http://bbc.in/gK0SYU BBC Radio 4 have been running a strand of interviews with assorted pundits about the future of various cultural shenanigans in their Front Row program over the last few episodes, ranging around through opera to, just today, Museums.
Of course what I would be interested in hearing about would be a panel answering questions on how it affects libraries, but I don't think that will happen.
The reason for that is not because libraries don't have anything to say on the issue. I think that they have probably been more profoundly affected by it than their peer-cultural-institutions, and have by now a considerable literature on the topic, alongside some increasingly interestingly-developed viewpoints. They are also beginning to encounter problems with it that their peers would do well to note, as I think that they are outliers of problems that might well afflict them too, in the longer run: for example the problems associated with the ever-inflating price of electronic journals, and the vital role they play in many libraries, or what to do to justify your space when the physical artefacts are diminished (ie the importance of the social space). When an external service is both vital and unique, there is great potential for discord, [or so the yarrow stalks tell me].
No, the reason is because libraries will stand behind some of these efforts as archives, as support, as part of the body of these institutions. If libraries appear to vanish, it is only because they are underneath the skin. This can be problematic, because, as I say, the fact is that libraries have dealt with a lot of these transformations in-depth in ways that other cultural entities could learn from. Perhaps R4 will in fact panel some experts from libraries, but I doubt it. I wonder, too, if this is because of a widely held misapprehension that digital media replace libraries. This is not so, and we can find material actually in today's episode (dealing with museums), where the announcer quotes Nicholas Serota's notion that museums will be more like publishers, curating materials for publication digitally, more than creating the physical experiences we enjoy today. This prediction is probably a bit extreme, but the digital publishing part is certainly going to be important. But what was really striking is that the announcer characterised the museum curator's activity as 'winding the golden thread' through the topic for the visitor to follow. I am confident that curators would want to use a well-found library to help them produce this, and equally confident that any efforts to produce materials for visitors to go further will benefit distinctly from the presense of a library to assist it.
The library as an assistive entity, then.
One thing about the dematerialisation of the library and its subsequent portability though, strikes me through this. Discounting for a moment the need for libraries to embrace their role as keystone spaces for actualising social exchanges of knowedge, learning and leisure (which is why bricks & mortar are still important), if one had a good enough centralised library "that could assist all these cultural institutions", would one need to have individual, (though cross-federated) libraries in each institution: or, going the other way, if there is universal access to the various nodes of the library as a web, do we need centralisation?
For one thing, I don't think we will see agreement on whether the 'contraction' or 'heat death' mode is the correct one. For another, it's in the nature of cultural networks to spread and specialise in chunks: to be rhizomatic is not to be evenly dispersed. What we see now are many specialist institutions that have specialist libraries. Whilst each of them can probably help others by making their material better available, and each could probably pick out at least some services to outsource centrally, I would predict that the dispersion of libraries currently would probably be a fairly good predictor for those areas and disciplines where a more concentrated specialism would be useful. Sometimes one needs the extra facets of a specialism to be available.
Of course, this is exactly the kind of thing people get wrong.