Libraries in the Twenty-First Century: Charting Directions in Information Services

1995–2005 325

Introduction

Stuart Ferguson

A critic might say that a book called Libraries in the twenty-first century is bound to be a slim volume – after all, libraries and librarians are soon to be things of the past. Those who saw the 2002 film version of HG Wells’s The time machine may recall the Vox System in the New York Public Library, a holographic cyber librarian from 2030 that can access every database on the planet and interact with library clients to provide any information they require. It even produces a treatise written by the time traveller himself (assumed to have died in 1903) on the creation of a time machine, although when the time traveller asks about the time machine he is referred to HG Wells’s novel, in one of those frustrating logical loops with which users of the world wide web are all too familiar. This wonderful, if flawed, librarian of the future also remembers its customers. When the time traveller finds himself 800,000 years in the future, in the world of the Eloi and the Morlocks, he stumbles across a much diminished holograph, bemoaning the fact that it remembers everything – ‘I even remember you’, it comments, ‘Time travel – practical applications’ (2002). Despite the obvious limitations of the cyber librarian, the image is a powerful one – not simply on account of the near-omniscience of the cyber librarian, but also because of the personalised service.

It would be easy to dismiss the romanticised imagery as so much science fiction except that, as with some of the genre, the technology is not all that far away – at least it is not far removed from the screenplay (although the cyber librarian was not part of Wells’s early twentieth-century vision). We do presently have holographic representations, after all, and we also have relatively easy computer access to a wide range of resources in digital formats that can be stored, manipulated and transferred across telecommunications networks by computers. Indeed, many pre-digital resources stored by libraries and other collecting institutions in paper and audio-visual formats are in the course of being digitised or converted into digital formats. In a recent symposium at the State Library of Victoria, for instance, Mary Jane Stannus of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation announced that the ABC would digitise 30,000 one-inch tapes in the space of three years, adding ‘we won’t have that format to deal with anymore, and then SP Beta Cam, SX Digi Beta Cam. So the problem that archives face with changing formats and having to keep them up to date’ (2006).

There have also been a number of attempts to digitise print books, the most famous being Project Gutenberg, and, while this particular book is being written, Google has embarked on a project to digitise as many as fifteen million books, in association with the libraries of Harvard, Stanford, University of Michigan, University of Oxford and, yes, the iconic New York Public Library. Even before Google itself was started, says co-founder Larry Page, the vision was to make ‘the incredible breadth of information that librarians so lovingly organize searchable online’ (‘Google checks out library books’ 2004). Librarians, who make as much use of Google as anyone else, can hardly help but notice the patronising ‘so lovingly’.

What of the cyber librarian, however? We do have what are occasionally called ‘cybrarians’ in some of our organisations. University of Queensland Library, for instance, did so, although its ‘Ask a Cybrarian’ link now takes clients to a more standard ‘Ask a Librarian’ service (University of Queensland 2007). These are human information professionals, however, working in a virtual environment, typically without face-to-face contact with clients. They are not computer programs and we are a long way from the New York Public Library’s futuristic Vox System – not altogether surprising since science fiction does contain a strong element of the fictional. It is true to say that artificial intelligence (AI) – the already old-fashioned sounding area of computer science that includes ‘intelligent’ systems – has not developed to the level of interactivity demonstrated in the film, despite the promise of expert systems research in the early 1990s. Nonetheless, elements of AI have found their way into software developments in other fields of computing and we see increasing interactivity in our information retrieval systems. Take, for instance, the intelligent agent (sometimes also called AI agent or autonomous agent), which can make inferences based on its memory and on its previous contact with its environment (inputs), thus learning from its environment and from past inferences. An example with which some people will be familiar is the customer-service agent, which uses natural language to interact with customers and allows them to state their intentions instead of having to search for information themselves on an organisation’s website (Barbuceanu et al. 2004, p.47).

Do librarians, or their ‘cybrarian’ counterparts, need to start retraining, before they go the way of the typesetter? In this collection the authors think not. Although there are examples of libraries being closed in the corporate sector and even in the school sector, the papers in this collection bear witness to a considerable role for libraries in the early twenty-first century. Anyone reading the chapter by Roxanne Missingham and Jasmine Cameron, for instance, cannot fail to be impressed by the fact that collecting institutions such as the National Library of Australia have harnessed information and communication technologies (ICTs) to create institutions that are far more ‘national’ in terms of delivery of service and sheer presence than ever their print-based predecessors could be. Their immediate future is certainly an exciting one. The public library described by Chris Jones in the opening chapter also remains a vibrant institution, which not only seeks to develop virtual resources and services, but also continues to provide an important physical space for local communities. Moreover, as Jake Wallis’s chapter on the wider social environment eloquently demonstrates, libraries are significant players in any attempt to counter the so-called ‘digital divide’ between information ‘haves’ and have-nots’ that some believe characterise our so-called ‘information society’. James Herring’s chapter on school libraries highlights the extent to which ‘information literacy’, which has been driven in the educational sector by librarians, is increasingly seen by educators as a central strand in the education of our children – and adults.

Libraries for the moment, then, seem highly relevant to their parent institutions and communities. This is in stark contrast to the vision of a senior library educator at Charles Sturt University, who in the early 1990s announced to a startled group of information technology (IT) lecturers that libraries would be dead by the year 2000, made redundant by the very ICTs they taught. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Is this a cause for complacency – yet another poor performance indicator for the profession of futurology? Library and information professionals are not rushing to retrain as futurologists but they are not complacent either. There are significant challenges facing them. The information environment in which they develop their services is growing ever more complex. They used to enjoy a relatively privileged position as major intermediaries (some would even say ‘gatekeepers’) between the individuals, organisations and communities they served and the world of (largely) print publications. This involved functions such as the following:

• analysing the information needs of clients, organisations and the community, whether these needs be educational, recreational or purely informational;

• developing collections of publications that meet their clients’ information needs;

• assisting clients find publications they may find useful by describing them (using elements such as publication details, physical description or subject descriptors) and developing appropriate resource discovery tools, such as library catalogues;

• assisting clients access publications by developing information services, products and systems such as reference assistance, document delivery and inter-library loans;

• managing library collections, including their storage, organisation, dissemination and preservation;

• instructing clients on how they themselves can address their information needs and make best use of the resource discovery and delivery systems developed by the librarians (a function sometimes called information literacy instruction); and

• evaluating the information services, products and systems they have acquired or developed.

These functions are still central to what many library and information professionals do but the information landscape in which they perform them is much more complex, for instance:

• clients served may not have physical access to their libraries, for instance, distance learning students in the tertiary education sector or staff in multi-site and multi-national organisations;

• library collections may be a mixture of physical and electronic resources (sometimes called hybrid libraries) or completely electronic (variously referred to as electronic, digital or virtual libraries);

• library collections are based increasingly on subscription rather than acquisition, involving complex and expensive licensing arrangements and large datasets of resources that may be lost to libraries as soon as subscriptions cease and, almost invariably, include resources, such as runs of journals, that are of little interest to the client base;

• libraries have invested heavily in, what are called, ‘legacy systems’ (for instance, library catalogues and the standards used to develop them) that lag behind the web-based systems to which many people have become accustomed, and may need to adapt their systems (or perhaps even scrap them) instead of insisting that clients learn about their systems;

• many people feel that they can get enough in the way of information resources from the internet, and do not therefore have such a pressing need for the services, products and systems developed by librarians;

• there are so many players in the information industries, some of which encroach on the field (or ‘turf’) previously occupied principally by librarians (such as Google’s digitisation of print resources, mentioned earlier);

• with many individuals and organisations getting into electronic publishing (for instance, university libraries developing digital institutional repositories of research and teaching resources), there is no longer a clearly identified ‘information cycle’, in which libraries constitute one of the main intermediaries between publishers and library clients; and

• there are so many different electronic resources and information providers that those searching for appropriate resources are faced with a variety of different search facilities and search interfaces (largely, the documentation on their computer screens that helps them find what they want).

These are merely a sample of the issues and challenges addressed in this book. One of the most interesting is the so-called interface between the individual, searching for information resources in an increasingly electronic environment, and the world of published resources. Librarians represent one of several information professions working to make that interface as transparent and as easily navigated as possible. There is a long way to go. Certainly there has been progress since the 1970s, when many of the resource discovery tools associated with library work, such as the library catalogue and the remote online bibliographic database, were command driven; that is, users needed to know the command language required to interrogate a computerised information retrieval (IR) system.

Interfaces are much easier to use in the early twenty-first century than in these early days, but they are still anything but intuitive, as witnessed by those who have tried using IR systems that offer users the opportunity to conduct a boolean search, in which the system searches for combinations of user-specified words (or parts of words or adjacency of words!) in documents and/or document descriptions in order to produce search results. Even assuming the occurrence of specified words in a document is a guide to its relevance to a user (a point many would question), is this a process that one really wants to inflict on the user of an IR system? Ideally, such processes are best left to the ‘back-end’ of IR systems, unseen by users, with intelligent front-ends providing the guidance, or even the prompts, to assist the user interrogate the system. Perhaps the cyber librarian described earlier is a worthwhile ideal to keep in mind.

It would be a mistake, however, to focus too much on the technology. While technological development may be one of the drivers of change in library and information services, it is by no means the only one. As a number of papers in this collection demonstrate, there are many more drivers, most of them socio-economic and/or political. There is nothing new about the idea of a global economy – Karl Marx, after all, wrote about it towards the end of the nineteenth century – but ‘globalisation’ is now spoken and written about as if it were a new phenomenon that has burst on the world’s nation states like an irreversible force of nature. One of the many far-reaching effects of globalisation is the impact of competition on areas of the world’s economy (or economies) that have hitherto enjoyed some protection, although some would question the notion that the powerful multi-national corporations are a force for competition and would see them as more of a barrier. Along with the economic pressures come political changes such as the challenge that the notion ‘user pays’ offers to library and information services in the public sector. Some library and information professionals need to learn what for many of them are new skills, such as political skills or the ability to put together successful grant applications – digitisation projects, for instance, don’t come cheaply.

Accompanying the unforgiving forces of competition is a realisation that one of the factors that distinguishes the more successful organisations from the less successful ones is their information resource and how they ‘leverage’ it (or give value to it) – not just the technology component in IT but increasingly the information part. Moreover, since the mid-nineteen nineties, the library and information services sector, along with many others, including business and information technology, has taken considerable interest in knowledge management (one of the topics of Chapter 13) and how organisations can become more adaptive and innovative by becoming ‘learning organisations’, harnessing their corporate knowledge better in the pursuit of their strategic objectives. The interest in knowledge management and in what many call knowledge society reflects, in part, the realisation by many organisations of the value of people and their ‘intellectual capital’, especially in knowledge-intensive industries such as legal and financial companies, in which the knowledge leaders are worth more financially than corporate buildings and technology.

Finally, it is worth reflecting on the earlier point that many library and information services remain relevant to their parent bodies, funding authorities and/or communities at the beginning of the twenty-first century. One of the keys to this survival has been a knowledge of the informational and related needs of the organisations and/or communities they serve. In some communities in which there has been considerable investment in information and communication technologies (ICTs) one hears complaints if the service component of library and information services is put aside in the mistaken belief that the development of better ICTs is the sole priority.

While this book was being written, a revised edition of Lee Welch’s The other 51 weeks, her invaluable work on marketing for librarians, was published. It is especially worth noting that the peculiar title – something that Lee pressed on her reluctant publisher – reflects the central idea that library marketing is not confined to Library and Information Week and, more important, is not confined to promotions. Marketing, she suggests (2006, p.8), is basically ‘the process of identifying and meeting client needs’ and ‘ a building block … in the process of managing and fostering our libraries’. In a key passage, she claims that ‘librarians should have a head start in understanding the application of marketing practices because they are based simply on understanding clients and putting them first’. Marketing is indeed a building block in the development and management of our library and information services and, if there is a major theme emerging from recent research into information management, it is that this understanding of client needs is far more critical to organisational success than any amount of funding for ICT infrastructure. Can library and information professionals tap into the current development of ‘social webs’ – human groupings and networks that typically act as sources of information for their members – and look at ways of facilitating greater interactions with their users, such as allowing them to annotate services (Cameron 2006).

What Libraries in the twenty-first century sets out to do, then, is to provide a diverse and informed perspective on current developments in library and information service, the environment in which these developments take place and research on these developments, with the intention of charting current and future directions for the library and information profession. There are undoubtedly challenges for the profession but what is especially noteworthy, it is suggested here, is the way in which it has adapted to the changing environment. Organisational skills that were once devoted to library catalogues and bibliographic classification, for instance, are now being applied to website development, the building of electronic repositories and design of client-focused gateways into the anarchic virtual world of the internet.

This book does not purport to be a manual that spells out how to be a librarian. Such works as Library practice: A manual and textbook (Burkett, Ritchie & Standley 1977) and The basics of librarianship (Beenham & Harrison 1990) are arguably a thing of the past. Libraries and related information services have for many years gone through a far-reaching process of change and this process, according to the papers in this collection, is likely to continue for the foreseeable future. Library and information professionals have been adapting, and continue to adapt, to changing roles, to technologies that help push the boundaries of service delivery and, in many countries, to political economies (or should one say, a single global economy?) that challenge many of the services and values of the library and information profession. As the following chapters demonstrate, not least Gill Hallam’s paper on educational issues, the knowledge and skills required in the contemporary library and information services sector are far too wide-ranging to be captured in a single book – a point to which the developers of educational programs for library and information services can attest.

The book’s aim is to use the collective expertise and interests of its contributors to provide a scholarly but accessible overview of library and information management (LIM) at the beginning of the twenty-first century and to analyse the many issues facing the profession. If this collection provides a clear snapshot of where library and information services are, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and gives a sense of the directions in which they are moving then it will have achieved its purpose.

Chapter outline

Unlike the many textbooks of LIM, which tend to start from general principles and work down to the specifics of how to implement them, this collection starts from the ‘concrete’ world of specific library and information agencies, identifying primary client bases and key functions, concerns, issues and changes, before moving out from these to a more general discussion, first, of functional and operational issues, such as the management of digital collections, and then of still more general issues, such as information ethics, management and the socio-political environment.

Part 1, ‘Library and information agencies in the twenty-first century’, focuses on specific types of library and information agency. Individual chapters may identify the communities or organisations served, outline the agencies’ purpose or mission, examine the resources, staff, systems and services that help deliver specific types of information service, and reflect upon the main issues and concerns confronting information professionals in these particular sectors. In Chapter 1, for instance, Chris Jones draws on his experience as a public librarian in New South Wales to discuss trends and issues in the contemporary public library, including its developing role as a ‘village square’. What is impressive, quite apart from the variety of public library collections and the range of services offered, is the sheer political challenge. As Jake Wallis underlines in Chapter 15, public libraries constitute a key resource for citizens in an ‘information society’.

Chapter 2 provides a significantly different perspective because the focus is not so much school libraries as the dual-qualified teacher librarians who generally lead school library development in Australia (although not on the other side of the Tasman, in New Zealand, where the norm is the library and information management qualified school librarian). James Herring analyses the changing and multi-faceted role of teacher librarians and in particular their concern with information literacy, which is increasingly seen by educators as a central strand in school education and by many within and outside the sector as a key to lifelong learning.

The following chapter draws on the experience of Shirley Oakley and Jennifer Vaughan in different types of library in the higher education sector and demonstrates library services that have moved quickly to embrace the new information and communication technologies (ICTs) and the possibilities of moving services outside the traditional library walls. In some ways these libraries resemble school libraries, especially in the prominence given to the development of information literacy. What emerges strongly from this discussion, however, is the context in which library managers in the higher education sector operate and the main drivers of change – political, legal and regulatory, as well as technological. While libraries have positioned themselves for many years as information agencies, what has emerged in the last decade (and this is reflected in this chapter) is the tendency for higher education libraries to engage more directly as partners in the main business of higher education institutions – teaching and learning.

In Chapter 4, Alison O’Connor provides a radically different perspective on library and information services. Hers is described as a special library, which is a catch-all term used to describe library-type services that do not fall under the other categories of library discussed in this part of the book. Special libraries are typically, but not always, part of a larger organisation, such as a government department or a private company, which they serve, and special librarians generally take pride in their engagement with parent organisations. Some do not call themselves librarians, many seeing themselves as ‘information managers’. In recent years some have even relabelled themselves ‘knowledge managers’, which carries different connotations for many in the profession. The account of this sector in Chapter 4 not only provides a useful discussion of an organisational culture that differs substantially from that found in many other types of library but also gives personal insight into the worlds of the law librarian and the parliamentary librarian and into the current challenges facing information services in the corporate sector.

The final chapter in Part 1, by Roxanne Missingham and Jasmine Cameron, discusses national, state and territory libraries. These, as the names suggest, cover a wider geographical area than public libraries. These are very often leading agencies in their sector and have used ICT development to move out of their capital cities to deliver resources and services directly to clients’ computer desktops – a point taken up later. Many of them are also key supporters of the public library sector, as Chris Jones points out in Chapter 1, and in the case of the national libraries of Australia and New Zealand (Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa) to the wider information infrastructures of their respective countries.

Part 2, ‘Library and information services in the twenty-first century’, takes a different approach from Part 1, examining specific aspects of library and information management, as distinct from specific sectors. In Chapter 6, John Mills examines changes in client and information services in the library environment. Whether developing face-to-face services or virtual services, he suggests, library managers need to understand the information needs of the communities they serve, whether these relate to educational curricula, support for organisational objectives, research or personal development. He also emphasises how important it is that library and information professionals study how their clients search for information or information resources, in order that managers can adapt their service delivery to ever-changing client understanding, behaviour and expectation, as distinct from expecting clients to adapt to library systems.

Chapter 7, by Alastair Smith, deals with the other side of information service provision – the enormous range of electronic, print and audio-visual resources that are the librarian’s stock in trade. Knowing clients’ needs is one thing, but being familiar with the databases, web-based resources, search engines, subject directories, web portals, ‘ready-reference’ resources, bibliographic tools, government publications and so on is one of the attributes that defines library and information professionals. Some of these resources are part of the ‘invisible web’, to which even Google has little or no access (at the time of writing!). What also defines a good information professional and sets him or her apart from many others in the community is their ability to evaluate information resources, an aspect of information work on which this chapter touches.

In Chapter 8, Paul Genoni focuses on one of the key areas of library and information management, namely, libraries as collecting agencies – a topic to which most of the preceding chapters have already referred. Traditionally, libraries consisted of collections of books, hence the name, derived from the Latin, liber or book. (Similarly French, in which libraire means bookshop, uses bibliothèque, from the Greek βιβλίου, or book, to denote a library.) A library collection today may consist almost entirely of weblinks or, in other words, a set of addresses or URLs (uniform resource locators) that identify resources on the world wide web. More typically, library collections are a ‘hybrid’ mixture of digital resources, provided by external agencies for a substantial subscription fee, electronic resources owned by the library itself, links to digital resources for which no charge is made and physical resources that the library owns, whether in print or audio-visual format. Just as the collections themselves are more complex than they used to be, so too the financial commitments, technological issues, licensing issues and policy decisions – issues with which this chapter deals. It also discusses some of the key functions associated with library collections, such as the selection of library information resources and collection assessment.

Chapter 9, by Philip Hider, focuses on another of the key areas of librarianship: information access, which refers to the means by which library and information professionals help clients find relevant resources by providing descriptions of resources – typically called metadata – that include given information (such as bibliographic and physical details of resources) and additional information that helps clients decide what a resource is ‘about’ (such as subject descriptors). Here standards are especially important. This chapter outlines the main standards used – some of them library specific and some with applications in the wider community – before discussing the importance of studying ‘information architecture’ and speculating on the future of information organisation, which is the name often given to this important area of information work.

Chapter 10, by Tom Denison, ‘Library and information systems – a work in progress’, covers the main types of ICTs supporting library and related fields of information work. This includes the information systems, networks, communications technologies and many standards (protocols) that enable the various systems to talk to each other and make possible the virtual library services discussed in earlier chapters. The chapter provides a wide-ranging overview of library technology development before focusing on integrated library management systems (ILMS), the key system in the management of library collections and increasingly their services; portals, which are an important integrative technology in information management; digital repositories; and the development of ‘open source’ software, which promises greater interoperability among the information systems being developed – one of the many works in progress reported here.

Part 3, ‘The information environment in the twenty-first century’, takes a broader approach than the two preceding sections, and places developments in library and information services in a number of different contexts. Chapter 11, by Michael Middleton, goes beyond the library environment to consider the wider field of information management and the changing role of the information manager. This chapter outlines the scope and history of information management – tracing its origins to attempts by the US Government in the 1970s to reduce paperwork – before focusing on the key tasks of an information manager. While some of these involve skills and understanding that are not always the stock-in-trade of all library and information professionals, this chapter demonstrates many commonalities between broader information management functions and those that characterise library and information management – for instance, the use of metadata standards, information resource evaluation and needs analysis.

In Chapter 12, Karen Anderson also moves beyond the library environment, in this case to examine developments in two related areas of information management – records and archives. Like libraries these are collecting agencies but they do not, by and large, handle the published information resources that make up most library collections. There are interesting commonalities with libraries, including the enthusiastic take-up of new ICTs, but there are issues that are quite specific to this sector, such as the development of highly evolved disposal schedules, in the case of records managers, or the need to address complex ethically-driven retention policies, in the case of archivists. As in the library environment, it has been felt necessary to develop standards to assist organisation of and access to the unique resources for which records managers and archivists are responsible, and these are outlined here.

The following chapter considers areas of information work that might best be categorised as information and knowledge management. Stuart Ferguson and Anne Lloyd discuss information literacy (IL), focusing on the higher education sector and on moves to integrate IL instruction into the more general curriculum. They go on to suggest, however, that it is necessary to look beyond IL instruction as a process by which library and information professionals teach clients how to find information using library systems, and to study IL in the context of workplace learning – an area in which Lloyd has done considerable research. The chapter argues for a broader definition of IL, based on issues of workplace learning, before discussing knowledge management (KM), a management paradigm built on theories of the ‘Learning Organisation’ and to a lesser extent on the information management principles outlined by Michael Middleton in Chapter 11. This chapter draws out some of the commonalities between workplace IL and KM, while recognising that which differentiates the two areas of study.

In Chapter 14, Ross Harvey looks at developments in library services from a historical perspective. This raises the question: why conduct research into our past, with all the pitfalls that involves, when the future of library and information services is so clearly going to involve a radical departure from previous practice? One reason is that by exploring the relationship between library history and wider socio-economic developments one may develop a more sound critical understanding of the current processes of change – if we understand where we have come from, we will have a clearer idea of where we are. The chapter discusses general issues such as these, before outlining the library history that has been published, providing a broad overview of library history and focusing on the evolution of public libraries in Australia, by way of example.

In Chapter 15, Jake Wallis picks up on some of the themes discussed by Harvey and provides a broad overview of the social and political environment that currently shapes the development of library and information services. Some in the profession are cheered by sociological studies that chart the development of a ‘post-industrial society’ into an information or knowledge society, and see the future for information professionals as a bright one, while others, Wallis included, focus on the need for the profession to be vigilant in the face of the growing gap between ‘information rich’ and ‘information poor’ – often referred to specifically in terms of a ‘digital divide’. While recognising that libraries, like any other postmodern institution, need to adapt and change, Wallis suggests that they have a continuing role in support of what Habermas in 1962 called the public sphere – a point emphasised in the statements of the Australian Library and Information Association on information literacy, which it links to a set of social, economic and democratic goals.

Chapter 16, by Jan Houghton and Jennifer Berryman, focuses on two imposing sets of issues confronting information professionals in an ‘information society’, namely, ethical and legal issues. While some values may remain relatively constant, the preceding chapters (especially Wallis’s overview) have demonstrated to some extent the global challenge to traditional values, especially in areas such as intellectual property, censorship, security and privacy – not to mention such basic values as freedom and equality. The library and information profession, like any other profession, is informed by a foundation of ethical practice – in its case, one that gives strong expression to freedom of information, equity of service and privacy rights. This chapter provides a general overview of professional ethics, a brief history of information ethics and a study of professional values and codes of practice. Also in this substantial and wide-ranging review – almost a chapter in its own right – is an account of information law, including intellectual property, censorship, privacy, national security and freedom of information, and an analysis of the sometimes complementary, sometimes conflicting demands of information ethics and legal obligation.

In Chapter 17, Damian Lodge and Bob Pymm deal with one of the most important resources in library and information work – people. If libraries are to implement the changes outlined above, they require a well-informed, innovative and skilled workforce. This chapter covers many of the management issues that have a major bearing on the development of information agencies, such as approaches to staffing information agencies, including staff training and induction, financial management, the evaluation of library and information services, change management and, more specifically, some of the management issues associated with the changing nature of library collections. The issue of marketing is prominent, as library and information agencies attempt to adapt to the greater availability of information resources, not least via the internet, and the growing number of information providers (including Google). While there are clearly challenges – outlined especially clearly in the two preceding chapters – this chapter provides a positive account of how library managers are responding to these challenges.

Chapter 18, by Gill Hallam, focuses on one particular area of human resources, namely, the education of library and information professionals. This includes not just the constantly evolving formal educational programs in the university and TAFE (Technical and Further Education) sectors, but also the role of professional associations and the growing importance of professional development in a changing profession that frequently requires new knowledge and skill sets. This is another area that is critical to the future of the profession. Some practitioners and educators worry that there are librarians who desperately want to hang on to their role as guardians of knowledge/resources and see delivery of resources directly to users as a threat. One of the themes to emerge from this collection is that librarians may need retraining in ways of thinking – a challenge for those involved in education and professional development. Issues covered in this chapter include the perennial ones such as the frequently alleged gap between the worlds of practitioners and educators, the relative lack of financial incentive to study higher degrees, the many demands placed on the curriculum and the relationship between library research and practice, plus some issues that are relatively new, including the ageing of library educators.

Some conclusions are provided by Alex Byrne, who has contributed to the profession here in Australia but also overseas, through his involvement in the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA). He draws an interesting parallel between the nineteenth-century notion (at least in the English-speaking world) of the public library as the ‘people’s university’ and the current drive to create an ‘information society for all’, providing in the process a global, societal context for the endeavours of the library and information professions mapped out in this collection.

For the benefit of relative novices to this field, there is also a glossary of terms. Readers could always be left to ‘google’ terms but it was believed that a glossary would be a useful ‘ready-reference’ resource, as would the appendices, which provide the reader with supplementary material, such as the factual data on national, state and territory libraries.

References

Barbuceanu M, Fox MS, Hong L, Lallement Y, Zhang Z. Building agents to serve customers’. AΙ Magazine. 2004;25(3):47–60.

Beenham R, Harrison C. The basics of librarianship. 3rd edn London: Bingley; 1990.

Burkett J, Ritchie S, Standley A. Library practice: A manual and textbook. Buckden: ELM Publications; 1977 1977.

Cameron J. Personal communication. 19. (April 2006):2006.

14 December 2004. Google press release http://www.google.com/press/pressrel/print_library.html.

Stannus MJ. In: Presentation to Libraries and collaboration: Library of the 21st century symposium, State Library of Victoria, 23 February 2006; 2006. http://www.slv.vic.gov.au/programs/events/2006/collaboration/stannus.html.

The time machine. 2002 motion picture, screenplay by John Logan, based on a screenplay by David Duncan, director Simon Wells, Warner Brothers and Dreamworks LLC.

University of Queensland. Help accessing databases and ejournals. 2007. http://www.library.uq.edu.au/database/help.html.

Welch L. The other 51 weeks: A marketing handbook for librarians. rev. edn Wagga Wagga, NSW: Centre for Information Studies; 2006.

Part 1

Library and information agencies in the twenty-first century: case studies

Chapter 1

The evolving public library

Chris Jones

The public library is there for everyone and the services it provides are in general free of charge. In Australia, this freedom of access is encapsulated in various state legislations and is embedded in the philosophies of national industry bodies like Public Libraries Australia (PLA) and the Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA). Such a broad scope with such a low price tag would suggest that everyone might be beating down the doors of public libraries. To some degree this is the case. People of all ages, all levels of ability, all ethnicity, all educational needs and with differing demands are walking through the doors of a public library somewhere.

There are, however, certain sectors of the community that traditionally are more regular library users than others. A group of particular importance considering its growing representation in the community is senior citizens. It is no coincidence that many of the busiest public libraries in Australia lie in communities that are popular retirement destinations. Coastal library services are a classic example of this. At the other end of the age spectrum, children and youth often appear as heavy users of public libraries. This use may take the form of leisure material (particularly in the non-print areas) or information related to studies. Of course, underlying usage of any public library are the demographics of its community. Public libraries with high ethnic representation certainly have extensive and often expensive demands placed on them to purchase non-English material. Other inner-city libraries experience high demand placed on them by a transient working population.

One common area in public library service lies in the online world. Every public library now has an online community. This means that virtually all public libraries have a web presence and increasingly are placing services such as reservations, catalogues and even reference services online. There is also an assumption that public libraries will provide computer access to the online environment.

Before exploring different aspects of the evolving public library, it would be worth considering the sheer scale of public library service and operations. The following figures represent the state of Australian public libraries as at June 2004 (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2005):

• There are 532 local government library organisations (up from 505 in 1999/2000).

• These operate out of 1,716 locations (up from 1,510 in 1999/2000).

• They employ 10,606 staff (1,000 more than in 1999/2000).

• They utilise 6,315 volunteers, equating to 55,746 hours worth of labour. The amount of voluntary labour used had risen dramatically from 30,647 hours of work done in 1999/2000.

• They cost $545.2 million to operate ($521.9 million of the funding to do so comes from government sources). This is up almost $90 million on 1999/2000 figures.

• There were 99.6 million visits to public libraries in 2003/04 (up more than 6 million from 1999/2000).

• They hold 42 million items (up 2 million from 1999/2000).

• They lent out 176 million items in 2003/04.

The public library mission

Defining the mission and role of public libraries in society is a challenge in itself. It is tempting to think of the public library as an information gateway for all, but those ‘information-only’ days are long gone. Certainly provision of information (along with the skilled staff to retrieve it) is a key service of public libraries, but this is not all they do. The modern public library also caters for the leisure needs of society – but this would hardly come as surprise (although the range of formats in which this occurs may do). What really has changed in the past decade has been the huge emphasis now put on public libraries being safe, comfortable and socially inclusive places to visit.

The vision statement of the Country Public Libraries Association of New South Wales underlines this shift (Country Public Libraries Association 2005, p.2): ‘Every local public library will be a focal point and a public space for the community, and a gateway for residents of NSW to the information resources of the world’ (italics added). This developing role of the library as a ‘village square’ has resulted in public libraries broadening their missions. This can be clearly seen in the library strategy for the Great Lakes Library Service (Jones 2006, p. 16): ‘The library will endeavour to meet the community’s need for information, education, culture, leisure and social interaction through the provision of an efficient and adequately resourced network of library services.’ One of the most apt comments on the challenge of dealing with the scope of demand placed on public libraries comes from Alan Bundy (2003, p.6): ‘no other agency in society has the breadth of role, the user range and diversity and the potential impact. In an age of specialization and community silos, public libraries are unique.’

It seems then that the modern public library must be all things for all people. This has its downside, but it certainly offers plenty of opportunities for variety. Those interested in the social role of public libraries are strongly recommend to read A safe place to go: Libraries and social capital (Cox 2000). This is based on a statewide survey and has some revealing and powerful information. It is also a strong theme in Chapter 15 of this book, which charts the social, political and cultural context of libraries in the twenty-first century.

Services offered and staff required

The demand for traditional services is strong in public libraries. Total loans for public libraries in NSW has risen steadily and reached more than forty-five million in 2002/03 (State Library of NSW 2004, p.x). Consequently, the issuing of items remains a central service of the library. Developments in self-check technology have meant that for some libraries the labour intensity has been reduced, but the simple issuing and returning of items is still core business. Public libraries also field reference enquiries on a daily basis and many libraries have dedicated reference staff. Some libraries even provide homework help for school students, which generally involves payment of an external tutor or