless of how beautiful the reading
room might have been (well, maybe the homeless, but that's it).

These segments are now better served by what the NYT dismisses as "a Starbucks
wannabe": a free internet node, possibly with curated portals. It might look
unfashionable to the NYT, but it's the hard truth. This can absolutely be
intersected with your "reading room" concept; I just don't think either
concept can survive on its own.

------
toyg
The future of libraries is one of the topics I'm pretty obsessed with,
probably because I loved them growing up and I've always found they had a huge
unexploited potential.

First of all, I don't think it's fair to lump the "big boys" (Library of
Congress, British Library etc) with smaller city libraries, because they are
huge brands that will forever survive as nexus of scholarly research, no
matter what fancy media we move on to.

It's much more interesting to look at small city libraries. Their main roles,
traditionally, were:

\- free access to information

\- safe space for reading and studying

\- preservation effort for local culture / warehouse for commercial culture

\- community point-of-interest for aggregation.

In many places, the preservation element had often got too prevalent for its
own good. Now that effort is not necessary at all - that's better left to the
big boys, who can leverage a large pool of skills in big cities and archive
all tweets for the rest of us, so to speak, with individuals submitting
pointers of local relevance ("please archive this and that").

The free access to information is split into two: access to the internet, and
access to commercially-available resources. The first is solved with the
"starbucks wannabe" model, the second is being discussed with commercial
players and we'll have to wait for that - but it's easy to imagine something
like patrons getting a locked-down kindle from libraries to borrow ebooks,
once the hardware is cheap enough.

What is really interesting is how you can perform the other two roles (reading
space, community aggregation) in new ways, now that we're free of warehousing
duties. Libraries are now free to experiment with spaces that want to draw
people together regardless of the media they consume. I'd love for some local
authority to be bold and try out "bookless libraries" concepts that can work
_through the decades_ \- there is no point, for example, building a library
around iPads, because they'll soon be obsolete; but you still have to provide
_something_ or people won't come. When you figure that out, you have what is
effectively an "engine for meeting minds" which could potentially be much more
significant than universities, shaping the relationship between citizens and
state/community as well as generating culture.

That's where the fun is.

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meganvito
So far, we don't have any other proved examples to pass knowledge especially
between generations than books.

~~~
robbrown451
Proved in what sense? Are you saying that because the internet and digital
data hasn't been around for multiple generations, we don't know that it is up
to the task of storing data for the long term?

It's certainly proven that digital data can survive moving from one storage
media to another (such as when the first becomes obsolete), and can be
protected by redundancy, and so on.

~~~
toyg
_> the internet and digital data hasn't been around for multiple generations_

The internet has been around for more than 25 years (which is what we commonly
refer to as "a generation"), and digital data has been around for almost 50
years now.

It is patently obvious that we've done a very poor job of preserving digital
data and internet artefacts, and little is changing. Sure, _in theory_
preservation can be done, but _in practice_ the required effort, cost (in both
time, manpower and materials), lack of skills and the breakneck speed of
technological change, are impeding most long-term preservation efforts. Even
when all planets align, we often find that our tools are not as reliable as we
thought (like CDs decaying and becoming unreadable).

The loss rate for analog media is still extremely good. I can read loads of
books from the '90s in their original editions with moderate effort, while
most of the '90s (and even '00s) internet was literally wiped out. That is a
huge problem, and archive.org on its own is not the answer.

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dammitcoetzee
I've spent probably ten hours in the last week doing market research for my
startup pitch deck in the SFPL. I have five books checked out and more on
hold. Anyone who isn't constantly using their library is both wasting money
and missing out.

------
ianai
I love libraries! I wish they were more prevalent. Sometimes I just want to
study something outside of my apartment and there's no where I'd rather be.

