The Value of Common Ground | Peer to Peer Review

Photo by Debora Miller

On the very same day that Amazon decided that libraries are not the spawn of the devil after all, I got an email from some hip young faculty colleagues who think it would be excellent if the library could set aside some space for a faculty lounge, a place where they could get away from their offices, meet people in other disciplines, and hang out with the über-cool librarians. Maybe they threw that last bit in just to sell the proposal. They didn't have to; I love the idea of having more faculty in the library, though the students who own the place are likely to head for the barricades if we try to take any of their library space away from them and give it to faculty. Still, I'll kick it around with my über-cool librarian colleagues and see if we can come up with a way to make this happen.

Shhh! Whispernet enters the library
Yet I was struck by the fact that, in an era when the content of the library is exiting the building and when Amazon can make headlines as it hastens the departure, these faculty members want a piece of our common ground where they can mingle and mix, just as their students do and just as the ideas in the books on the shelves do, or at least have done in the past and will do until we get rid of them in favor of digital files. These scholars are tired of the isolation that comes from being in small offices and narrow disciplines. I'm excited that they recognize the library as a place where all ideas are welcome, where both the physical space and knowledge are held in common, a place where conversations flourish.

If public libraries follow the same path academic libraries have and begin to put most of their budgets into licensing resources that can be accessed remotely, will anyone come into the building anymore? I admit that I tend to be a drive-by public library user. I generally know what I want to read next, look it up while I'm at home, place an interlibrary loan order if it's not there, and pick it up when it has arrived or swing into the stacks to grab it off the shelf. It takes no more time than picking up a quart of milk at the store, but I always feel good walking in the door, chatting with the staff, and seeing who else is there—a child helping her grandmother at a computer, a college professor browsing the fiction section, a Somali woman in a headscarf studying the bulletin board full of posters about community events. I would miss that brief experience of community if I only had to push a button to get the book I want. Heck, I could request the books I want to read through the library where I work, but visiting a public library has always been a ritual of citizenship for me.

Fostering community conversations
We don't see many faculty members in our library. We never have. It's an undergraduate collection, so when they need a book for their research, there's a good chance we don't have it. If they need articles, they're mostly online. They pop in to grab a video for class more often than anything else, mainly because we haven't figured out how to finance streaming video services. If we could pay for it, we'd probably do away with even that reason for visiting the library.

Yet younger faculty, hot on the trail of tenure, busy with advising and courses and committees, recognize that there's something important about getting away from their computer screens and their cloistered offices and spend some time just hanging out with smart people like themselves. They get a taste for it in their first year on campus in our year-long orientation program for new faculty, and they don't want to lose those connections they've made and the excitement and synergy they generate. They want the library to be their salon of ideas. Oh, and good coffee would be nice, too. I'm not sure where we could locate such a space, or how many faculty would use it and whether it would truly be a faculty lounge or would become a liminal space where students and faculty cross paths. But it's too intriguing an idea to pass up.

Still a place for libraries
Librarians have a lot of questions about this new Amazon agreement with Overdrive, and there aren't many answers yet. How will publishers respond? Was this a shrewd business decision on Amazon's part as it becomes increasingly a publishing platform? How is it going to actually work? But some of the questions are not technical or financial ones, they're philosophical. How seriously do we take privacy? Are we okay letting a company use libraries to build customer relationships? (Amazon persists in using the phrase "Kindle customer" when referring to our patrons.) How will we defend against censorship if publishers or vendors can alter information at any time? Unfortunately, academic librarians didn't ask these questions with any seriousness and we are paying the price today.

But it's interesting to me that after we made it easy to access library materials anywhere, the importance of libraries as places became a hot topic. Now we recognize them as crucial common ground, as areas where ideas can collide and mingle and spin off in unexpected directions, where people can enjoy one another's company as they work and, yes, as they goof off. I know publishers are nervous that borrowing books from public libraries will be too easy. Expect them to demand (as has happened in the UK) that patrons be required to physically be in the library to download a book or to limit loans as HarperCollins has done. I hope libraries will think hard about how satisfying patrons with the right equipment comes at a cost for those who don't. I have faith they will. And I predict that libraries as gathering places will remain at the heart of their communities, no matter what Amazon does.

Barbara Fister is a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN, a contributor to ACRLog, and an author of crime fiction. Her latest mystery, Through the Cracks (see review), was published last year by Minotaur Books.