This two-timeblock session was a great one, crammed with lots of hot information and insight, even if it didn't go quite in the direction that the organizers had planned.
The session was intended to be divided into four parts. In the first part Kathryn Zickuhr from the Pew Research Center would provide the results of the third of Pew's planned three studies of public libraries. In the second, Marydee Ojala would discuss the IFLA trend report. In the third Stephen Abram would provide some insight into the observations from these reports. In the fourth, conference attendees in the room would provide examples of what they were doing that was innovative, interesting and maybe the next big thing. The fourth part of this kind of fizzled as people were two interested in asking follow-up questions of the three presenters and the three presenters were only too-willing to provide great replies to the questions and apparently not too many people in the room had done anything in the past year that they thought was world-shakingly innovative.
There was a lot of information in this session and I'll try to cover the main points here, which is much easier to do with the first two presenters who had neatly organized PowerPoint presentations, as opposed to Stephen Abram, who seemed to just be speaking off the cuff in the scary, funny, information-dense way that only Stephen Abram can.
The first presentation was titled featured new data from the Pew Research center on how the American population in general is engaged with public libraries. Two earlier studies in this series have been done, one on the state of reading in America and one on library services. This study was on typology -- classifying the American populace into broad types based on library usage. This is kind of the inverse of the typical study which they have done. Prior studies have looked at the behavior of different groups of people broken out by race, gender and socio-economic status (e.g. "How much do middle class Asian women between the ages of 30 and 45 read books"). This instead looked at types of different kinds of library users (e.g. heavy library users, people who never use the library) and then tried to discover what these groups might have in common.
The full results of this and other research can be found at libraries.pewinternet.org, but here is a quick rundown of what was found.
Pew divided the responses they had to their phone survey into four basic types and each type was further divided into two or three subtypes. The four basic types described the level of engagement that the interviewed persons had with their local library and these were high, medium, low and none.
Within the high type there were "Library Lovers", about 10% of the respondents, and "Information Omnivores", which was about 30% of the respondents.
"Library Lovers" frequently use libraries and have high levels of appreciation for libraries. They found that this type included many parents, students and job seekers. They tended to have high levels of education.
"Information Omivores" made heavy use of libraries, but less so than the "Library Lovers". These respondents had the highest rates of technology use, education, employment, and household income.
The respondents in the medium level of engagement were divided into "The Solid Center", 30% of all respondents, and "Print Traditionalists", 9% of all respondents. Zickuhr didn't have much to say about "The Solid Center." They were the largest group overall and were a broad swathe of the population. The "Print Traditionalists" on the other hand, tended to live in rural areas, father away from libraries. The highest number of rural southerners was to be found in this group.
Zickuhr indicated that the most interesting information was to be found in the groups with low levels of engagement or who were not engaged with their libraries. In the low type there were three subtypes: "Not for Me", comprising 4% of respondents, the "Young and Restless", making up 7% of respondents, and the "Rooted and Roadblocked", making up another 7% of respondents.
The session was intended to be divided into four parts. In the first part Kathryn Zickuhr from the Pew Research Center would provide the results of the third of Pew's planned three studies of public libraries. In the second, Marydee Ojala would discuss the IFLA trend report. In the third Stephen Abram would provide some insight into the observations from these reports. In the fourth, conference attendees in the room would provide examples of what they were doing that was innovative, interesting and maybe the next big thing. The fourth part of this kind of fizzled as people were two interested in asking follow-up questions of the three presenters and the three presenters were only too-willing to provide great replies to the questions and apparently not too many people in the room had done anything in the past year that they thought was world-shakingly innovative.
There was a lot of information in this session and I'll try to cover the main points here, which is much easier to do with the first two presenters who had neatly organized PowerPoint presentations, as opposed to Stephen Abram, who seemed to just be speaking off the cuff in the scary, funny, information-dense way that only Stephen Abram can.
The first presentation was titled featured new data from the Pew Research center on how the American population in general is engaged with public libraries. Two earlier studies in this series have been done, one on the state of reading in America and one on library services. This study was on typology -- classifying the American populace into broad types based on library usage. This is kind of the inverse of the typical study which they have done. Prior studies have looked at the behavior of different groups of people broken out by race, gender and socio-economic status (e.g. "How much do middle class Asian women between the ages of 30 and 45 read books"). This instead looked at types of different kinds of library users (e.g. heavy library users, people who never use the library) and then tried to discover what these groups might have in common.
The full results of this and other research can be found at libraries.pewinternet.org, but here is a quick rundown of what was found.
Pew divided the responses they had to their phone survey into four basic types and each type was further divided into two or three subtypes. The four basic types described the level of engagement that the interviewed persons had with their local library and these were high, medium, low and none.
Within the high type there were "Library Lovers", about 10% of the respondents, and "Information Omnivores", which was about 30% of the respondents.
"Library Lovers" frequently use libraries and have high levels of appreciation for libraries. They found that this type included many parents, students and job seekers. They tended to have high levels of education.
"Information Omivores" made heavy use of libraries, but less so than the "Library Lovers". These respondents had the highest rates of technology use, education, employment, and household income.
The respondents in the medium level of engagement were divided into "The Solid Center", 30% of all respondents, and "Print Traditionalists", 9% of all respondents. Zickuhr didn't have much to say about "The Solid Center." They were the largest group overall and were a broad swathe of the population. The "Print Traditionalists" on the other hand, tended to live in rural areas, father away from libraries. The highest number of rural southerners was to be found in this group.
Zickuhr indicated that the most interesting information was to be found in the groups with low levels of engagement or who were not engaged with their libraries. In the low type there were three subtypes: "Not for Me", comprising 4% of respondents, the "Young and Restless", making up 7% of respondents, and the "Rooted and Roadblocked", making up another 7% of respondents.
The "Not for Me" type had a strikingly less positive view of libraries in their communities. They were people who were more likely to have had negative experiences at libraries, although they typically weren't this way because they just relied on the Internet for all of their information needs.
The "Young and Restless" type generally didn't even know where the nearest library was. For this group libraries aren't even something they consider. They tended, as the type name indicates, to be young people, frequently who had recently moved to an area.
The "Rooted and Roadblocked" type tended to have a positive view of libraries but had a lot of difficulties that made it impractical to make regular use of libraries. They tended to be older, many of them living with disability, and they frequently had experienced a recent illness in the family.
The people who had no engagement at all with libraries were divided into two groups: "Distant Admirers", 10% of respondents, and "Off the Grid", 4% of respondents.
The "Distant Admirers" were people who didn't personally use libraries, although 40% of them had family members that used libraries. The highest number of Hispanics were in this subtype. They tended to view libraries quite positively.
Finally the "Off the Grid" subtype just had little exposure to libraries. They seemed to be people who engage less frequently in community and social activities. Many of them live in rural areas and have low household incomes.
Zickuhr suggested taking the data from the study and cross tabulating it with the community to establish working hypotheses that could be tested. For instance, if a community has a high number of Hispanics, it is statistically more likely based on the results of Pew's survey to have more people in the "Distant Admirers" category. Libraries could test this hypothesis with targeted surveys and small studies, and if it was found to have validity that would provide an opportunity to reach out to the "Distant Admirers" in their community and try to turn them into library users.
Pew will be coming out with a library engagement quiz this summer and all who are interested in that are encouraged to sign up with the newsletter advertised on the Pew libraries site.
Following Zickuhr, was Marydee Ojala of the International Federation of Library Associations' summary of their trend report. Ojala began by providing a little information about the Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) itself explaining that it is a super organization of library associations and members of those associations are also members of it. One of the associations is the American Library Association, for instance, so most librarians in the United States, by being members of that organization, are also members of IFLA.
IFLA decided create a report to identify general information trends. The report applies to more than just libraries in its scope, although libraries should concern themselves with the findings of the report. The full details on the report itself can be found at trends.ifla.org.
The report identifies five trends which Ojala briefly covered. They were:
- New technologies will both expand and limit who has access to information
The "both expand and limit" part is the key point of this trend. Although things like the Internet clearly expand the amount of information people have available to them, there are countervailing trends and complex factors that are likely to limit information as well. Copyright is a major factor here as copyright laws have become more strict and copyright protection measures are widely use to make sure copyright is not violated. However this means that information that would be leaving copyright is not (items published since 1923 have not been entering the public domain, which has put objects at risk of being lost before they can be widely distributed without fear of violating copyright).
Also Information literacy is increasingly important. If you know how to find information it is frequently there for you, but if you aren't well versed in the art of finding information it may even be harder to find things you need than it was before the Internet.
For each point, Ojala had a catchy phrase that tried to get to the heart of the matter, and for this trend the phrase was "The world's information at your fingertips - but what can you do with it?" - Online Education will democratise [the British spelling is used because of the document's international flavor] and disrupt global learning.
The growing popularity of free online courses (commonly called MOOCs), informal learning, and open access to university class syllabi and lectures has made it such that if anyone is interested in learning about topics that previously might have been beyond their reach, they now can. It is unclear what this means for formal higher education, where education costs have been skyrocketing for decades, and for the quality of education.
The phrase here was: "If education is free then how much is it really worth?" - The boundaries of privacy and data protection will be redefined
To see what this item is about your hardly need to go farther than this year's headlines. The U.S. and U.K. governments have been publicly revealed as having harvested wholesale information on private citizens for years. Is the person who revealed this a traitor, a hero, or something else? Part of the reason that the government was so attracted to tapping the likes of Google is that we more and more contribute willingly piles of information to companies that decades ago would have been unthinkable.
The phrase here was "Who is profiting from your personal information?" - Hyper-connected societies will listen to and empower new voices and groups.
A networked society has allowed groups that were too small, powerless, and/or disparate before to join together in ways that have not previously been possible. It seems also to be leading, in some cases, to lead to a situation where a reinforcing feedback loop of opinion is making individuals less interested to try to understand where others are coming from and consequently to compromise. This is resulting in greater fragmentation of our political parties and upheaval in the political landscape.
The phrase here was "Are you ready for cyber politics?" - The global information environment will be transformed by new technologies
The prevalence of mobile devices that always know where you are, "Internet of things" devices that know details like how much energy you use and how warm you like your house to be, potentially disruptive technologies like 3D printing and Bitcoin, and the creation of a global information economy are so novel that we aren't really sure what kind of impact they will have on our society.
The phrase here was "When your phone, your car, and your wristwatch know where you are at all times, who runs your life?"
There are implications for the trends for libraries, for information providers and for each individual. We need to be thinking about these trends and finding out what they are going to mean and how to deal with them.
Following Ojala was Stephen Abram's talk. It is rather difficult to summarize Abram's talk. He tends to quickly build a lot of disparate facts, some of which sound difficult to believe but plausible (and hearing them from him makes you feel that you need to believe them) and joins them together into a coherent argument for action. It's perhaps not too dissimilar to listening to a really good conspiracy theorist talk except that there is no clear conspiracy and little is there to be dismissed by Occam's Razor.
Some of the points I managed to take down were:
- Copyright is a major issue going forward. The 10 biggest contributors to the presidential campaign are also the 10 largest copyright holders (I looked briefly for a source for this stat and couldn't find any direct evidence -- it probably depends on terminology -- although I have no argument with the larger point). Abram express a great deal of concern about copyright provisions in the Trans-Pacific Partnership treaty.
- MOOCs at the University of Toronto have had more students attend them than have graduated from the university in its history. Abram teaches at the University of Toronto and presumably knows what he's talking about here. He indicated that a lot of Chinese and Indians sign up for MOOCs in the United States and Canada. Later a question was addressed to Abram about how universities are going to pay for MOOCs, which are generally currently free. He explained that this is a developing technology in its infancy and like many Internet startup technologies the path to profit is murky at the outset. He felt that it was likely that MOOCs would stay free but that there would be some pay system if you wanted to get some kind of formal credit for the classes.
- What we are facing now is not a digital divide, but an access divide. It's not so much that people can't get their hands on computer technology, but that the resources that might empower them are inaccessible.
- The average newspaper reader is 63 years old. Coupled (interestingly) with this is his statement that 95% of American newspapers are owned by six Republican families. At least to me this last bit isn't too surprising or worrying as there has long been a tendency for business people to be Republican and being Republican doesn't mean that your a member of the Tea Party (a fact that I'm sure is no comfort to the Republicans that want nothing to do with the Tea Party). However, this certainly does not bode well for either newspapers or the Republican party.
- The biggest three textbook publishers are opening online high schools that will operate through public libraries.
- The NSA has been photocopying the cover of every snail mail letter going through the postal system for the past 30 years (there's some level of confirmation of this claim in this article in the New York Times).
- My paraphrase of what Abram said trying to stay close to the original wording: "People give up something for the great experience that they have at Google and Amazon. They give up nothing at the library and get a worse experience for it. Until we solve this problem it will be a huge issue." This is a huge problem for libraries and he is absolutely correct here. Google and Amazon can use information that its customers wittingly or unwittingly give them and then those customers get all kinds of recommendations and services that they love. Privacy laws, which are something libraries are proud of upholding, mean that we cannot do that for our patrons and then they get annoyed that we can't tell them what book they had checked out three months ago that they can't remember the title of. We potentially have a huge amount of data that would make Google or Amazon jealous, but our ethics mean that we don't dare keep it lest it end up in the wrong hands, and the NSA has not made us feel any more comfy about doing that this year.
- What will happen with privacy in libraries when our public are walking in wearing Google Glass?
- The brand of libraries may indeed be books, but if you look closer it seems that people are getting something else that's valuable out of the equation that they don't even consciously associate with libraries. We need to resolve this conflict. Abram pointed to the cautionary tale of Vaseline which wanted to create a dry antiperspirant, but that product failed just on the fact that people didn't want to buy a dry antiperspirant from a company whose name was synonymous with something that notably wasn't very dry.
- On an optimistic note Abram stated that librarians are the only professionals in the world that as a class have all of the proper skills to address the trends that Ojala detailed. That doesn't mean much if we can't find it in ourselves to use those skills properly, but it is something to go forward on.
This was a fantastic session, even if there weren't many libraries who could point to a big daring project they had undertaken. Maybe it will inspire some to do just that and they can report about them next year.
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