Category: 2019

“Data, Media, and Society.” University of Maryland Libraries Future of the Research Library Series. College Park, MD.

Abstract: It would be easy to see the advent of open educational resources, open access publication, and repositories of data sets as a continuation of the traditional mission of a research library. Namely, providing access to the scholarly record including items studied as well as the results of study. It would also be easy to see this as happening in parallel to a pivot of libraries to more community centered models. In this presentation Lankes will show how these developments are deeply intertwined in how we conceptualize scholarly communication and the need for advocacy around data in all aspects of higher education.

Slides: Slides in PDF

Audio:

“Library as Movement.” Victoria Libraries 2019 Planning Summit. Kalorama, Victoria, Australia. (via video conference)

Speech Text: Read Speaker Script
Abstract: Is the library a platform that allows communities to build knowledge? Is it a community center? A community hub? The concept of a library is evolving faster than our terms for describing the change. Today the library is being seen as a movement. Not a place, but a community-wide effort to improve the lives of community members through knowledge. This presentation talks about how the continued evolution of librarianship toward a proactive force for good in a community changes the skills of librarians, the responsibilities of the community, how we assess success, and how we determine common services while focusing on local realities.

[This is the script I used for my talk. I’ve also taken the opportunity to add some foot notes and links.]

Greetings! Thank you for having me, albeit via video. I very much wish I was with you in person. Today I’d like to talk about how our changing concept of what a library is directly effects our ability to plan for shared network services. In particular, how a shifting concept of the library as a community hub and emerging social movement requires a different approach to shared services. We have to take on the very real change of a library as a set of resources for a community to access, to the library as a supporter of building knowledge locally. 

While I could jump right into my recommendations for shared services for the next decade (hint – its more about people development than collection development), my recommendations might seem pretty arbitrary unless I set up why we need to change in the first place. I promise not to get too abstract here, but we need to start with some pretty basic assumptions. First, what do we mean by the word library anyway.

One could say I have a difficult relationship with words. In particular, I tend to get a bit obsessed on definitions. For example, in 2007 the then dean of Drexel’s ischool David Fenske and I were talking about libraries. He made a comment to the effect of “the field of librarianship will be held back until one can define a librarian without reference to a building.” In essence, what is a librarian without a library.

Four years later the direct result of this comment was the 400 plus page book the Atlas of New Librarianship. I think we can all agree, a bit of an overreaction. But here’s the thing about words like library and librarians. Once created, they rarely lead a stable life. Their definitions and usages evolve.

Fenske’s question about how we define what a librarian is began an intensive investigation about the term library that continues to this day. It began me thinking about how we define and conceptualize libraries and the work of librarians. You and I are on a journey of definition. That doesn’t really surprise you. After all, you keep having this meeting for the simple fact that what we do, and why we do it – our definition – changes. It changes for our communities as well, but they often aren’t aware of it. Our communities haven’t been deeply enmeshed in debates about the “library as a community hub,” or “members versus patrons,” and so the words we use to describe ourselves, our services, and even the terms we for them can be jarring for them, and it is dangerous for us if it is jarring for them.

To have a bit of fun with this let me quickly present the shifting ways of thinking about libraries as a sort of progression through evolutionary eras. To be clear, this is not a rigorous chronology, but rather a way of highlighting how we conceptualize libraries, librarianship, and the services we offer – and therefore the network services we need. For the purposes of this talk, these eras start out as more cartoon and stereotype.  However, I believe it is a helpful way of thinking about and planning for shared library service.

I would add some nifty Latin terms to these eras, but, well, I failed Latin. So we’ll begin with the Era of the Book Palace.

The start of the book palace epoch is a bit hard to nail down, but it arguably defined libraries in the western world for well over three centuries from the sixteen hundreds onward. But for our purposes we’ll pick on the Dewey era turn of the 20^thcentury.

It was a time when collecting books was vital because they were scarce. The great value of the library was in pulling collections together, and the vast majority of the books gathered were about the rest of the world, not the library’s service community. It was a time of grand architecture. It was also a time of the universalists and documentalists. That is, folks who believed that knowledge could be contained in the pages of a book, and that the knowledge of the world could be sorted into neat categories…ignoring that those categories were developed by and for a culture dominated by white guys. The king of the information world was the book, and libraries were an apex predator in the information ecosystem.

One of the ways you can see how we and others thought about libraries is in looking at the relationship we had with “them.” Them, as in, what did we call the folks we served? This was the golden era of the patron. Patrons supported the library, they received service from the library. They were also nearly anonymous. We didn’t spend a heck of a lot of time defining patrons because we were mostly the only players in town, and our value to our patrons was implicit.

Just as we look at the tools developed to demark epochs of human evolution – the stone age, the bronze age, and so on – we’ll do the same here. What were the defining tools of the book palace, particularly for networks of them? Union catalogs and interlibrary loan. With the dawn of the computer age we could connect our collections together. The work of consortia and library networks was around standardization and efficiency. We sought to use the same cataloging standards; we had closely aligned management structures. We were linking similar to similar. The role of the network was to create standards and to share materials.

So, what brought about the end of the Book Palace Epoch? Networks. Not computers – we’ve been putting up online catalogs since the 70s. No, it was that we could now network not only records, but digital files as well. We needed to get into the full-text business. We needed to get online, we needed to change.

So, libraries became information centers. We were no longer just a place with stuff, we were a gateway to the world. And that world was information. Gone was the quaint Victorian era concept of the patron, in was the modern user – a term freshly taken from computer scientists and drug dealers. Now it wasn’t about having it all, it was about getting to it all. 

And it if wasn’t online, then by God it better be. This was the era of mass digitization. Google and libraries hooked up to scan the world. I remember talking with a Harvard librarian at the time who said their main obstacle in digitizing materials was how to get trucks onto Harvard yard to take away the books and turn them into bits flying free. 

The scanner and the contract were the defining tools of the information center age. If we couldn’t scan it, we would license it. Database, ebooks, video services – the drive was to expand the collection with resources from around the world. In our drive to provide users access, we also transformed the very nature of collecting. Gone were the days of owned materials being ferried around the countryside in delivery vans (well, not gone, but let’s just say we didn’t put them on the postcards anymore), in were Dublin Core and metadata schemas to build towering virtual libraries.

Gone also were the days of budgets being strained to buy materials one time. Now we had to devote budgets to paying for access to a resource annually – a change that is now once again coming back to haunt us with terms of ebook lending. We also spent a LOT of money on public access computers. 

Our collaborative services? Digitization support; shared and state-wide licensing agreements; metadata schema development; and training to build the killer website.

A funny thing happens when you move from patrons to users, and from collecting to accessing. You tend to move from relationships to transactions. Instead of telling the story of the library in outcomes for our communities, we begin to quantify ourselves. Now instead of just counting the volumes in our buildings, we emphasized hits, circulated items, attendance, and of course gate counts. 

So what pushed us out of this era of libraries? Simple, we lost our monopoly.

Now to be clear, libraries haven’t been the sole source of information and access since, well, ever. Though we did have a lock in medieval Europe until Gutenberg went and screwed that up. But we at least had a large portion of mind share in our communities. With the advent of ubiquitous networks like the Internet, and the ability to monetize access, mostly through advertising, our portion of the mind share shrank.

We needed a new way of thinking about libraries and librarians and our value to communities. We didn’t just invent these out of thin air, rather we saw non-access and non-collection activities in a new light. We saw that the value we provide to the community was in the community itself. We became the 3^rdSpace, and instead of users, we had citizens or members. 

Our focus wasn’t on collections alone, but on being a place where community members could come and think and work with, or without, those collections. Our newly emphasized focus was on civic improvement. We helped folks find jobs. We provide vital literacy services to youth and adults. We were a safe place to explore dangerous ideas. 

And what tool helped define this epoch? The Library Café. Yes, the café as a literal place to serve coffee, but also the numerous spaces where we pulled down the stacks, or never built them in the first place to allow folks to get together. We called them living rooms, or agora, or simply “the teen space.” Many cities rebuilt or refurbished central libraries to promote economic development. We began hosting co-working spaces

Our consortia still paid for licensed resources and we still shipped materials around. But now, our joint services began to go a bit adrift. How do we collectively support what is by definition a very local thing?

This is also the time when our communities began to get very confused. Sometimes that was phrased inelegantly as “why do we need libraries when we have Google?” It was when our communities began wondering, what is the difference between a library and a community center?

It was also a time when we got very good at posts on Instagram. Because while we had a hard time putting our contributions into words, we had no problem showing the growing number of diverse faces coming into our buildings. Our identity became more diffuse, and more local in nature. But it was the seeking for an identity that lead to our next era, though it’s more a later part of the 3^rdspace era. But for now we’ll call it the era of the community hub.

We began to put words and concepts to the third space – but as often happens, we were better at saying what we weren’t as much as what we were. We weren’t a community center as in an open meeting room. We weren’t indoor parks with books. We were a learning center and community hub. Our members became learners, and our focus rested squarely on the community creating its own knowledge and identity. Our tool of preference? The Makerspace. 

No not just 3D printers in a room, but the idea that the community could come together and create in a library. For some librariesthe maker space is 3d printers and hand tools. For others it’s a wide-open living room for group chats. Still others it is the marked spike in programs where community members teach fellow community members.

In libraries across the globe video and audio studios began to pop up. Those scanners we once used to digitize the materials of the library were turned loose on family photo albums. Our walls were pulled down for workshops. We looked into the eyes of the Smart City and claimed the smart citizen turf. We loaned out baking pans with our books and even had cooking classes to boot. We not only paid for Kanopy, we created our own YouTube channels. We talked about great libraries building communities and the communities as the true collection of any library.

The Tilburg public library in the Netherlands took over a former train maintenance warehouse and built pop up libraries right next to incubators for new business start-ups. They used these pop ups as places of experimentation and play that ultimately lead to the impressive LocHal. The IP Centre at the British Library moved the business reference books to the side and retrained the librarians as business planning experts.

The era of the community hub was, well, is a reaction to the retreating human interface to government. Our members could no longer talk to a person with questions on taxes or social services. The face of health care went from a doctor or a nurse, to a patient portal. Into this vacuum stood librarians ready to help. And to support them, social workers. And to support them all artists and writers in residence. Instead of giving the books the best views from our new libraries of glass and steel, we created a destination. Our value was now in quality of life.

I would say many of us are living firmly in this Community Hub Epoch. We are, however, already starting to see the need for continued evolution in this approach. In the UK, for example, too many local councils have seen the community well integrated into the workings of the library and made the jump that the community itself can maintain the library in the form of volunteers. 

In the Netherlands there are no more library schools because community-centered librarianship is being defined as user experiences and customer service versus librarianship and its values and skills. In Florida they are having theme park experts design libraries as an experience, instead of librarians designing libraries as a service. Don’t get me wrong. We should be designing our libraries with the experiences of people in mind. We should be building organizations that serve. But in doing so we must recognize the unique value librarians bring to this endeavor.

That is also not to say that as professionals we are necessarily where we need to be for our communities. Within the library we have to look at ourselves. Are we best structured to serve as a community hub? If evolution happens to ensure survival of the fittest, are we ready? How much of our preparation for librarians cover event planning? How much focus do we put in skills development on tech and collection building, and how much on community engagement and cultural skills? How open are we to the entire community when all too often we organize ourselves in hierarchical management structures where some positions never have to interact with the public?

Which brings me to an emerging era and my attempt to answer what shared services and resources do we need in today’s library landscape. It is conceptualizing the Library as a Movement. It is taking all of this evolution to the next level. The focus isn’t on collections, or access, or places, it is on mobilizing a community for social action. Instead of calling folks patrons or users, or even my personal favorite members, we don’t have a name at all – because the walls between “them” and “us.” Begin to break down. 

Libraries bring together people of diverse, and even clashing perspectives to seek common ground. The greatest asset we have in this era is trust. In a world filled with a cacophony of perspectives, propaganda, and belief, we serve as vital social infrastructure and trusted facilitators working across community divisions to develop a new community narrative. And I know that last sentence borders on buzz word salad, but all it means is we help members of a community find meaning, and power in each other. And in the era of the library as movement, how this happens is going to be different in every library and every community.

In this new era we not only support reading because literacy is a vital skill in making change and democratic participation – we team with the primary schools and the local pizza restaurant to ensure we use common vocabularies and we create a whole culture of reading. In a project for the Hearst Foundation, we created a community literacy initiative. We found that classroom teachers and youth librarians would use the exact same words, with totally different definitions. Literacy for the teachers was skill development for the decoding and understanding of texts. For librarians? It was reading enrichment and the promotion of a love or culture of readers. Parents would take their children from school to library, hear the same words, and not understand the mixed messages they were receiving. 

A literacy researcher on the team was demonstrating how story times could be used to both enhance literacy skills and the love of reading. After the session a mother with her infant child came up to the researcher. “What did you say on that page?” she would ask. Then “and what about on this page.” It took the research a moment to realize that the parent couldn’t read. But instilling reading skills in her child was so important she was going to memorize this book so she could share it with her baby.

That story then led to not only local restaurants having library picked books available for kids, but the city council passing a resolution that every town sponsored event had to have a literacy component. The governor of the state not only signed a declaration about the importance of reding, he recorded a video to be used in all of the schools.

My point is that the community-the schools, the libraries, the businesses, the parents – came together to create change, to create a movement. And the library was part of that movement and could never have done it on its own. And here is the most important part. What worked in Columbia South Carolina will not work in your community. No matter how well we document it, or call it a best practice, or try and turn it into a downloadable toolkit, it won’t work. It is meant to guide, instruct, and inspire you. You, the librarian, your job is to see what will work in your community. That’s the difference from the era of the Book palace. Rather than trying to connect similar to similar – to make a suite of unified and undifferentiated services for all, the networks of today have to train librarians to adapt, not adopt. The network supports and inspires.

Of course, all of these phases of our evolution still co-exist together. 

Take for example The South Carolina Center for Community Literacy – which was the South Carolina Center for Children’s Books and Literacy – which started as collection of award winning children’s books. 

The Center has a collection of both award-winning children’s books and books that help teachers learn about including diverse and representative materials into their lessons. It also has digital services. However, in the past few years the movement aspect of SKILL -as we call it -has emerged. 

We have a bus full of books. No big surprise there. But this bus is also filled with university students from across the campus, and this guy. This is Cocky, the university mascot and something of a celebrity here in South Carolina. That bus? Cocky’s Reading Express, goes to the poorest schools in the state. Those college students? They read to the kids and demonstrate how vital reading is. And the books? Well, that’s where Cocky comes in. You see he gives them out. Over a 120,000 books given to kids where they promise Cocky, a symbol of sport as much as anything else, that they’ll read every day. 

And the center doesn’t stop there. We work with social safety net organizations to do one on one consulting with those in need to connect them to housing, food, and services folks need in their most desperate hours. We work with immigrant groups to advocate for bilingual education. Why isn’t this a community center? Why isn’t this just a bunch of volunteers with book shelves? Because of the answer to David Fenske’s question – it is because librarians with their skills, values, and mission are not simply delivering these services, they are shaping them. Librarians are ensuring privacy in a data driven world. Librarians are ensuring these services are both inclusive in their views, and equitable in their delivery.

And here we come to the meat of the issue: what kind of shared services do we need in this epoch? What do libraries need to support local movements? Awareness, continuous learning, mentorship, and a memory. 

Awareness in looking across libraries, cities, and industries for ideas that can help the communities we serve. What do libraries do in the face of artificial intelligence? How can we best advocate with our communities to put in place safeguards for personal data? How can we better welcome refugees? How can we build platforms for the community to connect people of shared interest? The union catalog of today is the foundation of a community learning management system of tomorrow. A system that directly links a persona with resources, experts, and tracks personal progress in mastering new skills and insights. 

Of course, awareness of an idea and the ability to adapt it to local needs is a very different thing. And I do mean adapt not adopt. Our staff needs to be constantly acquiring new skills. Technical skills, certainly, but facilitation skills, political skills, research skills to implement technologies, programs, and services that look like the community itself.

As librarians develop their new skills and seek to implement new ideas in a community, they need guidance and fellowship. Networks of libraries need to provide mentoring and coaching. We need to develop future leaders and build strong ties among the most remote colleagues.

Lastly there needs to be a shared memory. This memory ranges from classical archives of community development to identifying and highlighting innovation among the group. 

If this sounds a bit familiar…well, it is. The future shared library service is a university of the people. A function that engages librarians and the community players who are part of local movements in learning. Teaching members how to organize collective action. Bringing together different industries together with librarians to forge common goals.

And just as all ideas need to be adapted to local needs, this library university does not have to look like a classical institution of higher education. Don’t build lecture halls, but cooperative laboratories. Teach online, sure, but also learn together in pop up libraries in malls and beaches, and football stadiums. Eschew periodic diplomas for continuous portfolio building. And no class without the partners and community members making this real in their lives.

So there you go, my quick trip through the evolution of libraries. A trip that will never be complete, because we are a living and thriving profession. Our communities need us now more than ever. They need us because we are a trusted place to make sense of a world increasingly wracked with xenophoabia and a flavor of nationalism that seeks to define a nation only as people who think and look like us. Our communities need trusted professionals to ensure not only their rights, but to amplify their voice in the debates on the future.

So there you have it – from an unhealthy relationship with dictionaries to the people’s university. I hope this has been useful, or at least entertaining. I look forward to the conversation to come.

“Librarianship in an Era of Big Data: The Vital Human Touch.” Conference of European National Librarians. Mo i Rana, Norway. (via video conference)

Speech Text: Read Speaker Script
Abstract: In a world of AI and Big Data the values, skills, and mission of librarians is increasingly vital. How do we prepare our professionals to guide and support communities across the EU? How do we ensure the smart citizen is at the center, and in control of the smart city? It is crucial that librarians advocate for issues of privacy and the common good in the midst of a growing market place that transforms users into products. How can librarians increase their value, work with technology giants to shape services, and in the end help our communities make smarter decisions and community members find meaning in their lives.

[This is the script I used for my talk. I’ve also taken the opportunity to add some foot notes and links.]

First, I must begin with an apology to Cecile and the organizers. For weeks they have been asking for slides. I have struggled to put into a concrete form what I want to say to such an important and, frankly, intimidating crowd. I have also spent a year wrestling with cancer and a bone marrow transplant. I don’t say this to get sympathy (maybe a little), but I have found that the experience has given me a new perspective on things that I am still trying to integrate. At once, I am grateful for just about everything, but tend to be less patient with things I feel need changed. And to be clear, as I look out at my home country and across the Atlantic, I see some need for change.

This crystalized for me when preparing for the talk and kept coming into the phrase “memory organizations^[1].” If indeed Santayana was right that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it^[2],” then what obligations does that place upon institutions who are charged as memory keepers of nations? I would argue that as stewards of cultural heritage, we are also stewards of society. I would also argue that we must stop serving communities, and start building them.

Our communities, our societies, our cultures are too important to sit on the sidelines and simply observe or collect their output. We must recognize, without the haze of nostalgia, that we are actors in this world and accept a responsibility to work directly with communities of all types to shape a better tomorrow. 

Now this could, and should, take many forms. Confronting growing economic disparities, alerting the world to the dangers of xenophobia mixed with nationalism, or confronting the realities of climate crisis. I could talk about the continuous marginalization of whole segments of the population because of race, or class, or sexual preference. Marginalization by society, and indeed, all too often by librarians and the libraries they manage.

Today, however, I would like to use just one societal issue to support a call for national libraries to directly build communities. This incredibly consequential issue often goes unnoticed. It is the dangerous aspects of an increased societal reliance on data-driven algorithms generated by artificial intelligence and machine learning methods. 

Before I begin, let me throw out a few caveats and clarifications. The use of data, when appropriately gathered and analyzed is incredibly powerful. Indeed, it underlies most of science. The rise of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and indeed Big Data has unquestionably brought massive benefits to many disciplines. The ability to search through trillions of pages in milliseconds, search across massive number of images, and the ability to automate complex processes have directly benefited librarians. The issue, as I see it, is when we believe that data gathering, analysis, and encoding into algorithms are somehow neutral acts without social costs^[3].

In terms of clarifications; I will use the term community a lot. That is often seen as synonymous with towns, or citizens of a city. I use the term more broadly. When I say communities, I mean a group of people joined by some known variable and that share a means of allocating limited resources. A town is indeed a community sharing a common location, and a system of governance that allocates land, taxes, and other resources. A university is a community of scholars, staff, students, and administrators. A community can be a law firm, or a hospital, or a national library.

The other caveat is on the topic of national libraries. I have done some work with national libraries, but much of my relevant experience is working with state libraries here in the US. There is an old joke that once you know one state library, you know…one state library. I don’t pretend to be an expert on European National Libraries. However, from what I’ve seen, this is true of your institutions as well.

Some of you are active in networks with public and academic libraries. In some countries, there are multiple national library agencies. Some actively seek to support business communities^[4], others focus on scholarly research. Bottom line – no one set of issues or models will reflect your great variety.

That said, I am reminded of the saying, “every idea is a good idea in libraries, just not in my library.” It is very easy to focus on what differentiates us now and believe that prevents collective action in the future. I hope I can successfully persuade you otherwise

So, with the caveats and clarifications out of the way, my purpose today is to recruit all of you to build a network of proactive librarians around European. I am calling on you to directly support, train, and empower librarians from those working in the most rural public library to those in the most prestigious university. What’s more is that I am asking you to engage in community building to shape a better future. Why? Well, let’s start with a story.

Charles Duhigg, author of “The Power of Habit^[5],” tells the story of an angry father who storms into a department store to confront the store manager. It seems that the store had been sending his 16-year-old daughter a huge number of coupons for pregnancy related items: diapers, baby lotion and such. The father asks the manager if the store is trying to encourage the girl to get pregnant? The manager apologizes to the man and assures him the store will stop immediately. A few days later the manager calls the father, only to find that the daughter was indeed pregnant, and the store knew it before she told her father.

What’s remarkable is that the store knew about the pregnancy without the girl ever telling a soul. The store had determined her condition from looking at what products she was buying, activity on a store credit card, and in crunching through huge amounts of data. If we updated this story from a few years ago we could add her search history and online shopping, even her shopping at other physical stores. It is now common practice to use online tracking, wifi connection history, and unique data identifiers to merge data across a person’s entire life.

I am hardly telling you anything new here. Facebook is only the latest business to dominate the headlines with privacy breaches, and hidden data gathering. Most citizens of the EU and the US now live two lives: their own, and one created, often without their knowledge, from the digital debris created through our devices. Add to this increased requirements by governments and businesses alike to be online – to apply for a job, to vote, to receive health care, to listen to music – and we see a world that is moving faster than regulation, and faster than realization by those we seek to serve.

In Toronto, Sidewalk Labs, a subsidiary of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, is working with town planners to redevelop Toronto’s Eastern Waterfront. The story of transforming old industrial areas into gentrified multiuse spaces is nothing new. However, a large part of the controversy in this case comes in the plan to make the new neighborhood a data generator. The plan, according to The Intercept, “includes a centralized identity management system, through which ‘each resident accesses public services’ such as library cards and health care^[6].” There has been a large debate over who owns and controls the data generated by that system, and who can profit from it.

Many librarians might look at these examples and claim a sort of ethical high ground. After all, as a profession, we explicitly value privacy. In the US we count it as a core value of the field, and yet we often undermine it. We tell our online patrons that we don’t track their work. And yet their internet provider can indeed track every click they make. Therefore, we are often misleading that patron and giving them a false sense of security. How many libraries set up TOR servers^[7]or anonymizing VPN services^[8]for our service populations? How often in our licensing of databases or other software do we explicitly forbid the aggregation of user data or the selling of that data? How often do we check on those terms?

Then there is the question of how all of this data is used.

In her book “Weapons of math destruction^[9],” Cathy O’Neil documents story after story of data mining and algorithms that have massive effects in people’s lives, even when they show clear biases and faults. For example, an algorithm that led to outstanding teachers being fired. How? O’Neil writes about an outstanding teacher who had proven positive effect on under-performing students– raising their performance and grades significantly. As a reward, the teacher is given a year with honors classes filled with the brightest students in the school. However, the impact a teacher can have on honors students is not nearly as evident as those with students needing a lot of help. After all, top students receiving top marks can’t get better than, well, top marks. So the algorithm saw a teacher that was no longer effective in a classroom, and recommended the teacher be fired. Recommended by a piece of software using criteria that was hidden from teachers, and was assumed to be objective.

Algorithms are now used here in the states to determine health care cost and availability; access to credit for home ownership; suitability of a candidate for a job,; and even how long a person should be in jail.

Yuval Harari refers to this reliance on collectable data and algorithms as Dataism^[10]. It is the result of computing power combined with machine learning and the wide availability of constantly connected devices like our phones. It is the belief that if you gather enough data on a person or situation, you can accurately represent that person or situation and predict an outcome.

It often also comes with some very dubious, and downright dangerous assumptions. Assumptions such as algorithms are objective, and that data collection is somehow a neutral act. Or even, that everything can be represented in a quantitative way – including, by the way, culture^[11]. And before I make you wonder what any of this has to do with the work of libraries, or think I’m letting our profession off the hook, I have to say that librarians have suffered from some of the same dubious assumptions.

For too long librarians and library science educators saw ourselves as neutral actors. We collected, described, and provided materials believing that these acts were either without bias, or that those biases were controlled. In collecting we took it all…except for works that were self-published, or from sources we deemed predatory or of low quality. In cataloging we relied on literary warrant and the language of the community – often ignoring that we only saw the dominant narrative and voices. Our services were for all – from 9 to 5 with a researcher’s card who could travel.

We as a profession are now waking up to the fact that we are a product of our cultures – good and bad. We understand that the choices we make in everything from classification to exhibits are just that – choices. They may be guided by best practice, or enforced by law, but ultimately, they are human choices in a material world where resource decisions must be made. We can speed up digitization with newer machines, but we still have to pick a starting point. We can expand those we serve on the web, but still must acknowledge that there are people with no broadband or connectivity.

Now it would seem like this may turn to a call to redouble our efforts in neutrality. A call to wipe away the biases in ourselves so that we can confront the cost to society of skewed machine learning efforts. But it is not. In fact, we must embrace that libraries, and the librarians that build and manage them, are biased^[12]. What’s more, it is only by seeing libraries as biased that we prove our value in the world of massive scale data.

First, we must realize that it is impossible to be neutral. Putting a book on a shelf or in a vault is a choice. Every day in archives and special collections we make professional determinations of how accessible an item is versus how protected it is. We can seek out many voices and yes, gather data, to make those decisions, but in the end, they are decisions with consequences. Pretending we are neutral doesn’t change the consequences, it only allows us to pretend they are not the result of our action.

Now, I keep calling them biases, but a better word would be principles. Principles are an explicit statement of belief. They should be transparent and, most importantly, able to be assessed. Are we following our principles? 

And make no mistake principles are not neutral. Seeking to serve all equitably takes effort and resources. Choosing to provide images for fee or free is a choice. Fighting censorship is a decision. If you don’t think so, try balancing it against issues of hate speech and threats to marginalized communities.

It is in our decisions and our transparency in making those decisions that we build trust with our communities. Our scholars, and entrepreneurs, and citizens don’t trust librarians because we are neutral, but because they agree with our principles and see them consistently applied. The days when libraries had the monopoly on access to large collections is well over. Yet libraries in most places the world are not only in use, but in growing use – public, academic, school, and national libraries alike.

Where library use (not necessarily support, but use) is growing it is because we are seen as accessible, equitable, and trusted. Yes, the collections we hold are valuable. The fact that we hold unique resources that either haven’t been, or can’t be digitized is important. But it is only important if those who seek out these resources trust us to be honest stewards of these resources.

It is our embrace of our humanity – our human touch in an increasingly automated system that underlies our value. This is not a luddite’s call against technology, AI, or machine learning. Rather it is a belief that human connection – community- is more important than ever when the face of government and business alike become web pages and bots under the banner of austerity or efficiency.

The future of libraries is ultimately not set by which technologies are developed or deployed. It is not in a value that was defined a century ago. It is in our very human ability to build trust with our communities. It is upon that trust that we build support. It is upon that trust that we build use. It is upon that trust that we find and confirm our necessity.

It is with that trust that we must reach out to the computer science community, the online industry, and the governments collecting data and deploying algorithms. We must advocate for a seat at the table and represent the voices of those without a seat. We must use the hard lessons we learned and are still learning in issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion to help guide these technologies. We must be trusted by our communities to speak truth to power and to give those communities power to speak for themselves. We must follow our principles in actively shaping, with our communities, the policies, regulations, and laws that talk about data. 

National libraries must play a large role in civic data stewardship. National libraries must not just safe guard the heritage of cultures, but the privacy and intellectual safety of citizens. You need to be a memory organization in the realization that effective memory is both about remembering, and, forgetting.

How do I resolve the paradox that I just advocated for a common role in institutions that I also acknowledge are so diverse? If indeed, you each represent unique institutions, does this preclude collective action? Of course not. Because in effect you are what all libraries must become. Every library- public, academic, school- should be shaped to the communities they serve. Then, as librarians, we become the connective tissue that seeks the best of all libraries and shape those innovations to local needs. Gone are the days when every library looked alike or supported some cannon of common services. Gone are the days when best practices extend to all libraries of a given size or type. Throw away the toolkits and instead build a toolbox^[13].

We must prepare our librarians, regardless of title, or training, or location to be a missionary force proactively engaging in the well-being of our cultures and communities. We must build national peer networks that rapidly and effectively spread ideas and help librarians effectively shape them when they meet local needs. These networks discard best practice and industrial standardization for conversation, learning, and adaptation. We must connect the best thinkers together regardless of status or institutional boundaries.

How do important national institutions do this?

We must create platforms for continuous engagement of librarians where they can share, learn, teach, mentor and support each other. This may be built upon and with national and regional associations, but the focus is on individuals, not institutions.

We must create a system to formally recognize participants within and beyond this platform. Work with library science programs where they exist, but also extend the recognition beyond formal degrees to continuous learning.

We must recognize Lighthouse Libraries^[14]that embody innovation and serve as inspirations, not blueprints, for other libraries.

We must proactively engage this network of change agents to transform libraries, associations, institutions, and ultimately communities globally. Members of our peer networks, our communities of practice, must encounter daily new ideas from across the globe.

Think of a library as movement, not a place or an institution^[15]. It is a movement of people committed to improving society. Librarians, certainly. But also, scholars, politicians, entrepreneurs, programmers, and authors. Discard terms like users that reinforce the idea that our communities are consumers, and our only value is in the utility we provide to a demand. We have members and citizens; neighbors and scholars that all own and shape the library.

Most importantly, this will not happen in one hour of a conference. It will take more engagement, more experimentation, and more investment. That is why I support the PL2030^[16]project. Building off of the Public Libraries 2020 project, it is a group of librarians from across the continent seeking to transform public libraries across Europe one librarian at a time. It advocates for libraries and builds connections between elected representatives and library innovators. But it needs help. 

PL2030 and the work of its members represent the need for a new vital link between the cultural heritage mission of National Libraries and public libraries. Libraries are transforming from access points, collections, and information providers into community hubs across Europe. From Manchester to Cologne to the amazing Dokk1 in Aarhus to Delft and Tilburg in the Netherlands and Pistoia and Perugia in Italy public libraries are the places communities come to learn, create and dream together. Here, by the work of innovative librarians, libraries have gone from quiet places of retreat to loud places of engagement. The true collection of a great public library is now the community itself. Blacksmiths and bakers host conversations. Librarians lend out books and musical instruments and recording studios. Rather than bringing the world to the community, these libraries have become loudspeakers broadcasting the community to the world. These public libraries have become the cradle of cultural creation.

As institutions charged in part with preserving and supporting the cultural heritage of a people, you need to preserve and support the work of these institutions. Not simply as a backup or for posterity, but as part of the living and breathing centers of community conversation. In a connected world – connected through technology certainly, but also in trade, in governance, and in preserving the earth itself – There is no more front-line service and library of last resort. We librarians are obligated to serve all, and in your nations now is a network of libraries eager for your partnership.

I thank you for your time, and I look forward to the conversation to come.

^[1]Or “Memory Institutions” like the CENL Strategic plan https://www.cenl.org/wp-content/uploads/CENL-Strategy-2018-2022_final-1.pdf

^[2]https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_Santayana

^[3]I love Chris Bourg’s take on the use of “societal cost” in discussing AI versus ethics.

^[4]I’m a big fan of the British Library’s https://www.bl.uk/business-and-ip-centre

^[5]http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/881631924

^[6]https://theintercept.com/2018/11/13/google-quayside-toronto-smart-city/

^[7]https://www.torproject.org/

^[8]There are plenty of good articles explaining VPN. Here’s one that actually compares VPNs vs Tor: https://www.cloudwards.net/vpn-vs-proxy-vs-tor/

^[9]http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1039545320

^[10]http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1060991037

^[11]This article certainly doesn’t claim that all of cultural heritage can be represented quantitatively. Rather I include the citation because it is a good introduction to the use of quantitative analysis of some cultural material and because it includes the very cool term Culturomics, “Culturomics is the application of high-throughput data collection and analysis to the study of human culture.” https://www.librarian.net/wp-content/uploads/science-googlelabs.pdf

^[12]Here’s a good place to start on the discussion of libraries, librarians and neutrality:https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2018/06/01/are-libraries-neutral/In particular check out Emily Drabinski’s take.

^[13]Pithy phrase, but in case it is not clear I mean stop sending out assembled ready to implement toolkits and focus on librarians gaining the tools to develop their own programs and/or create local application of programs customized to their communities.

^[14]https://publiclibraries2030.eu/projects/lighthouse-libraries/

^[15]Stole this idea from the amazing Marie Østergaard: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/princh-library-lounge-ep-3-building-global-networks/id1451326347?i=1000437039135

^[16]https://publiclibraries2030.eu/