CIP on the Moon

When first launched, the Cataloging in Publication (CIP) program was an imaginative enterprise—too imaginative for some. And, in fairness to the skeptics, some of the initial expectations, like trying to complete processing for all CIP requests within two days, were a little loony. Thus, the phrase “CIP on the moon” was coined to refer to such wild-eyed notions. Today, the CIP program is taken for granted as a major source of cataloging for most libraries, and, in retrospect, it doesn't seem especially imaginative. Scanning the landscape of librarianship, in fact, reveals little that's especially imaginative.

This is a serious dilemma as we are a profession in crisis—a crisis driven by technological change and sustained by a lack of vision. We live in an age of electronic connectivity exemplified most notably by the Internet, but our efforts to integrate libraries into the e-environment in a strategic and prominent way have not been successful. We explain why our systems are superior. We reiterate the need for users to be more fully trained. We rewrite our cataloging rules. We revamp our cataloging practices. We acquire electronic resources and digitize print publications. We design and redesign our homepages. These ploys constitute neither a comprehensive nor strategic approach to reinventing libraries nor do they, for the most part, make libraries more relevant.

Much of the best that we have accomplished in recent years has resulted from developing automation applications that have improved the efficiency of book processing, searching, cataloging, data sharing, user services, and other activities. But none of them has engendered a renaissance of our profession mainly because they have been driven by an urgency to reduce costs and improve efficiency, not realize a vision of 21st-century librarianship.

“Improving operational effectiveness is a necessary part of management,” Michael Porter notes in On Competition (Harvard Business Sch., 1998), “but it is not strategy.” It improves productivity, but, as Porter also notes, it drives many industries toward convergence. It makes competing industries look alike, which is not good for the industries (or the consumer) as the industries lose their singular qualities. Much of our response to Google and Amazon.com and other perceived threats follows this drive toward convergence. We try to emulate them just as they have emulated functions that were formerly the sole province of libraries. “The operational agenda is the proper place for constant change, flexibility, and relentless efforts to achieve best practice,” Porter advises. “In contrast, the strategic agenda is the right place for defining a unique position, making clear trade-offs, and tightening fit.”

For a company to reconnect with strategy, it needs to identify what Porter calls its “core of uniqueness,” which is not limited to just a single characteristic or group of characteristics but also includes “the fit”—the way the characteristics are combined. This is what distinguishes a company and makes it difficult for competitors to replicate. When we discuss the future of libraries, we discuss issues like searching and bibliographic control. These are essentially operational, not strategic, issues, and they do not truly distinguish libraries from the competition.

That libraries are not commercial, however, is unique. Libraries don't sell their services. The Internet, by contrast, mainly comes with a cost that extends beyond the price of its products and the annoying ads. Every search or purchase, every transaction leaves behind a record of that action. These records can be readily brought together with personal data about membership associations, hobbies, health, food preferences, political affiliations, public records, and a host of other data to provide a thoroughly detailed profile of the user. This user information is a valuable asset for direct marketing, but it is a liability for personal privacy and brings with it considerable potential for abuse. Libraries are dedicated to preserving personal privacy, but data gathering of user information is an intrinsic part of the commercial world. It has a very tight “fit” with other elements of the commercial strategy and will not be easily peeled away.

Libraries are secure, closed systems, and that is also part of our “core of uniqueness.” Public libraries, of course, are open in that they encourage free access to their content. Still, libraries have guidelines for acquiring, discarding, accessing, managing, and distributing content and are governed by accountable staff who safeguard users' rights, copyright laws, privacy, and fairness. In contrast, virtually anyone can add or take content from the Internet. The only real limits are the limits of Internet technology and the ability of users to apply that technology, for better or worse.

There are other characteristics that constitute the core uniqueness of libraries. These include thousands of publicly owned and not-for-profit library buildings distributed throughout the United States housing multiple millions of items; substantial automation resources developed and dedicated specifically for accessing library content; a large, well-trained work force with expertise in numerous subjects and languages; shared principles of librarianship; and a long history of working collaboratively to improve operational effectiveness.

A company's history, Porter suggests, can also help to revitalize its strategy. “What was the vision of the founder? What were the products and customers that made the company?” he reminds us to ask. In his History of Libraries in the Western World (Scarecrow Pr., 1984), Michael Harris identifies a passage in the 1852 Trustees Report of the Boston Public Library that articulates, “perhaps better than any document before or since, the ideal conception of public library service”:

Reading ought to be furnished to all, as a matter of public policy and duty, on the same principle that we furnish free education, and in fact, as a part and a most important part, of the education of all. For it has been rightly judged that—under political, social and religious institutions like ours—it is of paramount importance that the means of general information should be so diffused that the largest possible number of persons should be induced to read and understand questions going down to the very foundations of social order, which are constantly presenting themselves, and which we, as people, are constantly required to decide, and do decide, either ignorantly or wisely.

The report was undoubtedly influenced by Thomas Jefferson. “Whenever the people are well informed,” Jefferson wrote in a letter to Alexander Donald, “they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights.”

Jefferson's influence recurs in the mission statements of many public libraries. These statements also include other reasons for the existence of libraries: to preserve a comprehensive record of humanity's knowledge, creativity, and culture; to acquire significant research materials in all fields; to organize materials to be readily accessible; to instruct and assist users; to increase literacy; to defend intellectual freedom; to inspire learning and enlightenment; and so on.

Our history and our mission statements include broad idealistic aspirations, operational functions, and lists of the products we provide users. The products are paramount. If the products do not meet users' needs, the operational functions count for nothing, and the idealistic aspirations cannot be realized. None of the terms we use to describe our products—knowledge, information, materials, content, resources, ideas, books, technology, media, etc.—are perfect, but those that emphasize the container are less satisfactory than those that strive to define the substance. Knowledge and information are both good as they are broad and cover much of what libraries provide. Interestingly enough, however, they are rarely, if ever, linked to the term entertainment, a peculiar omission given that much of what we provide is clearly entertainment—novels, music, movies, etc. As such it would seem reasonable that our mission statements would include the phrase, “to inform and entertain.”

Knowing our products is critical to defining our strategy. It also helps identify the competition. If information, for example, is a principal product, then our competitors are not limited to the Internet but include television, radio, news print, and government agencies. Given the size and resources of the competition, this is a disheartening notion, except in that change also threatens them. No organization, including the informal one that creates the Internet, is immune to change. Many countries, concerned by the United States' dominance of the Internet, which they perceive as a threat to their culture and security, are building their own Internet, China perhaps most aggressively. “China is betting that by moving to the next-generation Internet before the rest of the world, China's researchers, academics and entrepreneurs will be the first ones to develop applications and services that take advantage of the new capabilities,” Ben Worthen advises, writing in CIO (7/15/06). “If all goes according to plan, those services will be commercialized, making China home to the next wave of eBays and Googles.”

This and related developments mean that other media are also challenged by change. Blogs, instant messaging, and RSS feeds threaten the relevance of newspapers and magazines. But of greater concern to the public is the increased concentration of mass media in the hands of the few, e.g., corporations that own businesses in a variety of commercial markets—not just information or entertainment. “Such conglomerate control,” Dean Alger argues in Megamedia: How Giant Corporations Dominate Mass Media, Distort Competition, and Endanger Democracy (Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), “raises questions about the consequences for news coverage, economic competition on a level playing field, and other economic and sociopolitical functions.” The concentration of mass media ownership, Alger fears, will jeopardize the democratic process as citizens may not always have an opportunity to inform themselves fully.

The nature and extent to which ownership influences the information provided by mass media is open to debate. It is referenced here not to resolve that debate but to acknowledge conglomerate ownership as an element of the core uniqueness of mass media (while the majority of libraries, by contrast, are public or academic institutions). The formats of mass media are another part of their core uniqueness. Format defines each medium and influences the nature and quantity of information that each provides. Television news programs, for example, are limited to measured time slots subdivided by commercial breaks. Subject coverage is by necessity brief and without considerable depth.

Libraries and mass media, however, do share the same idealistic aspiration. The First Amendment states that Congress shall make no laws abridging the freedom of the press. “Where the press is free, and every man able to read,” Thomas Jefferson wrote to Charles Yancey, “all is safe.” The argument for a free press is the same as the argument for libraries. “A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it,” James Madison wrote to W.T. Barry, “is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy—or perhaps both.”

One might reasonably ask how our competition is doing in achieving its goal. The run up to the war in Iraq would suggest that it could do better. By any measure, this was an event of public importance about which both Jefferson and Madison would expect informed debate among the populous. In hindsight, it's clear the debate should have included a discussion of Middle East culture, regional governance, religious sectarianism, tribalism, Iraqi aspirations, and the like. Mass media, however, limited the agenda of public debate by and large to a discussion of weapons of mass destruction, falling far short of the ideals of Madison and Jefferson.

Libraries also failed, even though much of the information relevant to the Iraq debate resides on library shelves. We failed because we are mainly a passive profession. Libraries provide many outreach programs, but our primary business posture requires the user to come to us, which is influenced by the book and the dominant role it has played in library history. Books are physical items. Their physical nature imposes constraints on the ease and practicality by which they are distributed (constraints, of course, that are also imposed on the information they contain).

The findings of the 2005 OCLC Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources report are clear on this. “Borrowing print books is the library service used most,” it states. For users, books, not information, are critical to our core uniqueness. The report concludes by saying, “It is time to rejuvenate the 'Library' brand.”

This task, however, won't be easy. In his book Conquering Uncertainty: Understanding Corporate Cycles and Positioning Your Company To Survive the Changing Environment (BusinessWeek Bks., 1998), Theodore Modis compares such efforts to tampering with evolution:

Turning a company around is an almost impossible task, because it involves diverting a process from a declining natural course. In nature, such diversions do not happen. No species, unaided, ever succeeded in halting its own extinction. Yet most companies embark on this attempt. They reorganize, replacing much of their personnel up through the management team. But in the end, only a few companies succeed. Product substitution proceeds successfully only for truly differentiated products. Similarly, a company turnaround succeeds only if the changes are so profound that the transformation is tantamount to creating a different company.... The board's primary concern should be to make sure that the planned changes do not fall short of transforming the organization into a new “species.”

New catalog rules and web pages will not suffice. Libraries need instead to inventory our resources and identify all of the pieces that constitute our core uniqueness. We need to think imaginatively and rearrange the pieces in a way that presents both a compelling “fit,” difficult to replicate, and a compelling strategy that will enable us to realize the ideals of Jefferson and Madison in a 21st-century world. We need to consider options beyond cost cutting. We need to imagine the impractical, the impossible, and the far-fetched.

We should, for example, imagine the possibility of building our own Internet—a genuinely free Internet that is noncommercial, stable, unbiased, and secure, a closed, independent system managed by accountable staff in accordance with professional principles and standards that respect users' rights and copyright laws while ensuring access to the broadest scope of quality resources by the broadest possible audience without censorship.

We should imagine a proactive business stand that routinely “pushes” information to the user. The Library of Congress Congressional Research Service (CRS) routinely provides Congress with information relevant to its legislative business, and Congress gives it high marks for the service. Still, Jefferson's ideal could be realized more fully if the broader library community could provide similar services to the entire populous to ensure well-informed debate on all issues of civic concern on the local, state, and national level and to ensure that the agendas for those debates are complete and balanced.

We should imagine what it might be like to reorganize the way libraries relate to one another and consider if we might more effectively achieve our mission by emulating some of the structural arrangements of public television (in which local affiliates produce programming for broad distribution) and how a reorganized library landscape might look if some principal libraries served as nodules within a library Internet network, producing “pushed” information within specific subject areas.

We should pretend for a moment that we could develop, solely for libraries, a device—a tabloid or iPod or ultralight laptop—uniquely designed for circulating a wide range of information and entertainment content. We should imagine a device that we could refresh and “lock” so the content we distribute (like books today) would be available to a single user and not redistributed in violation of copyright law.

We should rethink our relationships with content providers and explore with them whether libraries might play a larger and more active role in providing users a full range of electronic content (including the most current releases) while safeguarding that content within a closed, secure system.

We should at the very least ask ourselves how long we will discuss our future before we decide on a course of action, though admittedly this is difficult to determine. Lacking as we do any framework for our discussions, how can we measure progress? This open-ended discussion is consistent with old and all-too-well-established institutions. Bureaucratic and past their prime, they respond to impending crisis with aimless debate—more process that gives the sense of doing something to remedy the problem—while incrementally, day by day, they become less and less relevant. Few innovative breakthroughs were born of protracted deliberation. Most are born of a compelling vision and a leap of faith. Our leadership will not bring us to a new city on a hill by applying the same skills that maintained the old institution. This is not business as usual. Our leadership, instead, needs a sense of the visionary, a high tolerance for risk, and perhaps, too, a little bit of lunacy.