ALA Conference 2009: Ubiquity of Mobiles Greatly To Affect Libraries
ALA Annual Conference: Libraries must adapt their services and address issues of licensing, privacy, and accessibility
Norman Oder -- Library Journal, 7/13/2009
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- Mobile devices have penetration worldwide; speed to explode
- Streaming media to grow in importance
- Libraries must adapt services, maintain values, say panelists
(For more on tech from ALA, don't miss the Top Tech Trends Panel's predictions.)
Libraries had better prepare for an explosion in the capacity of mobile devices as well as the transformative increase in user capacity and expectations. This was the message conveyed by a panel yesterday at the American Library Association's (ALA) Annual Conference on Libraries and Mobile Devices: Public Policy Considerations.
After all, explained Jason Griffey, assistant professor and head of Library Information Technology at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, cell phones are the most popular and ubiquitous information device worldwide; in 50 countries, cell phone penetration (phones/person) exceeds 100 percent.
By the end of 2010, he continued, 90 percent of the world’s population will have access to a cell-phone signal. Right now, more than 60 percent of people have a cell-phone subscription, and three-quarters of them use text messaging. That total, 2.4 billion people, is twice the number currently using email.
Further, more people are now accessing the web through mobile devices such as a smartphone. New examples include the always-on Amazon.com Kindle and the growing number of netbooks.
“Our current network is child’s play” compared to what’s coming, Griffey predicted, explaining that the advent of LTE promises a minimum of 100 megabytes downstream and 50 mb upstream. “It’s like having an Ethernet cable in your pocket,” he said. “With those speeds, we’re going to see things we can’t imagine now.” Look for a debut in February 2010 at the Winter Olympics in Vancouver.
“Mobile devices are just now becoming robust enough to be transformative,” Griffey said, quoting media scholar Clay Shirky as observing that tools don’t get sociologically interesting until they become technologically boring. “I think we’re right at that cusp, of things being really, really interesting.”
He warned, however, of the problems posed by copyright and DRM (digital rights management). As content on cell phones moves from text into audio and video, he said, those issues will pose a big challenge.
Tom Peters of TAP Information Services commented that he couldn’t think of any other device that has had a 60 percent diffusion worldwide: “This is huge.”
Licensing and local content
Moderator Tim Vollmer of the ALA's Office for Information Technology Policy (OITP) asked about the role of libraries in licensing such future digital content.
“This is really the question for libraries in the 21st century,” suggested Eli Neiburger, associate director, IT and product development at Ann Arbor District Library, MI. “We need to get out there right away and realize that holding a copy that exists in ten thousand other places in the world is worthless…when you have in your pocket the entire digital world available to you.”
He suggested that libraries should embrace a new role of providing unique content, either by “making that stuff” or “letting your patrons make that stuff.” While once the library’s prime value was to bring the world to the community, he said, now its prime value is to bring the community to the world.
He warned of a Scylla and Charybdis situation, with the former as the triumph of DRM, leaving no place for libraries, and the latter as the death of copyright, with everything free.
“The library’s real role is to aggregate the buying power of the community,” he said.
Bonnie Tijerina, digital collections services librarian at UCLA, said that libraries now must face the challenge of providing access to content and serving as “the good stewards we need to be.”
Peters agreed, saying that, even as stewardship of content becomes more centralized, libraries will have more of a role.
Changing services
How does mobile technology change the traditional library service model? Tijerina suggested that the core services and values remain the same, but that mobile devices expand the “when” and “where” of the library response.
Griffey pointed out that many services are moving to real time, citing Twitter and FriendFeed. That means libraries should start thinking about “proactive reference…for localized sorts of situations” in which libraries “insert ourselves into processes that people are using.”
The future: streaming
Asked about issues of privacy and bandwidth planning, Peters, who works with digital download services, said “my gut is telling me the future is streaming media.”
However, he pointed to two factors might limit that: local storage costs and battery life. Continuing in the vein of the classical allusions made earlier in the panel, he said, “I would say battery life is the Achilles’ heel in this scenario.”
However, “when we do get to streaming media,” he said, “I see a real change in the way we think about information.” Rather than think about objects, the “information experience”—such as “books you can walk into”—will become more important.
Also, he said, digital content makes it much easier for libraries to measure what’s used and for how long.
Privacy issues
Such measurements, Peters acknowledged, raise many privacy issues, and Deborah Caldwell-Stone, acting director, ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom, observed that libraries should always give users a choice in providing personal information.
That also means that libraries should educate people about the choices they have, and make it possible for them to have access to multiple formats.
Peters described work on a text message reference service using AltaRama and GMail. “We decided AltaRama was more trusted,” he said, so it will be used to save questions, but the GMail will be deleted.
“I want to put out radical proposition,” said Caldwell-Stone. “Sometimes, just because we can do it doesn’t mean we should do it.” If a service exposes personal information, he continued, the library need not offer it.
Neiburger suggested that libraries do as much authentication as possible in-house. While many libraries use Google Analytics, “you’re piping all your hits through the Googleplex.... At some point, the people wishing to obtain patron data will realize the library is an impenetrable fortress with all these holes."
Digital like the physical?
Vollmer pointed to the example of downloadable audiobooks that expire after three weeks and asked if libraries should treat digital objects like they do physical ones.
“Treating the digital like the physical is insanity of the highest order,” Griffey commented. “The music industry was the first to be destroyed and rebuilt,” he said, citing the examples of Napster and iTunes. “I think video and text are going to go in the same directions.”
“We’re not going to be able to compete with free,” he said. “We need to be easier than the piracy.”
“DRM will destroy us if we allow it to,” Griffey added. “It’s going to be a very difficult thing to overcome in next three to five years.”
Peters suggested that we must rethink issues of intellectual property, which are tied to physical copies. Now networks allow the making of unlimited number of copies for fractions of a penny.
Accessibility
Vollmer pointed to the example of pressure from publishers to disable text-to-speech function on their books via the Kindle.
“I think we need a Reader Bill of Rights for the digital era,” Peters suggested. While publishers now sell large-print books, he said, readers should have the right to choose their own font size and the “ability to turn text to speech should be inalienable.”
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