I can conceive of library functions being focused in three primary areas:

1. Extending the traditional
2. Data systems support
3. Space and place

1. Extending the traditional.

Libraries are already moving toward functioning as information intensive social centers, permitting and encouraging a wide range of study, research, and interactive capacities. I think there are new iterations of these services looming, discussed below. However, the core function of the library as a print warehouse is clearly being deprecated by the widespread ubiquity of network access which removes the necessity for physical collections beyond a particular form of archival preservation.

Other commentators (including visibly Daniel Greenstein of the University of California) have noted for years that traditional library functions are likely to be significantly reduced as the attractiveness of print book artifacts lessens. Content will be increasingly licensed from external vendors, both library consortial interests (e.g. possibly a role for HathiTrust) and commercial, for-profit (e.g. Elsevier and other large aggregators). Curation may continue to reside in libraries by grace of localized expertise working in close contact with faculty and library peers, but the business functions should be removed to campus or organizational administration.

There is a scarce explored value in reviewing the existing functions of libraries, including ensuring access to the published record (both formally and informally instantiated), through an exploration of digital analogues to print traditions. For example, libraries have been permitted to function within the framework of copyright in the United States through explicit reliance on the First Sale Doctrine. Imagining how First Sale might benefit access to digital works has not been systematically explored. However, while public domain works are fully available in digital form, and newer in-print publications are nearly always available for purchase or licensing in digital form, there is clear danger of sharply restricted access to digitized out-of-print materials.

The Internet Archive, working with other organizations, is committed to exploring digital lending of out of print works through its BookServer Project, which aims to provide access to any book, to any reader, on any device, and in any format. Clarification of the digital rights attendant on such service will likely only be addressed once services have been enacted, and are available for challenge and refinement. However, this is arguably a critical juncture for libraries to commit to ensuring their privileged place in the framework of copyright and information access on behalf of their served communities. As Georgia Harper of the University of Texas said in 2007, “I’ve begun more and more to believe that for some things libraries need to do for the future, they just need to be done without much concern for what the law says today. ”

2. Data systems support.

It has been well spoken that libraries need to become more fully inserted into contemporary faculty and community research patterns. Active collaborations with faculty, often cross-institutional and almost inevitably cross-unit within a single campus, are spreading with a fervor driven by library administrators who believe they have found a possibly unassailable haven to lay claim to their continued survival. However, these are not virgin grounds. These functions are also laid claim to, with some justification, by campus technology departments, which usually possess both greater experience with, and aptitude designing, developing, and deploying technology based information access systems.

Engagements in fraternal collaborations is an exercise in marketing more than in productivity, permitting management to acquire the mantle of success while their staffs struggle to match resources and labor with new endeavors while sustain relinquished existing priorities, which rarely re-align to accommodate the stresses of this new organizational vision. Rather than struggle through organizational muck, it is preferable to euthanize functions that under-perform in both library and IT units. To perceive unmet needs and address pressing ones, universities should collapse the technology, science, humanities, and research support centers that increasingly exist in ample measure across both sides of dividing fences.

From a campus wide perspective, fundamental components of campus library and technology organizations need to be surgically extracted from their current hosts and combined in a new data systems support unit focusing on educational and research needs, mandated to perform the essential systems analysis of serving the core functions of a university with the goal of enhanced information access, handling, and interactivity.

Such a strategy rightfully enervates existing IT and library departments. The need for sufficiently senior strategic executive management rests in the development and guidance of a new and holistic unit focusing on educational and research data systems support, and this should be a Chancellor’s or President’s Cabinet level position. Whether the current status of library management should be preserved is an open question; its organizational relevance to the mission of the university has been lowered.

3. Space and place.

In the near years ahead, with increasing ubiquity of network access via the proliferation of portable devices and other ad hoc network portals, startup initiatives will develop fully immersive environments and tools that not only locate us in a network of information resources but bridge us together in ways that we might find difficult to imagine now. The recent development of immersive real-time conference facilities that enable virtualization of presence points toward a new horizon role for next generation library-IT support centers, enabling them to connect space and place in new ways.

Augmented reality toolkits and applications for mobile devices, such as Layar, already enable casual network users to sandwich linked data layers on top of their perceived environment; a smartphone capable of knowing place (GPS) and position, and “seeing” people, places, and things through its camera eye, is already a platform sufficient for combining and presenting datasets on history, architecture, census, and a wide range of other data. Extension of these toolkits to extended physical spheres (i.e., non-lived environments such as astronomical, geophysical, and molecular level perceptions) is being executed.

The “envelope of perception” generated by user-integrated data presentation layers will inevitably be expanded to encompass holodeck-like virtualization capacities that will enable far flung collaborative groups to investigate and manipulate information through sophisticated data sharing systems that can willfully impose shared reality-dreams on their participants. Being able to “be on the ground” at significant historical events, or investigate alternative historical or future scenarios, will require a skill-set combining computational science with movie and entertainment industry understanding of pyscho-physical response to visual, auditory, and perceptive cues. Similarly, the ability to explore through hand-delivered manipulation changing environmental influences on global urban health via computing capacity that would still be considered super-computing class today is a clear extension of contemporary CAVE simulations.

In this synthesis of information-dense space and place rests a compelling re-architecture of the library, neatly synthesizing its assets in physical space and knowledge engagement. The library as an institution, engendered over the past few millennium to provide gatekeeping to scarce physical resources, is reaching a terminus in its life cycle. Yet its capacities and visions for access to the widest possible collection of information to the widest possible number will be enshrined in new ways. This is a future well worth the designing hands of the new library professionals waiting for an opportunity to latch onto change; imagining futures among the empty shelves, hoping that they will be able to turn on new lights even as the lights in their own old buildings grow dim.

Baltimore, MD (BWI)

Traditionally, the school has partnered with Scholastic, which makes their list available, and a set of books are physically delivered and then sold on site. If titles run short, more are Fedexed during the week in which the book sale is running.

No one wanted to replicate that again this year. Scholastic titles are usually not literary landmarks, and their commercial partners (e.g. Disney) produce overly commercialized tie-ins. The decision had already been made to partner with a Bay Area independent bookstore, but this brought up interestingly complicated logistics.

Obviously, the bookstore would have to select – curate – a set of books that would be offered to the kids across the school’s grades (K-8, in our case). How would the books get there? What if some titles ran short? Who would return the unsold? Control the inventory? Run the actual merchandising during the week? Amass the wish-lists by the school teachers so they could benefit from parental donations? Entice volunteers to staff the booths for 4 whole days? It seemed crazy.

So we began to try to re-invent it. Why not simply have display copies available on-site for people to browse? The bookstore (Hicklebee’s in San Jose) already supports rudimentary wishlists. Why not create an online ordering form? Let the kids browse the titles, generate lists of their preferred books, and then allow parents to order against the list per each family’s budget? The revenue would be collected by the bookstore, and the books could be sourced and shipped direct to the School, or alternatively collected at the bookstore and driven up to the School, for local distribution.

For this to work, the bookstore would have to support a custom ordering page against a set of chosen titles, with orders aggregated and then released to a fulfillment agent at the conclusion of the weeklong booksale. It shouldn’t be that difficult … is it? In general, the more finely granular selling of books is something that we should be trying to support by not just Amazon, or Google, but independent bookstores. Hicklebee’s is a member of IndieBound — do they provide support for this kind of merchandising?

Somewhere in this is a vision for how we “break-apart” the bookstore. For as long as it is desirable to sell paper books, we need to figure out how to take advantage of networks and the far deeper reach that point of presence can mean in a web 2.0 world. Local customization of a bookstore to a school — that should be easy.