For most of libraries’ history, the value of a library was easy to see. Information was scarce and we found it, acquired it, organized it, and preserved it. People came to the library because finding things was hard, and we were good at the hard part. The real work, underneath the stacks, catalog, and reference desk, was helping people to think for themselves with what they found. We could let “access” stand in for that as long as finding was hard, because from the outside the two looked the same. Someone arrived with an information need and left knowing more. People looked at the catalog, or the bookshelves, or the person at the reference desk, and drew a reasonable conclusion that helping people find the information is what we do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That substitution has been coming apart for a while now, for pretty much my entire career if not for a decade before I joined the profession. When I went to library school the environment was already changing. The internet was reshaping people’s information expectations, search was replacing the patient navigation of a directory, and there were people publishing their own thoughts to the web using HTML. Over the past 25 years we’ve seen this change accelerate: with social media, with the internet in our pockets, and with artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The belief that I started with, that libraries help people navigate a complex information environment to be able to think for themselves with what they have found, still stands. If the work were really access, then yes, the internet would have been an extinction event. The work actually looks more like discernment, and the internet was just the next environment people would need help learning to navigate. Discernment in 2005 looked like telling a real source from a convincing one online. Discernment looks different now, but it’s still the same root work of librarianship. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
We’ve spent a generation getting better and better at access, and access is now widespread (of course, not all information is, but the landscape is certainly more open than it once was). You can get an answer of some quality to almost any question in the time it takes to type it. But as I have witnessed time and time again over the arc of my career, when answers get cheaper, something else gets more expensive. The genuinely scarce thing is no longer the information, it’s the judgement. Now the challenge of working with information is understanding this new landscape of possible information sources, knowing what to ask, noticing what a confident answer leaves out, and sensing when something is wrong. When you know something the challenge is being able to say with clarity why you think what you think.<\/em> These harder skills were embedded amongst the easier ones, so we never needed to name them. The objective outcome of a reference interview was the sources for the paper, but the affective outcome might be how to frame the question or interpret the results. <\/p>\n\n\n\n This is the part I keep finding myself reflecting on: the usual assumption is that when the tools get better, the library gets less important. But in my experience it runs the other way. The cheaper answers become, the more valuable judgement becomes. Those conditions for judgement are what we have always been focused on building. We were never an access institution that taught a little discernment along the way. We were a discernment institution that used access as its medium. Now the medium appears to be further automated away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I’ve never felt that saying we deliver information fully captured our work. I’ve always thought of our roles as being more in the vein of education. The capacity of library users to know is theirs, formed by their own effort. We build the conditions for that learning: we take a person’s curiosity and desire to know seriously, scaffold the hard parts, and make discernment a little less lonely than it is when it’s just in front of a screen. That work is older than the internet, and is close to the founding charge of the field: the idea that a library exists for the production and use of knowledge across a society, not for the delivery of documents. <\/p>\n\n\n\n This line of thinking has always been at the center of it for me. But it’s also the source of most of my professional worry. The trouble with building conditions is that the conditions don’t show. When we do it well, it looks like magic or it looks like nothing happened. Worse (from our angle) it looks like whatever happened didn’t have anything to do with what we<\/em> did. Someone is simply more capable now, more able to find their own way through a thicket of confident, contradictory, frictionless information. And they experience that capacity as their own, because it is<\/em> their own. There’s no artifact, checkout count, or gate-count indicating it. The work leaves the faintest trace precisely because what it leaves behind is a person carrying a judgement they correctly call theirs. I don’t think the invisibility is a flaw in how we work, but it does make it a lot harder to convey the story about the intellectual contributions of librarians and the work of the library. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I’ve spent enough time in budget meetings now to know what happens to work that doesn’t show or isn’t able to be tied to outcomes. This is due to the ordinary and reasonable pressure to fund what can be demonstrated and trim what can’t. We have a responsibility to steward the precious funding invested in our institutions in ways that will demonstrably improve the success of our community. So the challenge is how to capture and explain the work of building the conditions for discernment in a way that can be understood by others.1<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n\n\n\n Though it doesn’t show up in much of my writing, I have spent a lot of time thinking about library communication. At Wake, the first time, I worked with our Web Services Librarian to put together a social media strategy way back before that was typically part of library work. I managed the first communication team at Virginia Tech University Libraries. Communications reported through my portfolio at UW. And a central theme of all that work is that communications isn’t the thing we do after the work is done. Making the work visible is part of the work.<\/em> An institution that builds the conditions for something this necessary, but can’t show that it’s doing so, will be redefined by people outside the organization by what they see. We have to create within this information environment and we have to be willing to practice on our own behalf. The discernment to name what we do, make it legible, and insist on its value in terms that our users and the people deciding our future can actually perceive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So the work is twofold now, as it has been and it always will be. Build the conditions for people to navigate their information environment and make that work visible. Those of us who want to do good work and are uncomfortable bragging about it can hopefully be comforted that visibility is not the goal, just an method to help advocate for the important role of what we offer our communities. The goal remains to help people think for themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I came into this work thinking something close to this, even before I had the words for it. I loved books and I loved the stacks, and I don’t want to talk anyone out of loving them. But what I loved was never really the shelves. It was being somewhere that took my needing to learn seriously and made it possible to seek more information as my curiosity pushed into new areas. The shelves looked different when I started than they do now, and they’ll continue changing over the next twenty years. What lives underneath them remains, and I think it’s most of what we do. I suspect the next few years turn on whether we can find the voice to make that work visible, before the people who never saw it conclude it was never there.<\/p>\n\n\n For most of libraries’ history, the value of a library was easy to see. Information was scarce and we found it, acquired it, organized it, and preserved it. People came to the library because finding things was hard, and we were good at the hard part. The real work, underneath the stacks, catalog, and reference […]<\/p>\n<\/a>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"[{\"content\":\"ACRL has been pointing to this for ages, most notably with the Value of Academic Libraries<\/a>.\",\"id\":\"ad63d463-bdfe-4928-87b7-dba95e5c27cc\"}]"},"categories":[5],"tags":[57,6,58,59],"class_list":["post-100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-libraries-ai","tag-academic-libraries","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-communication","tag-value-of-academic-libraries","h-entry","hentry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/laurenpressley.com\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/laurenpressley.com\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/laurenpressley.com\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laurenpressley.com\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laurenpressley.com\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/laurenpressley.com\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":102,"href":"https:\/\/laurenpressley.com\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100\/revisions\/102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/laurenpressley.com\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laurenpressley.com\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laurenpressley.com\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}