Editorial: No Content? No Way!

Aaron Schmidt, digital initiatives librarian for the District of Columbia Public Library, may have expressed some of our worst fears in a March 4 post on his blog, Walking Paper, entitled "Libraries Might Not Provide Content in the Future & It’s Okay." Both the post and slew of responses it touched off should be required reading in the profession. It also gave me hope that despite his title—and I’m not ready to give up on content yet—there are many smart librarians out there who are capably thinking about the future in all its complexity and who aren’t afraid of it. People like Michael Porter, Tony Tallent, Kathy Dempsey, Jonathan Rochkind, Jason Griffey, Walt Crawford—and, of course, Aaron Schmidt. (Several of these folks are LJ Movers & Shakers past and 2009.) You may not agree with everything they have to say, but they’ve provided enough thoughtful give-and-take for us all to chew on—and posit solutions, too.

Schmidt’s post was prompted by the flood of cheap content available (or soon-to-be) to consumers, like streaming-only NetFlix subscriptions, newspapers and magazines shifting away from print, free downloadable music, the Kindle app for iPhones, and so on. He predicts that the library future lies not in providing content itself but in creating "excellent programs and experiences based around content and conversation."

Most commenters, however, aren’t ready to embrace that future, nor do they view it as the only likely outcome of cheap consumer media. They give very good reasons for taking Schmidt’s argument with not just a few grains of salt but several huge tablespoons, particularly regarding the impact on access and intellectual freedom, fundamental library values.

As we’ve seen from the Google Book/publisher settlement, there’s very little protection for, or concern with, the public interest. No one’s got the public’s back, except perhaps librarians (several library associations are in the process of filing an amicus brief before the settlement is finalized by the courts in June). As far as the publishers and Google have so far determined, one terminal would be enough for public libraries of any size, and pricing for academic institutions would be based on the unacceptable and likely unaffordable FTE formula.

Jonathan Rochkind, digital services software engineer at Johns Hopkins Sheridan Libraries, rightly points out on Schmidt’s blog, "[W]e...ought not to sanguinely accept publishers’ attempts to illegalize libraries traditional content provision in the ‘1s and 0s’ market, [as] they would have liked to even in the print market." Michael Porter, interactive strategy manager at nonprofit WebJunction, says he intends to make this issue a priority; he writes, "[O]f course for-profit institutions aren’t reaching out to libraries, why should they when they can make more money and increase their market share without us?" Walt Crawford (creator of Cites & Insights) notes that "tens of millions of Americans—let’s say roughly half, since the median household income in March 2007 was $48,201 in 2006 dollars—may not agree that stuff is so cheap they’ll just buy everything for their ebook devices because it’s so convenient. Those are the people who NEED libraries...."

Access and affordability are the elephants in the room. At a conference on the Google Book settlement at Columbia University March 13, reported on LibraryJournal.com, Harvard University librarian Robert Darnton warned against "the danger of monopoly," notably monopoly pricing. "So we have a situation where Google can really ratchet up prices, and that’s what really worries me," he said. "There’s no real authority to enforce fair pricing...," which could "ruin libraries." Darnton proposed a public authority to monitor prices.

Ceding content delivery, whether because we’re shut out by monopoly-controlled costs or by the availability of cheap, ubiquitous, convenient popular materials, is not an option. "Will libraries still be about content in 20, 30, 50 years? I dunno," says Kathy Dempsey (editor of Marketing Library Services newsletter) on Schmidt’s post. Reading the post and the comments on it, however, confirm for me that we needn’t abandon providing content in any and all formats, but we can enrich that role in ways Schmidt and others suggest. There are enough smart people working in this field to make that happen.