From the Name of the Rose to the Name of the Game: The Role of Libraries in the First Decade of the 21st Century

Keynote Address given at Executive Briefing of CILIP: Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals

Date: 06/11/2003
Venue: London, UK

More than 500 years after Gutenberg and Caxton, libraries are still monastic. They are not spontaneous and promiscuous disseminators of information but are, rather, timeless places of preservation and storage; they still pose Eco's great question in THE NAME OF THE ROSE, do they exist to keep information for the public or from the public? In this sense they have more in common with THE NAME OF THE ROSE than THE NAME OF THE GAME. By convention, rather than necessity, if you want to study the background to breaking news, when you enter the portals of your library you break yourself from the breaking news; how often have you seen a television inside a library tuned to a 7/24 news channel?

In the last decade the monopoly of the book has been challenged in libraries by the PC and the Internet; but I want to suggest that this is simply a diversion: digital technology may be plastic; hypertext may be superior to Dewey when it comes to classification; metadata may have become simpler to assign; but, at root, what was designed by the military and handed on to academia is still a bundle of mystery and mess. The very people who persevere with the book persevere with the Power Book.

Meanwhile, the 'bottom half of the market' has quite rightly refused to be seduced by ICT hype. Politicians may rail that society would be a good deal better if only these people would go on line and improve themselves but, apart from sending email and attaching digital pictures to it, these are the people of the remote controller, not the file server. What I want to suggest in this presentation is that these sturdy tax payers who embraced the VCR but have so far rejected the blandishments of corporate America, are entitled to an information service firmly grounded not on computer based but on broadcasting and telecommunications based technologies.

I want to split the topic into four:

Making and marketing information
Media literacy;
Information 'push'; and
'Always on'.

1. Making and Marketing Information.

With the honourable exception of the Open University, educational broadcasting has been an abject failure. Television, which changed all our lives, changed it everywhere but in the classroom. Radio had very limited success and the gramophone occasionally found its way into music appreciation; but that was it. In secondary education as the uniformity of the curriculum grew, we left basic instruction to widely diverse teaching performance. I do not for a minute contest the need for teachers to explain and expand - since Plato the essence of Western education has been dialogue - but teachers might have saved themselves personal/years of toil and embarrassment if the basics had been provided through educational broadcasting. In further and higher education it was no better. How many of us turned up in draughty lecture halls to be on the wrong end of a dull monologue? Again, when it comes to basics, why could we not be given the best through broadcasting? Why were Sir Kenneth Clarke and Jacob Brunowki so widely esteemed in the family home but not in the hall of residence or the student bed-sit?

The answer to these questions is cultural; whereas lecturing and computing are worthy and serious, television is vulgar and frivolous. Now, of course, this is nonsense; there is a mass of fine (non-formal) educational programming on television and an even greater mass of pornography available through computers on the Internet. I have stressed the importance of dialogue in learning but there is no more dialogue available from most web sites than there is from the History Channel and remember, the book is not interactive!

I want to suggest that two significant developments have taken place more or less simultaneously which are of immense significance in the way we look at information dissemination. The first is the growth, particularly in the first instance in social classes E, D and C2 of multi channel television. If you subscribe to Sky you will be close to 400 channels. This provides immense depth and breadth and this is a social reality amongst those who are classified as 'socially excluded'. So in reach terms, television is the most significant multi-media technology.

The second development is the plummeting cost of making and broadcasting television. If, for example, the British Library wanted its own 24-hour TV channel the start-up cost would be less than half a million, the running cost per year would be about the same and you would need a programme budget of no more than £1.5 million. This is the worst-case scenario. The chances are that major companies would be happy to sponsor this kind of project. This would not be the traditional model of constant novelty which we expect from the main channels; it would be an extended loop of broadcasting, lasting perhaps six hours. This sounds rather low level but it is like a web site but more dynamic and easier to get hold of. At the same time, as these costs fall, high labour web site maintenance costs are constant or rising. I enjoyed the Caxton experience a month ago but wouldn't it have been better as a television loop?

So, here we have a familiar, simple, user friendly, socially universal, life changing technology with falling costs. PC technology, on the other hand, is still intimidating, clumsy, class based and reliant upon constant upgrading.

The public sector is interested in special television for teachers, nurses and other professionals, the very people, paradoxically, who have high levels of PC ownership. At the same time, people who have serious problems defining searches to use the Internet effectively are being pushed into acquiring ICT as a basic skill instead of learning from television how to define searches. It could be argued that most people watching Sky are only interested in sport but what started out as leading edge research is now a truism; that people who are classified as innumerate are brilliant with sports statistics. People classed as illiterate are involved in the sophisticated argot of the offside rule and the arcane process of benefits claiming. Many vox pop responses to situations from those we classify as 'excluded' are coarse by our standards; but many of those who claim more for themselves are no less coarse in their ends, they just have more sophisticated means. Greed is as rampant in The City as in the slum.

2. Media Literacy

I am going to use the term 'media literacy' in a broad sense rather than in the narrow sense in which it is used in the Communications Act. By it I mean the ability of people to

Know a medium for what it is
Exploit its resources effectively
Relate it to other resources
Integrate it into individual knowledge and experience.
Know a resource for what it is. In the field of analogue information we roughly know where we are; we can make a distinction between a weighty tome, a light novel, a peer reviewed periodical, a broad sheet newspaper, a tabloid. ON the internet we have two kinds of problem: the first is to find what you want, to learn how to search; the second is to assign weight to what you have found. I believe that defining searches is an absolute key skill. People may start an internet search with the word "Dog' but they need to get to: Scottish Terrier & grooming".

In the era of four channel television we also had a reasonable idea what to expect and we could find what we wanted but now we have almost 400 channels. As these are the primary means by which many people, particularly the poor and disadvantaged, receive their information, I believe it is a duty of public libraries to develop their media literacy as it relates directly to television. I expect a library atrium to be a bank of screens showing different channels. People need to learn the difference between objective reporting and hysteria, significant facts and speculation, the probable and the possible. Librarians are famed and honoured for being non judgmental when they are asked for a book or a document and they are discerning in advising on a favourable outcome to an enquiry; they need to move from advising on entries in reference books to television documentaries. As television becomes less scheduled and more 'on demand' this will become both easier and more important.

Exploit resources. Most television is, necessarily, synoptic. Many channels are now offering follow up resources; but many people need help to take their enquiries further. Put simply, the poor are poor askers; that's why they're poor. Below the problem of economic performance their lies the fundamental issue of self-esteem. Where there are no follow up facilities offered, people need help to see behind what they have taken in. This might mean individual help or group discussion. Either way, librarians need to be as aware of television as they are of books.
Relate to other resources. For many people, whether they are reading print or watching television, there is a problem with integrating undifferentiated knowledge into some kind of pattern. What distinguishes us from monkeys is said to be language but underlying linguistic ability is pattern recognition and generation. These skills are central to effectiveness but in a world absolutely awash with information it is ever more difficult to see patterns; and there is, of course, the problem through innuendo, hysteria and sales pitches, of the creation of bogus patterns.
Integration into the personal. Finally, on this topic, people need help to relate information to themselves. The classic case is linking behaviour to outcome, e.g. if you do not use village shops they will shut; if you smoke you will risk premature illness and death. This is almost a moral point but there is a radical disjuncture in many people between what they do (or fail to do) and what happens to them.

In summary, then, understanding media is not simply a matter of finding the correct piece of intellectual content. This pushes librarians in the direction of counselling, mentoring and community development but I see no harm in that.

3. Information 'push'

Which brings me, rather neatly I think, to the idea of 'information push'. The most familiar form of information push is direct mail but that is very crude. More sophisticated is direct marketing from specialised lists such as that which offers you loans or a new credit card. More sophisticated still is the beginning of a special offers strategy based on your supermarket loyalty card. The idea is simple, you find out what people want and then offer them more of it, usually at a higher price.

Now I think we should apply the same technique to the supply of information. People should be encouraged to register their interests - the overwhelming starter will be soccer -and they will then be supplied through email or text messages with updates. Librarians will use information aggregators to undertake some of this work automatically but for it to be really successful it needs a local and a personal element. Libraries should forge alliances with local societies such as steam train preservers or local sports facilities to supplement their national counterparts. They also need to play a part in consortia to establish ultra local (or community) broadcasting.

4. 'Always On'

The reason why all these proposals are not only viable but necessary is because of the way in which technology is changing. Rather than trying to give you yet another lecture on technological convergence, let me give you some concrete illustrations:

A Sony/Eriksson 800 mobile phone can take pictures and transmit them as attachments to text messages; it also has Global positioning technology so that, for instance, people can receive tourism information according to where they are standing.
The Nokia Communicator mobile phone can send and receive email as well as text messages
Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) TV is giving way to flat screens; these can be linked by a wireless to any information device so that people can literally walk with a television sized screen and watch information from any source; or, conversely, they can walk with their own information device and transmit the data onto any large screen
Broadband allows people to be on line and in conversation simultaneously
By 2010 there will be no charges for using telephones, only charges for buying information services.

In other words, we will soon be 'always on' and ready for whatever information we are sent. For many of our less fortunate citizens this will mean junk and worse; we have an obligation to understand this new generation of technologies and apply our librarianship accordingly.

5. Conclusion

I can already see the headline in MANAGING INFORMATION: Carey On The Death Of The Book. Of course I am not forecasting this; book sales will continue to grow steadily in spite of ritual moaning about the death of small, specialist bookshops. Neither am I forecasting the death of the chaotic, generally low quality World Wide Web. Libraries can adjust to the first and are already beginning to adjust to the second.

But if libraries are to remain relevant, publicly funded bodies they need to be much more proactive in promoting learning and social cohesion. Libraries are trusted like no other social institution and it is time to capitalise on that trust. The ground of media literacy is treacherous, the road to social development is rocky, the competition for attention in the 'always on' society will be ferocious. Nonetheless, it's time to abandon the stacks and come out fighting.

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