Digital Libraries: Of Real and Digital Libraries

By Roy Tennant -- Library Journal, 5/15/2007

I arrived by chance in Jackson County, OR, the day after its 15 libraries were shut down on April 6. I was visiting Ashland, OR, with my family, home to the world-renowned Oregon Shakespeare Festival and also to Southern Oregon University, which has a 93-acre park for a city of 21,500 people. The town has many civic and cultural amenities. Except now, that list doesn't include libraries. An election for a three-year property tax was to be held May 15.

How Jackson County ended up without library service, especially after recently building new facilities, is a long story, too long for this column.

Without real libraries, digital ones are nothing but a bunch of bits. This is not a new revelation for me, but I keep returning to it. I first thought about this when libraries garnered sudden attention from the computer science community in the early 1990s. When the U.S. government decided digital libraries were interesting enough to allocate millions of dollars for research, computer science researchers also suddenly became interested in digital library issues.

For computer scientists, a library was any pile of content. Pull together a large enough pile of content, and, voilà, a library is born. Although many of us knew better, we humored researchers to see if anything useful would come of their sudden attention to our problems. Mostly nothing did—at least not much that helps real libraries today. The genuine breakthroughs were unexpected and came from unwatched corners.

Graduate students Sergey Brin and Larry Page were not trying to solve “digital library” problems as much as the problem of finding things on the web. Few of us predicted that Google, the company they spawned, would transform legacy content digitization.

Meanwhile, librarians have integrated digital resources and services within their existing “real” ones, making many tough resource allocation decisions. We are still traveling this path but making genuine headway toward a future where we can drop the “digital” moniker and simply say “libraries,” and they will be assumed to encompass physical spaces, collections, and services provided in person, as well as virtual spaces, collections, and services.

Now, I'm changing from extolling the benefits and virtues of digital collections and services as I've done for nearly a decade. Instead, I'm paying homage to the real libraries that give digital collections their foundation and their raison d'être.

People who believe a random pile of digital bits is a sufficiently robust library have never been served by a librarian—either physically or virtually. Individuals who believe you can inspire a child to read by showing him or her a web site have not seen a child first make acquaintance with a book by teething on it.

Nor have they sat with a young child on their lap and read, furnishing a high squeaky voice or a low gruff one as the story demands. Neither have they watched a room full of children sit enthralled by a gifted storyteller librarian who brings the story alive and draws them into magic that will light up their lives until their last day.

Digital libraries require real ones in a way that real libraries will never need the digital. If all you want is stuff, there are plenty of places to get it. But if you want selected, curated, and preserved collections with the services to make them usable, only one place will give you that—libraries—in all their digital and physical glory.

Digital libraries offer many things, but without the services provided by bricks-and-mortar libraries and the librarians who keep them open, they're nothing but a pile of bits. This is something we do not need to tell the people of Jackson County.

For more on the wired library, see the netConnect supplement mailed with the January, April 15, July, and October 15 issues of LJ.