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.

If a library offers anything to 'the contemporary user', it is in the offers it makes to the dependencies or weak points of augmented reality or social networks. To AR, it offers the example (and the practice) of other methods of organising and thinking about relationships between knowledge than spatial ones. And, flipping the coin, to the invisible world of social networks, it offers real space with real resources. That is something libraries have always offered. When I ask, 'have we ever offered anything else?' I ask whether it is not true that the role of libraries has been to facilitate the social forms that have made use of them: societies, universities, communities. What does it mean to service a community in this way? Am I saying libraries should be community centers? Well, in a certain sort of a way, yes, I am. But quite what that means depends entirely on the needs of the communities served. And libraries tend to respond to that quite well. What I see at the moment is a momentum for communities created by their leap forward into the virtual medium: this is quite supportive. But it will still be helpful if these communities can put a foot to the ground from time to time: preferably somewhere where there are facilities to nurture their interests. Perhaps, if it goes well, they will choose to meet there often, to study, to exchange ideas, to gather material for themselves or for their colleagues or families. That still sounds a lot like a library to me. I suppose a metaphor would be to think of it more in terms of a 'drive in cinema'. There isn't so much of a need for the traditional apparatus anymore, but we want those who do choose to use the spatial aspect of the library to be supported by what they can plug in to. This means facilitating the social: libraries as a social keystone, as it were. There is still a potential for the physical aspects of libraries to be important, especially to social networks of all kinds.

As far as the augmentation of reality goes, the techniques of organising, relating and presenting information-artefacts will continue to develop and be useful in the world. Simple overlays into space cannot capture the many facets of reality that exist. There comes a point where visual metaphor becomes saturated, and no amount of advanced user-interface can cope. The parallel is with mathematics, or with the representation of multiple dimensions, where abstraction is far more efficient than visualisation. Yet the fields of user-interface and abstraction collide with the services offered in informational organisation. Can a single search box really cope with the cosmos? It's like pointing a telescope at the heavens: we may see deeply, but it takes another level of abstraction to see widely. Libraries build the systems that incorporate these abstractions. As a matter of fact, we probably ought to see them more like the theoretical abstractions of knowledge they are, and expose them to a bit more Kuhnian or Popperian rigour (dependent of course on the phases of the moon and the acidity of the paper): it is library science, after all, and should shudder through the occasional revolution if it is to adequately describe reality. Are the incremental changes and alternative systems we currently adopt sufficient, or is it fair to point out that we have islands of practice, sometimes speaking a common tongue, but still waiting on a comprehensive renaissance?
In fact, other developments threaten to outstrip this work. The semantic web will allow machines to take a greater role in deciding what we need and don't need to see, and what connections we will probably want to make. (I hope they throw a dash of the irrational, the serendipitous and the downright musty into their calculations). We would rightly welcome these developments as offering a far more systematic and universal set of bridges and tunnels between knowledge than the 'isolated practices' I mentioned above (though it could be worryingly impervious to arguments for change).  As automated as the process could become, I think it is important that people take steps to organise knowledge themselves, to make the decisions that disclose culture. These are sometimes irrational and unexpected. Sometimes they are wrong, sometimes even dangerous. But they are unconstrained by rational processes, in a way that 'automated semantic judgement' can only mimic. (It is worth asking whether such mimicry would be complex enough, juggling multiple cognitive and linguistic quantizations as to seem sufficient.) As Douglas Rushkoff notes we must either 'program or be programmed', and libraries can form a sensible interrupt in that librarians themselves interpret knowledge structures and make decisions about what matters, what is significant and what is not when they construct taxonomical links and other structures. The algorithms that settle page ranking in Google are secret, and though one supposes them to be automatic, they harvest the meaning created in human decisions to mention or not, to link or not, to like or not. There should be similar input in creating the landscape of information reality, too, and libraries offer a tradition of shaping this. Whether the tools libraries  have hitherto used are the right ones to continue with or not, the description of what they do in organising and providing access to knowledge remains important.

Simply teaching people how to engage with knowledge remains important too. The concept of 'information literacy' has been around for a while and now engages strongly with pedagogical ideas about how we learn socially and imbricated in the discourses of the larger-scale social networks we belong to.Libraries can be like a map that takes us above this to see how it works and how best to work with it. I was intrigued and interested to find out about 'Find the Future', a project to immerse 500 youngsters in New York Public Library and have them work together overnight to create a book. It's explicitly and deliberately presented as agame: but it turns research into (back into, I'd say) something playful and social, and it uses the library as a staging ground: it uses the library because it is a: somewhere where ideas can easily meet other ideas, where the structure of knowledge is not immediately determined by physical geography or the dictates of the scopic, and b: somewhere where you can get 500 kids in overnight to hustle some ideas together. In other words, it's just a library doing what libraries do.

Libraries, have, of course, a foot in real space and a foot in the virtual world. Of interest to me is the way in which we can view them as being not presences, as not agencies (in the sense that I have a presence or an agency when I describe myself in Facebook.) That is something that people have and the marketing arms of organisations largely fake. Libraries do fake a voice, a presence; (often compellingly) but this turns away from their actuality. They are brokers, distributors, processors. They organise the baseline and they populate it with value, sometimes value derived from their users. And they don't use real space to do it.

Let me iterate this point a little. Libraries do offer a presence in their community, and they do create cohesion and potentiality by offering lots of interesting stuff and a place to do it in. (Points which should recommend them as augmented and as social sites). There is a decidedly human aspect to all this. But they offer something more which underlies all of this. They offer bibliographic space that does not depend on the metaphor of actual space as an organising principle. The scholarly space begins with a single work which takes on the structural dimensions of narrative: largely chronological and mappable fairly easily. But as soon as a footnote or a citation appears, that impression is revealed as a misconception, as a flatland, as lacking the dimensionality of the social that inheres in each work.

That is why a library makes us think of a world. It has boundaries we can never reach, potentiaities we can never realise, horizons we can never catch up with. Each work in it describes a reality that is rapidly augmented by its explicit or implicit commentary on others. When early hypertext systems arrived they began to capture some of this in a more mechanised form, but it merely reflects what is already apparent.

How is this relevant to the 'facets of contemporary practices of knowledge and society' I've described above? Does the library offer anything other than a pool to digitise from, to unravel, to transliterate into other forms? I'd begin by saying yes, but I'd pause by adding that that unravelling and reweaving is no mean task, it is one that awaits the completion of the works of criticism and literature and bibliography (and all the other reflective disciplines) as complete sciences. That is, the tapestry is not complete until we know, conclusively, everything there is to know about every book in the library in relation to everything else they might possibly have to do with, as well as each other. I don't know whether Sisyphean or Borgesian is the correct adjective here. But at any rate, tremendous value is inherent in the project, but it is an impossible one to complete. Even if Google books ingests every bit of print in existence, the 'meaning of the library' will not be finished with. Indeed, it serves only to clarify the value that exists beyond the physical apparatus of what is there on the shelves.

To be continued…

Library-themed conference at UWE today. (Organised by John Vincent of The Network) Working-over some by-now-familiar themes on the state of play as regards libraries and social inclusion (whoops, regime change means we're probably meant to call it something else now), along with some examples of practices that supported this: particularly the Partners in Literacy project (under the aupices of the National Literacy Trust) that Lucy Kitchener presented.

A sub theme of today's conversations seems to be the work of enlarging the discourse of 'what libraries do'. We tend – as library workers – not to take the credit we should for what we enable or bring about. Although the communities we serve are the ones who are actually producing the outputs we should be looking at, we just don't see it that way. We are a vital support for culture in its widest sense: stuff people do together. Of course there are certain specialisms that tend to be where libraries excel in this area, but managing knowledge (would 'cultural access' be a better, if somewhat ungainly, term?) is what gives people the access they need in so many more ways than just simple search.

I see our work as something like RNA – without it the good stuff (DNA) just couldn't do its work, and its our job to facilitate that.

We had a good worry about what The Big Society will mean to all this. As readers (if there are any!) of my recent posts will know, I believe that the service we offer to networks and communities is valuable and worth investing in: I also don't think that it's easy. If libraries in the digital age didn't exist, we'd have to invent them. We might erroneously think that we can do without them, but were they to disappear, they'd be followed by something else that took up the same cultural niche. What's worrying is that this might happen, but the institutions that replace libraries might not have the same sense of social duty attached to their remit. That would be a loss, and would be to disarticulate some of the links between literacy, society and fairness.

What we need to do is to reconnect the beginning and end of what we do. Libraries can offer more than just the means to search; we can offer the understanding that will help people to do so, and the local value and expertise that can help zero in on resources. Goohle knows that the story is important: this is why they tried out Search Stories, and regardless of what we make of that, the story is the thing. I think there is no better way to get a handle on what the service offered is. Of course, Google have it easy. Their service is a box with a button on it. But, y'know, there's more.

I also think that there is a facet of the bog society. localism, that might have some interesting aspects that I don't completely disagree with (this too was a topic under general discussion). I can see its value to possible partners too, though: if libraries are a kind of cultural clearinghouse for local communities, they might have value to trade in terms of shared value in the Michael Porter/business-speak sense. If businesses seek cultural partners that are part of their 'cluster' or community, it could be that libraries have a lot to offer. As I have mentioned before, this could be a deal with the devil, (which is why one examines the contract very carefully), but it chimes neatly with other parts of the conference where we talked at length about how to make partnerships with other organisations/stakeholders successful.

So pretty good stuff. Wish I had a bit more experience to throw into these things, though, as the work I do is always on the fringes, always kind of almost under the auspices of what De Certeau calls la perruque.

Augmented reality overlays our vision of the world with other orders of information. Not dominated solely by the perspectival, scopic regime of the view situated in three-dimensional space, augmented reality equips us with footnotes; with the voices of other events, other times impinging on the present. It equips us with overviews, with maps showing the unseen way ahead, with the disposition of our peers, with their commentaries, their experiences. It endows us with facets of exchange and of reflection. It exposes nodes and trackways unseen but pioneered by those who came before.

But typically, though, it begins with real space, with the three dimensional world we move around in. If there is buried treasure, x marks the spot ; if there is a review of a restaurant visible, it may hang like a billboard outside the plate glass window of the establishment itself as it sits on Main Street. If historical commentary is offered, you may be sure that it teems round the sites of important events, or wispily hangs around the desks where moments of brilliance attended the solving of an equation or the drafting of a declaration. A museum is clogged thickly with such ghosts. Augmented reality supplements the visible, the spatial, in ways which are perhaps familiar to scholars or enthusiasts of any sort, for whom particular sites resonate with the knowledge they bring with them. But experiencing augmented reality would reverse the experience of the world-as-memory -palace from their  point of view. Rather than a walk through the special site prompting the recollection and configuration of fact and meaning, the site itself proffers meaning to the neophyte visitor, who has no prior knowledge (and may, shudder to think, not treat the hallowed groves with appropriate awe. or even interest).

Accompanying this is the non-spatial phenomenon of the social network. Relationships take place to an extent, not through places or spaces, but in virtualised forms of these. There is a small irony in the fact that much of what is discussed must still have its roots in the world. The band that plays a concert still plays it somewhere, likely with a real audience, even if the wider audience only ever witnesses it online. An academic conference may well take place entirely virtually, but can we conceive of a university that had no foot on the ground at all? Even a distributed university has offices and other facilities. Social networks take place in both spheres, and I would proffer the notion that healthy networks have at least an occasional chance to meet in real space. Most mature, larger-scale online networks make at least some effort to organise meetups IRL.

These two strands frequently coalesce and inform one another so that it is difficult to pick them apart. Indeed, I have no particular reason to do so except to point out their twin reliance on real space as an organisational framework, as a root or baseline from which to expand, augment, annotate and observe.

They also describe a couple of, I think, crucial facets of contemporary practices of knowledge and society, and I think that it is worthwhile to think of how libraries interact with or find a relationship to these practices.

To be continued…