SPARK LIBRARY EVOKATION_The Place

Return to: SPARK LIBRARY Executive Summary

1. Place: The Library

Libraries, by definition, are collections of sources, resources, and services AND the building in which these are housed. Additionally, libraries serve as a critical piece of the public domain; a symbolic space that accommodates our persistent desire for collectivity. The evolution of information technology, specifically the Internet, has allowed the idea of the library, which is rooted in free information sharing, to grow beyond its physical constraints and participate in the expanded field of information being created, organized, and shared online.

1.1 Libraries as Agencies of Culture

What a library is depends on what it does: it is a social enterprise, a physical infrastructure, a symbolic site of collective memory.[1] Historically, libraries were thought of as places for contemplative learning through access to books. However, the physical infrastructure of the contemporary library is now greatly expanded by its connectivity to the global community and what was once a closed resource within a community is now an open portal to a large and vibrant knowledge ecosystem. In other words, the growth of the digital increased the scale of our collective social enterprise. Nevertheless, the physical buildings remain, and each is a material representation of the form our culture takes within the civic landscape.

1.1.1 Library as Vehicle of Social Mobility

As repositories for information, libraries are invaluable resources for individuals committed to advancement through self-education. It was for this reason that the great American philanthropist Andrew Carnegie funded the construction of more than 2,500 libraries at the outset of the twentieth century. When asked why he focused on libraries, Carnegie would recall a story from his youth, when he was a child laborer at a mill in Alleghany, Pennsylvania. It came to pass that a prominent local citizen generously opened his personal library to the working boys of the town and with it provided access to “the precious treasures of knowledge and imagination through which youth may ascend.”[2] Carnegie took full advantage of this opportunity and saw it as foundational in his rise out of poverty.

Now more than ever the library bears the promise of knowledge and imagination. Physical collections are cheaper and easier to build, the range of materials continues to grow exponentially, and foundational resources are available in virtually every language. Additionally, web connectivity offers access to incredible resources that can either be accessed virtually or downloaded and turned into physical volumes. Noteworthy examples are sites whose content focuses on education. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s OpenCourseWare[3] was a pioneer of online higher education and we can now find a range of online degree programs offered by a wide range of universities. The BBC now offers free primary and secondary level educational resources[4] in addition to free language courses.[5] Connextions is a free website that provides user-generated, open-source material for textbooks that is customizable and allows users to quickly "create, rip, mix and burn" coursework without fear of copyright violations.[6] While it is true the majority of existing content is in English, this base provides a template awaiting translation, which may even be automated in the near future. Additionally, as web connectivity spreads more new content is being generated in a variety of languages.

1.1.2 Women, Minorities, Children, and Migrants

Unlike other modes of educational advancement, such as higher learning and trade schools, libraries offer a free and open forum to any individual interested in absorbing information on a subject of interest. In this sense, public libraries have been a particularly important resource for women, minorities, children, and migrants. For those of limited economic means, libraries have also come to represent places of free Internet access, which is now a given in most libraries of the Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)[7] member states.

1.2 The Changing Library

As a building type, the library needs to change. The approach of the previous generation, predicated on the book as the dominant means of communicating information, is a model that is rapidly becoming outmoded. What we currently understand as the book - a written or printed work, usually on sheets of paper fastened or bound together within covers - is far from dead. However, its supremacy is crumbling, and with it an antiquated spatial logic. A new array of media, mostly digital, is being offered to the public as alternative means of communicating information. Compared to the book, these new forms of media are radically different in their approach to creating, storing, and accessing knowledge. Likewise, those accustomed to new forms of media have an alternative relationship to that knowledge. Where the library of the physical book was a place of contemplative learning, the library at the outset of the digital age is one where users come to aggressively reconstitute the sea of data they’re immersed in. In other words, the contemporary library is an environment deeply concerned with the activity of knowledge production.

1.2.1 The Frontiers of Information

At a cognitive level, the process of acquiring knowledge is network-based, requiring a complex mix of perception, learning, communication, association, and reasoning. Contemporary advancements in telecommunications are leading to a radical overhauls for each of these inputs and we now have fundamentally new ways to create, disseminate, and exploit knowledge. The potential of these new technologies finds peak efficiency when delivered with open access protocols, that is, a system where participants are given free access, free interaction, and can contribute freely. These were the fundamental principles upon which the Internet was founded, and as it continues to develop, we are seeing a move away from classic, top-down, corporate models for providing content in favor of fresh, bottom-up, open access/open source platforms. This current seems completely in step with the core ambition of the public library: to provide free information to all.

1.2.2 The State of the Book

Computation has changed the rules of the game and currently anything that is not dependant on a bodily form is migrating to the much more immediate, glamorous and flexible domain — that of the electronic.[8] This migration is certainly not limited to newly created materials. Google is in the midst of a well-publicized campaign to scan as many books as they can and create a database of universally accessible knowledge. They are not alone. Parallel efforts are underway by a variety of other groups throughout the world[9] to add to the burgeoning pool of digitized material.

There exists, however, a significant portion of content that is resistant to digitization. These are exceptional and obscure artifacts found in archives and rare material collections whose digital status is among their least important qualities. They serve other more valuable cultural purposes. These materials are unique to, and definitive of, the place they were created and/or currently reside. In their physicality they are alive with aura, an intangible experience that cannot yet be replicated electronically. Interestingly, as the mass scanning continues, these special materials become more special.

So, in this context, what is the next step for the physical book? While there may be a great deal of chatter in the blogsphere about the death of the book, upon reflection it seems an overly presumptuous forecast. For starters, about 1.6 billion people on Earth still live without electricity, [10] and 75 percent of the global population is still not online.[11] Based on the current trends, one might suggest that under the pressure of digitization what we understand as the current book will split into three parts, which I’ll refer to as absent, common, and unique.

The absent is an acknowledgement that information is now produced in a wide variety of media whose representation can no longer be accommodated by the physical book alone. This is the electronic, virtual, online book. It is also the sub-worlds of information generated by Facebook, email, the blogsphere, online journals and newspapers, digital music and videos – all created without ever having a necessity for bodily presence.

The common is what we understand as the current, physical, leaf-bound book. While at first blush this might seem like a stable technology, it is, in fact, capable of being radically recast using slightly evolved combinations of existing technologies. For example, there are a number of recently launched companies providing compact book printer/binder on the scale of an office copy machine. These devices are interfaced with online book suppliers, like Google, and are capable of printing and binding volumes rapidly and on-demand. If, instead of printing books on a cellulose-based paper, we switched to a material with a high recycling coefficient, such as a polymer film, then one could imagine this scenario: a patron goes to the library, requests a book, which is instantly printed, and then when it is returned it is ground up and recycled into a new book. A highly functional, 50 million+ volume library could be achieved with a small machine, a high-speed internet connection, and a few hundred pounds of cycling print material.

The unique is an understanding of how to treat those objects resistant to digitization. As library collections become more and more similar, the rare materials – that part of the collection that makes an individual library different and is often a potent embodiment of the local culture – increase in value. In a future where printing on-demand is widely accepted, the traditional foundation of the library collection will be obsolete. Instead, libraries can devote more energy and space to archiving rare and unique material. This curation should not focus only on materials from the past, but strive to support the creation of new unique materials in the present and future.

1.3 Synthesis: Knowledge Commons

Libraries remain a critical piece of the pubic domain and a symbol of our persistent need for collectivity. They are also engines of mobility that provide equal services to all genders, cla****, and races. In imagining the next evolution of this building type, we might return to old notions of gauging success in a public library through progress and abundance in its collection. (Aurst 2001, 10) In this light, the goal for the next library should be an approach that maximizes the potential of each respective phase of the book and provides a stage for synergetic interactions between them. The exact nature of that atmosphere is difficult (if not impossible) to pin down because in all likelihood it will take on the qualities of the medium it instantiates: it will be a user-generated machine, constructed literally by countless contributions from the entire community, rather than the singular vision of any one individual. If the typology is allowed to loosen up and go with the electronic flow, it will be able to begin bridging the divide artificially separating our physical and virtual realities and dramatically increase its effectiveness.

There is already a wealth of useful information online and more is being generated every minute. The library is a servomechanism that can facilitate the flow of information from its source to any point where it can be made useful. The following section will discuss the most strategic placement of new libraries in order to leverage the greatest possible impact with respect to the continent of Africa.

Return to: SPARK LIBRARY Executive Summary

[1] Augst, Thomas, “American Libraries and Agencies of Culture.” In Libraries as Agencies of Culture, ed. Thomas Augst and Wayne Wiegand. (University of Wisconsin Press: Madison, 2001), 5

[2] Carnegie, Andrew. Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie. Open Source book: BiblioBazzar 57

[3] http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm

[4] http://www.bbc.co.uk/northernireland/schools/index.shtml

[5] http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/

[6] http://cnx.org/

[7] The OECD is an international economic organization of 30 countries. Most OECD members are high-income economies with a high Human Development Index (HDI) and are regarded as developed countries. The identification of OECD will be used in place of the dubious term “western.”

[8] Paraphrased from Rem Koolhaas’ acceptance speech of the 2000 Pritzker Prize.

[9] The dizzying pace at which Google has moved forward with its book digitalization initiative has caused anxiety among some European intellectuals, especially in France and Germany, that if the vast majority of archived knowledge online is English, it will weaken the agency of works done in other languages. The result has been an rippling of accelerated scanning in throughout Europe.

[10] Source: http://www.globalissues.org/article/26/poverty-facts-and-stats Accessed April 8, 2010.

[11] Source: http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm Accessed April 8, 2010.