Author: John Palfrey
Title: Bibliotech: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of the Internet
Publication: New York: Basic Books, 2015. 280 p.
ISBN: 978-0-465-04299-9
Sacred Heart University Library: Z674.75 .I58 P38 2015
This is not a book for librarians, but for everyone else. Palfrey makes a strong, counter-intuitive case that libraries matter more than ever, not despite the volume and complexity of information, technologies, and sources available today, but precisely because of them. Digital culture has made libraries more important, not less. The author’s claim directly contradicts the culturally ascendant narrative that such a “legacy” institution is merely a ripe occasion for “innovative disruption.” The affluent can get what they want from Amazon, anyway, so who cares? As Head of School of Phillips Academy, Andover, and formerly a professor of law at Harvard, Palfrey intentionally reaches beyond the affluent to ask how society can work for everyone, not just those at the top.
The rise of digital culture has been accompanied by the rise of cultural and economic divisions and tensions. Previously dismissed, such divisions have led (surely at least in part) to recent political and social polarities. The divisions and tensions of American (and world-wide) society have deep roots in growing, unequal access to information and cultural discourse (and many of things, to be sure). Providing this access is the fundamental mission of libraries, and Palfrey embraces it heartily. Libraries provide safe spaces, access to information, face-to-face and digital networks, and a sense of connectedness and connectivity. This social life of information and cultural discourse is of little interest to marketplace capitalism unless it can be monetized (such as Amazon), and such conversion changes the conversation: who can speak, what can be said, and who can afford to hear it.
Libraries have not had an easy time of it, nevertheless. Rapid changes in information technology have not been easy for them to anticipate and implement, in part because they are very expensive, and in part because libraries have to live in a both-and world: both digital and analogue, both print and networked. A decade or so ago it was fashionable to claim that universities, libraries, and bookstores would simply disappear. Even groups of librarians like the Taiga Forum of 2006 produced statements that “within five years . . . all information discovery will begin at Google.” All? —in 2016 even Google does not claim so much. (Next time you require serious medical consultation, instruct your physician or nurse to restrict information searches to Google . . . ) Living in the both-and world, libraries recognize that people seek and use information in many different ways, and that facile generalizations about “digital natives” are as often false as true.
Many who work outside libraries have a nostalgic view of them, and remember them as adventurous places of discovery: building a sense of self-direction, mastery, and purpose whether as a child or a student. Libraries still do that, but the means have changed. No longer the only information game in town, libraries have recalled their fundamental purpose of providing access: “free to all” (Boston Public Library), with meaningful contact that allows everyone to use the resources and services. By serving their communities, libraries return to their beginnings: to guaranteeing that responsive democratic government and culture will in fact be open to all. Lest anyone suppose that the library of a private university catering to the upper middle class does not need to bother with such a mission, one may recall that a great deal of tuition funding is in fact dependent upon government guarantees. No university, and no library, is an island: the fundamental purposes of public and academic libraries are the same: access, instruction, the care for our common home.
--Gavin Ferriby
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