Articles: Seth Godin, The future of the library

Seth Godin’s article The future of the library, based on a talk he gave recently (there’s a good summary of the talk on Nancy Dowd’s blog), has sparked an interesting debate. It’s always a little galling when a non-librarian tries to tell information professionals how to do their jobs. I’d overlook that if the arguments were sound, but in this case they’re not.

Godin opens with an apt description of a librarian (although we could all add to it, as Bobbi Newman points out):

The librarian isn’t a clerk who happens to work at a library. A librarian is a data hound, a guide, a sherpa and a teacher. The librarian is the interface between reams of data and the untrained but motivated user.

Unfortunately, the remainder of the article reinforces Godin’s belief in the stereotype of librarian as clerk, declaring that films are “a mere sideline that most librarians resented anyway”, exhorting us to stop “defending library as warehouse”, and arguing that “what we don’t need are mere clerks who guard dead paper” – absolutely right Mr. Godin, but then this ceased to define a librarian many, many moons ago.

The thrust of Godin’s argument is that while librarians can still play a key role in a digital future, libraries themselves are a thing of the past. Why go to a physical library when you can access all the information you need through a computer screen? Why borrow a book, or a DVD, when you can get them cheaply online?

They need a librarian more than ever (to figure out creative ways to find and use data). They need a library not at all.

As Phil Bradley and Bobbi Newman point out in their blog responses, this is an incredibly simplistic, unrealistic view of the situation as it currently stands. Not everyone can use a computer. Not everyone who can knows where to look for the information they need. And not every source of information on the web is reliable (Wikipedia is the only resource named, and we all know how unreliable that is). To say nothing of the stripped-down budgets public libraries are currently dealing with.

Godin bases his argument on a totally outdated library model; he overlooks, for example, the fact that the vast majority of libraries already subscribe to online reference databases, and that most librarians already work with digital as well as paper resources.

Yes, we should be “fighting for the future, which is librarian as producer, concierge, connector, teacher and impresario.”

 Yes, “the library ought to be the local nerve center for information.”

But that nerve centre must include online and offline resources, or we risk alienating and disenfranchising a chunk of the population who aren’t web- and tech-savvy, or can’t afford to be.

Further reading:

• Phil Bradley, Seth’s Blog: The future of the library
• Bobbi Newman, Seth Godin Misses the Point on Libraries, Again.
• Nancy Dowd, Godin, Guttenberg and Going Forward
• Agnostic, Maybe blog, “Bring me the head of Seth Godin!”
• The Unquiet Librarian, Are Librarians, Not Seth Godin, the Ones Missing the Point on Libraries?