Research & Thought
An Age of Rapidly Emerging Technologies
To put it mildly, we librarians are living in an age of change—certainly not the first, but perhaps one of the most dramatic since the rise of computers some decades ago and certainly one of the most rapid. Indeed, the rapid pace of change has been one of the most difficult issues for libraries: try to adopt every flashy new thing that pops up and one can quickly find oneself wasting time and money on things that turn out to be complete flops, or the efforts may flounder simply because it is not entirely clear how to adapt these emerging technologies to the library setting. Wait too long and one can find oneself labeled as outdated and antiquated. It gets even more complicated as one must take into account the technological proficiency of their audience—it seems perfectly reasonable to switch from physical mail to email for getting the word out about library events, but if a significant portion of one’s patrons are the elderly or those without internet access one will effectively be cutting off one’s own patrons and driving down library usage. Attempting to communicate news exclusively through Twitter when an older audience prefers traditional email can lead to similar results.
Long story short, emerging technologies are a tricky tightrope to walk. New technologies provide so much potential to reach new audiences and advocate for the library, but one has to approach them carefully and rationally and with a full understanding of their audience. A classic example of this is Facebook: Once it was the halcyon land of the youth demographic and provided an excellent way to reach out to this group, but more and more it has become the domain of the middle-aged.
During my studies I was able to interview the Seattle Public Library about their social media and outreach efforts to get an idea of how a major library went about this challenge. The creation of a dedicated team was one of the first steps in this as having a team provided the means by which collaboration could occur and varying perspectives could be injected—indeed, they facilitated a means by which anyone within the library could make suggestions. This in turn allowed for their use of social media to be quite social, with them even citing that platforms such as Facebook were employed specifically to spur discussion between librarians and patrons while Twitter was employed as a way to quickly answer any variety of queries. They have also made it a point to take stock of the purpose and demographic that each platform is most adept at reaching, employing a variety of key performance indicators to keep track of how successful each endeavor is. On top of all this, they still employ more traditional forms of outreach such as advertisements on TV and radio.
Related: Seattle Public Library Interview and Summation
Social Media - The Challenge of Finding One’s Audience
Beyond this, several of my fellow students and I crafted a comparative assessment of UNCG's use of social media—in particular, Twitter—as compared to ECU. In both cases, the accounts seemed to have a respectable number of subscribers with ECU notably having nearly double what UNCG had. A closer look showed that the reality was far more grim, as when one looked at the number of actual student followers—the key demographic that both the ECU and UNCG libraries were serving—they barely reached 1% of their respective total student bodies. Together, my group and I attempted to theorize about how this situation might be turned around so that social media could be effectively employed to reach out to the student body as a whole, with myself synthesizing the collective results in the paper linked below.
Related: Collaborative Analysis of UNCG Social Media
The Role of the Electronic Book in the Post-Industrial World
Through my time at UNCG I have learned a lot about emerging technologies, from the above issues of social media to the use of HTML, XML, CONTENTdm and a number of other resources. I have learned that one has to be adventurous yet cautious, taking into account a number of factors in the employment of new technologies, factors beyond just how popular they might seem for the moment. All the same though, there's one technological elephant in the room that has not quite been addressed: ebooks.
I have seen more than a few librarians eagerly dismiss ebooks, waving them off as a fad or eagerly bandying about articles that claim they are inferior for learning. Many of us, simply put, have an attachment to tangible paper books and fear of what the ebook may mean for them. Despite the worry that the ebook may one day replace the book, I feel confident saying that this will not be the case. This is not because of some Neo-Luddism or blind love of the physical book, but rather a recognition that the book and ebook, despite similar names, represent very different evolutionary paths. This does not mean things will not change though.
As I learned in my class on the history of the book, during the industrial revolution the role of the book in society began to change drastically. The printing press may have initiated this change, but it was not until the industrial advent of cheap paper and mass production that the world of reading began to change. Books in this age were no longer a rare and expensive commodity, lovingly crafted by specialist and often tailored to the purchaser. Now, they were mass and economically produced to be consumed by an increasingly literate populace hungry for information and entertainment. This, one could say, was also the rise of the age of access.
For so long the industrial book carried the weight of information access, being the only way information and entertainment could be cheaply and widely accessed. Radio, movies, and television chipped away at this a bit, but it was not until the rise of the internet that this truly began to change. Now there was an electronic means by which the contents of a book could be reproduced a million times without much cost at all, something the industrial book simply could not match. Yet, there was no way to easily and comfortably access a digital book. Carrying around a desktop was quite impossible, and a laptop, while portable, was hardly ideal for reading. With the rise of electronic readers and other devices which were easily portable and could connect to the internet anywhere at any time, the ability for electronic books to reach the public began to change.
More and more it is the digital which carries the weight of information access. We have already seen this with newspapers, namely with how digital equivalents to the old newspaper and magazine have increasingly put these old models out of business. The digital is cheaper, faster, and more efficient. So then, is the book fated to be consumed as well?
First off, it is far too soon to tell. While the spread of cellphone and internet technology is steadily reaching the whole world, it still remains far more prohibitive and difficult than a simple paper book. It will be decades if not a good century before we see the true results. Nonetheless, there is something that the book possesses which newspapers and magazines lack: an aura. By this I mean that one chooses a book not simply because it conveys information but also for the artistry of it. A finely crafted book is a thing of beauty, with quality paper and bindings and enrapturing cover art. Even an inexpensive book with good cover art can be enticing to hold. The newspaper is fading away because there is no purpose to the newspaper besides conveying information—the format itself is messy, inefficient, and unappealing. This simply is not so with books. In a way it is akin to art: one can easily find a digital version of a Monet or Picasso, but does this really compare with standing in a gallery and beholding the real thing?
What this almost certainly does mean though is the steady de-industrialization of the book as the digital realm takes on more and more of the burden of information access. This may mean physical books become less common albeit more artistic and valued, or it may signify a split between media, with the linear book happily continuing while digital ebooks evolve into something else entirely as they begin to truly take advantage of the digital realm via digital storytelling. Likely as not though, they will continue to co-exist for decades more. Even so, it is worth considering what these changes will mean for the library and how the library will adapt to meet them.
While I may not have the answers, I nonetheless have benefited greatly from my studies, be they in emerging technologies or the history of the book itself.
Related: Blog post on The Future of the Book and The Book as Art
To put it mildly, we librarians are living in an age of change—certainly not the first, but perhaps one of the most dramatic since the rise of computers some decades ago and certainly one of the most rapid. Indeed, the rapid pace of change has been one of the most difficult issues for libraries: try to adopt every flashy new thing that pops up and one can quickly find oneself wasting time and money on things that turn out to be complete flops, or the efforts may flounder simply because it is not entirely clear how to adapt these emerging technologies to the library setting. Wait too long and one can find oneself labeled as outdated and antiquated. It gets even more complicated as one must take into account the technological proficiency of their audience—it seems perfectly reasonable to switch from physical mail to email for getting the word out about library events, but if a significant portion of one’s patrons are the elderly or those without internet access one will effectively be cutting off one’s own patrons and driving down library usage. Attempting to communicate news exclusively through Twitter when an older audience prefers traditional email can lead to similar results.
Long story short, emerging technologies are a tricky tightrope to walk. New technologies provide so much potential to reach new audiences and advocate for the library, but one has to approach them carefully and rationally and with a full understanding of their audience. A classic example of this is Facebook: Once it was the halcyon land of the youth demographic and provided an excellent way to reach out to this group, but more and more it has become the domain of the middle-aged.
During my studies I was able to interview the Seattle Public Library about their social media and outreach efforts to get an idea of how a major library went about this challenge. The creation of a dedicated team was one of the first steps in this as having a team provided the means by which collaboration could occur and varying perspectives could be injected—indeed, they facilitated a means by which anyone within the library could make suggestions. This in turn allowed for their use of social media to be quite social, with them even citing that platforms such as Facebook were employed specifically to spur discussion between librarians and patrons while Twitter was employed as a way to quickly answer any variety of queries. They have also made it a point to take stock of the purpose and demographic that each platform is most adept at reaching, employing a variety of key performance indicators to keep track of how successful each endeavor is. On top of all this, they still employ more traditional forms of outreach such as advertisements on TV and radio.
Related: Seattle Public Library Interview and Summation
Social Media - The Challenge of Finding One’s Audience
Beyond this, several of my fellow students and I crafted a comparative assessment of UNCG's use of social media—in particular, Twitter—as compared to ECU. In both cases, the accounts seemed to have a respectable number of subscribers with ECU notably having nearly double what UNCG had. A closer look showed that the reality was far more grim, as when one looked at the number of actual student followers—the key demographic that both the ECU and UNCG libraries were serving—they barely reached 1% of their respective total student bodies. Together, my group and I attempted to theorize about how this situation might be turned around so that social media could be effectively employed to reach out to the student body as a whole, with myself synthesizing the collective results in the paper linked below.
Related: Collaborative Analysis of UNCG Social Media
The Role of the Electronic Book in the Post-Industrial World
Through my time at UNCG I have learned a lot about emerging technologies, from the above issues of social media to the use of HTML, XML, CONTENTdm and a number of other resources. I have learned that one has to be adventurous yet cautious, taking into account a number of factors in the employment of new technologies, factors beyond just how popular they might seem for the moment. All the same though, there's one technological elephant in the room that has not quite been addressed: ebooks.
I have seen more than a few librarians eagerly dismiss ebooks, waving them off as a fad or eagerly bandying about articles that claim they are inferior for learning. Many of us, simply put, have an attachment to tangible paper books and fear of what the ebook may mean for them. Despite the worry that the ebook may one day replace the book, I feel confident saying that this will not be the case. This is not because of some Neo-Luddism or blind love of the physical book, but rather a recognition that the book and ebook, despite similar names, represent very different evolutionary paths. This does not mean things will not change though.
As I learned in my class on the history of the book, during the industrial revolution the role of the book in society began to change drastically. The printing press may have initiated this change, but it was not until the industrial advent of cheap paper and mass production that the world of reading began to change. Books in this age were no longer a rare and expensive commodity, lovingly crafted by specialist and often tailored to the purchaser. Now, they were mass and economically produced to be consumed by an increasingly literate populace hungry for information and entertainment. This, one could say, was also the rise of the age of access.
For so long the industrial book carried the weight of information access, being the only way information and entertainment could be cheaply and widely accessed. Radio, movies, and television chipped away at this a bit, but it was not until the rise of the internet that this truly began to change. Now there was an electronic means by which the contents of a book could be reproduced a million times without much cost at all, something the industrial book simply could not match. Yet, there was no way to easily and comfortably access a digital book. Carrying around a desktop was quite impossible, and a laptop, while portable, was hardly ideal for reading. With the rise of electronic readers and other devices which were easily portable and could connect to the internet anywhere at any time, the ability for electronic books to reach the public began to change.
More and more it is the digital which carries the weight of information access. We have already seen this with newspapers, namely with how digital equivalents to the old newspaper and magazine have increasingly put these old models out of business. The digital is cheaper, faster, and more efficient. So then, is the book fated to be consumed as well?
First off, it is far too soon to tell. While the spread of cellphone and internet technology is steadily reaching the whole world, it still remains far more prohibitive and difficult than a simple paper book. It will be decades if not a good century before we see the true results. Nonetheless, there is something that the book possesses which newspapers and magazines lack: an aura. By this I mean that one chooses a book not simply because it conveys information but also for the artistry of it. A finely crafted book is a thing of beauty, with quality paper and bindings and enrapturing cover art. Even an inexpensive book with good cover art can be enticing to hold. The newspaper is fading away because there is no purpose to the newspaper besides conveying information—the format itself is messy, inefficient, and unappealing. This simply is not so with books. In a way it is akin to art: one can easily find a digital version of a Monet or Picasso, but does this really compare with standing in a gallery and beholding the real thing?
What this almost certainly does mean though is the steady de-industrialization of the book as the digital realm takes on more and more of the burden of information access. This may mean physical books become less common albeit more artistic and valued, or it may signify a split between media, with the linear book happily continuing while digital ebooks evolve into something else entirely as they begin to truly take advantage of the digital realm via digital storytelling. Likely as not though, they will continue to co-exist for decades more. Even so, it is worth considering what these changes will mean for the library and how the library will adapt to meet them.
While I may not have the answers, I nonetheless have benefited greatly from my studies, be they in emerging technologies or the history of the book itself.
Related: Blog post on The Future of the Book and The Book as Art