Dave Parkes

Introduction

Web 2.0 is transforming the library – its spaces, DNA, books and journals. It is changing how these resources are accessed, discovered and used. It is changing the fabric of libraries and their physical shape; the designed social spaces now common in libraries reflect online social networking spaces. Training, teaching and instruction in the use of libraries and learning resources are being transformed. Conversations, discourse, feedback and interaction with users through a variety of Web 2.0 tools are common and, importantly, two-way.

The book will eat itself – e-books 2.0

As I write physicists are about to engineer a collision of two beams of particles at something close to the speed of light in a big tunnel under the Swiss border with France. Assuming you are reading this and the Large Hadron Collider didn’t open a black hole, which consumed us all, I will continue (update – I now know it didn’t go quite according to plan and is either coming back from the future to destroy itself or bird detritus is getting in the way). What these physicists are also doing on this auspicious day is switching on ‘the Grid’. The Grid is a worldwide grid of computers, combining the capacity of about 70,000 of the fastest computers in the world to analyse the millions of petabytes of data that will be generated. This data is equivalent to a 21-kilometre-high stack of CDs every year, according to the website (http://lcg.web.cern.ch/LCG/lhcgridfest/).

The last attempt to find the Higgs boson at CERN, 20 years ago, created a spin-off called the World Wide Web. This in turn set in motion the big, slow, radical transformation of libraries and its composite particle – the book. Who knows what the Grid may bring?

The e-book is now entering its late 30s and is undergoing a mid-life transformation. Born around 1971 in modest surroundings but with a good pedigree and a small but caring family in Project Gutenberg, its early years were quiet and understated, its teens geeky and awkward. The e-book now enters a kind of celebrity phase; it is becoming a household name and – like many celebrities – it remains elusive and yet ubiquitous, and is derided and applauded in equal measure.

What e-books could be – the online or networked book

The Institute for the Future of the Book (IFB; http://www.futureofthebook.org/) is describing a fascinating and compelling life for the online or networked book. This small ‘think and do-tank’ (their words) provides access to highly imaginative visual renderings of ‘the book’ in a fully realised hypertextual and interactive environment. These true e-books are captivating – they are different, but also strangely evocative of ‘the book’ – the codex – that ‘perfect machine’.

In the hands of the IFB – just like a real book – the e-book becomes a powerful object, encouraging an intimate relationship with the reader, engaging the imagination and encouraging interaction. These IFB e-books allow access to the hinterland of the book, its contents, index, structure, narrative, size and mass. They allow readers to annotate, comment and interact with the book and the author. E-books are actually a joy to read and use online and highly recommended as a vision of what the ‘networked book’ can be.

McKenzie Wark published his book Gamer Theory (Wark, 2007) in two formats on the IFB website. One presents a text visualisation of the book called ‘TextArc’, a representation of the text: ‘the entire text (twice!) on a single page’. It is a combination of an index, with every contextual occurrence of every word, and a summary. It uses the viewer’s eye to help uncover meaning. In the other version, dubbed ‘READ/WRITE’, the pages are rendered as highly interactive cards, actually reminiscent of catalogue cards; it is very usable and lots of fun.

The book is also available in traditional hard copy format from Harvard University Press. These e-book models:

Of course this isn’t a model of a mass type or likely to become one just yet. Our e-books will continue to be, at least for the foreseeable future (six months – the definition of eternity in the web world?) rather flat digital replications of text. In our current dash for e-books are we simply buying (or leasing) a rendered digital facsimile of the book? It is really a photograph of an artefact – we are purchasing an image of the typing!

The e-book library – not reading but searching

Of course books don’t stand alone – as librarians we are interested in building great libraries for our patrons – often against the odds. Alberto Manguel, in the foreword of his wonderful new book, The Library at Night, asks why we do this:

He goes on to call libraries ‘pleasantly mad places’, which I think is a ringing endorsement of our craft.

E-books can provide an instant library – a library where we can weave and search through the texts of thousands of books from dozens of disciplines and in seconds. We can locate phrases, words, concepts and ideas. Books can now ‘know’ what other books contain. With algorithms we can penetrate connections and associations; waves and ripples are made – but this isn’t reading – it’s searching. I can search with speed and precision, in quantity and on demand, and the results are impressive. In 3.34 seconds I searched 20,000 e-books for ‘Manguel’ in a well-known aggregated e-book library, and returned 65 results across disciplines as diverse as folklore, political science, mathematics, heresy, education and the HBO series The Sopranos. This is incredibly powerful – but then, reader, the drudgery begins. I enter each book individually after launching the plug in (which only works on certain platforms and in certain browsers). The first is pleasant enough, I find the context and any other occurrences of Alberto Manguel, I can highlight and bookmark, add notes, but then I have to close this book and open another book and go through the process again; without some effort and patience I cannot cross-reference or compare texts or extracts. The search has promised so much but the rendition is a bore.

Borges wrote of the fantastical infinite library, containing the sum of all texts ever written. In The Library of Babel (2000) he writes of ‘a someone’ who was born in, spent his life in and knows he will die in the library – I can empathise with this poor citizen as I trawl around an e-library. Still, all the content we could want or ever need will eventually be available in there – and we must be imaginative about how we leverage and squirt this hidden content into the places and online spaces where people learn.

Every searcher a book, every book its e-book reader platform

Lots of different proprietary software and plugins are available to view e-books – some are streamed, never leaving the servers in Texas; others are downloaded. Platforms are often designed to build in digital rights management (DRM), the controversial access control mechanism, or they allow for extras like adding notes, or for citations and copyright statements to be printed.

Rapid developments in the functionality of web browsers such as in Firefox, Opera or Google Chrome leave the glacial and over-engineered development of some publisher platforms adrift in the primordial soup. Some aggregated e-libraries are still only fully functional with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer for example.

There is a bewildering array of platforms and interfaces – just like with our e-journals collections in fact. Perhaps we need to recognise that journals and books are not so different in the ‘e’ world. E-content is more important than form; some integration would seem to be a sensible approach. For example, it would be a wonderful enhancement to be able to leap from a journal citation to an e-book chapter and back again with the minimum of fuss, but we seem to be some way from this.

Aggregators, suppliers and publishers have been slow to respond to or embrace new developments in emerging technologies or Web 2.0 applications, RSS aside. Librarians should adopt emerging standards or better still create or facilitate a ‘mashup’ of access to online content, which could really help transform the experience of reading online.

Devices and gadgetry

The IFB is weaving magic with online content but what about devices? There is now a proliferation of e-book readers available and more promised in the near future, all of which are intriguing and desirable objects. The successes of the Amazon Kindle in the USA and the Sony eBook Reader here in the UK are testament that there is a market for single niche devices. A number of so called ‘Kindle Killers’ are now almost ready for release: companies such as Plastic Logic, Readius, Brother, Fujitsu and Barnes and Noble are all offering pocket-sized or A4 e-ink devices, some purported to be in colour and with wi-fi or 3G connectivity.

But how can we improve on that perfect machine – the book? Books are evocative, tactile, hypersensuous objects; we have a physical and a psychological relationship with them – they don’t need wires, batteries, recharging or operating instructions – can a bleeping electronic device really replace or challenge the book? After all the book is highly portable, apart from some big computer manuals perhaps, and the world’s largest book – currently Bhutan: a visual odyssey (this colossus weighs over 60  kg and measures 1.52  m by 2.13  m, oh, and the world’s heaviest book, the 14,300 stone tablets recently rediscovered in China, published in AD 605).

How can these e-book readers improve on the reading experience? They can provide hundreds of titles in one portable, lightweight device. They allow the reader to change font size and page rendering and e-ink is easy on the eye. Devices will eventually allow for always-on access to the internet, for purchase or updating content. All very useful gadgetry but nothing a lightweight compact netbook couldn’t offer?

It is assumed that sales of digital content will eventually outstrip sales of traditional books. A survey from the Frankfurt Bookfair in 2008 thinks this will happen by 2018 (Jones, 2008). Perhaps people will be encouraged to adopt e-readers more widely by the availability of e-news devices rather than e-books. In France (always early adopters – as evidenced by the prescient Minitel system – the pre-web online service) Orange has rolled out a paperless newspaper called Read & Go. This touchscreen device, about the size of a paperback, offers updates from five major newspapers including Le Monde and Le Parisien. As a fundamental shift is taking place in the newspaper industry we could see revolutionary developments here. One possibility, recorded in the Business Insider, might be to give away the Kindle or a similar device and sell the newspaper as a wireless edition. According to the Business Insider, it costs the New York Times about twice as much money to print and deliver the newspaper over a year as it would cost to send each of its subscribers a brand new Amazon Kindle instead (Carlson, 2009).

Are single niche devices the way e-books will be delivered for our users or will we use multifunctional devices such as mobile phones or games consoles as our portable bookshelves of the near future?

I am reminded of the possibly apocryphal but nevertheless popular NASA pen story. This ‘space pen’ ballpoint was developed to be able to function in space at zero gravity. Taking years of development and costing millions of dollars to produce, it worked, but the Russians used a pencil.

Apple of course has the iPhone and the iPod Touch – this device is already proving to be the most popular e-book reader available. With the free download of Stanza (it also comes with one preloaded book, The Time Machine by H. G. Wells – very apt for this most futuristic of devices) you can read, resize, rotate and turn a page by flicking your finger, and download books over the web. A new free Kindle application is now available for the iPhone and iPod Touch to provide all the Kindle books available on the device.

There is a plethora of schemes and plans involving mobile phones. Borders has teamed up with Penguin and Bloomsbury to deliver the first chapters of novels to mobile phones for free. The DailyLit website (http://www.dailylit.com/) will send entire books in short customised instalments by e-mail or RSS to your phone, blackberry, iPhone or PC. The subscriber chooses the frequency and delivery mode. In Japan the ‘keitai’ – a novel for the mobile phone – is a phenomenon. Vodafone has launched a service bringing books to mobile phones in audio and text, and Google Book Search (http://books.google.com/m) now provides mobile editions.

E-publish or perish

The whole ecosystem is evolving and changing rapidly; publishers are seeking new revenue streams, suing (if press reports are to be believed) and courting upstart interlopers such as Scribd (http://www.scribd.com). Scribd is a document-sharing website with a social networking element; it has 55 million readers per month, and adds 50,000 documents per day. Simon and Schuster and Random House have teamed up to provide excerpts and full texts.

Publishers are experimenting with business models. Taylor & Francis allows users to ‘rent’ access to an e-book for a period of between a day and six months. Oxford Scholarship Online gives institutions subscription access to a fully searchable collection of 2,000 OUP monographs. And in 2009 Bloomsbury launched a set of e-books available as free downloads.

An interesting development is emerging in the shape of Flat World Knowledge. In this innovative model the publishing house gives textbooks away free online but sells study guides, paper versions, flash cards and versions for the Kindle. The textbooks are built to order, allowing the mixing of content. An online social learning platform is also included as is a Blackboard and Facebook application (http://www.flatworldknowledge.com/minisite/).

OverDrive is a global digital distributor which libraries can sign up to, as 8,500 have done. This service provides 150,000 downloadable audiobook, e-book, video and music titles. In 2008 it registered approximately 5.3 million checkouts of digital material, a 76 per cent increase over 2007 (http://www.overdrive.com/).

Google Books – the infinite library

The big e-book news has to be the Google agreement with the book industry. Google now has 20,000 publishers participating in its book-scan programme. This means that users will soon be able to search and buy millions of titles, many of which were out of print and previously unobtainable. The scheme will be targeted at universities but will allow anyone to download any of the 7 million books already scanned by Google.

Google won’t be an infinite library just yet, however. Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt estimates that it won’t manage to index all of the world’s information until around the 24th century (Mills, 2005).

The future observed

As the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) national e-books observatory project discovered, there is clearly a demand for e-course texts, which is currently not being met (JISC, 2008). Concerns over the impact of e-course books on print sales and uncertainty about a sustainable pricing model are still holding things back. According to Mintel (2007), academic and professional books were an estimated 20 per cent of the total market in 2007. As this is in a market worth £3,414 million, one can understand the risk aversion.

We are entering a transformative era, though, and witness to a key moment in the evolution of publishing and digital libraries as each word in each book is cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analysed, annotated, remixed and reassembled; every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages. Edward A. Feigenbaum, a noted Artifical Intelligence pioneer, wrote in 1989 from the perspective of a future scholar who recollects the time ‘when books didn’t talk to each other’: ‘The library of the future will be a network of knowledge systems in which people and machines collaborate’ (Feigenbaum and Merritt, 1989).

What is clear is that the e-book in all of its manifestations is undergoing what mathematicians, biologists and economists call a ‘random walk’ (one version is the drunkard’s walk – but we won’t explore that further). We know successive random steps are being made and we can try to model the outcomes and build innovative and adaptive services, but the real outcome remains unknown – perhaps the answer lies in what is happening at CERN and in ‘the Grid’.

If there were no such thing as libraries would we build them today?

Just as the DNA of the library – the book – is morphing, so too are our buildings being terraformed and transformed into creative, dynamic, technologically rich, inspirational, motivational and aspirational places, which encourage social interaction, inquiry-based learning, collaborative activity, coffee, cakes and cultural opportunities.

This physical reinvention complements and reflects the virtual emergent social media phenomenon we have experienced online over the last five years of Web 2.0. Social media, blogging, microblogging, social networking, social bookmarking, tagging and the wisdom of crowds all combine elements that are supported by physical manifestations in the shape of new library buildings. For example, librarians recognise that libraries are not built purely for administrative simplicity but they need to foster human to human interaction, communication, knowledge syndication, inquiry, collaboration, discussion and consultation in places where people not only consume but produce content, media and knowledge. The new library is a social interface as much as Facebook or Google Wave.

As Facebook and other social networking tools are virtual community spaces, these new learning spaces are physical community spaces. Barry Wellman (1979) described communities as ‘as networks of interpersonal ties that provide sociability, support, information, a sense of belonging, and social identity’. This definition can be applied to online communities as well as the activities and services encouraged in new libraries.

Architecture and libraries share a special relationship; the great libraries of the world have the ability to inspire, uplift, engage, stimulate thought and evoke emotions. They are cultural and political symbols, and libraries remain great assets for universities as a special place, a third place.

Libraries which were once designed for administrative simplicity are now designed for user experience. These new libraries are a big experiment, just as our forays into emerging and social technologies are experimental discoveries. They are beta buildings, where ideas are implemented and iterated – always morphing and evolving to reflect and engender change.

Should library administration even manage these new spaces? Why not the students’ union, or student services, estates, IT or even Starbucks? What do librarians bring which cannot just as easily be delivered by another agency? Certainly we identify, select and manage information and learning resources and pay the bills, but increasingly the information we buy goes straight from the supplier to the end user without needing to ‘enter’ the building.

The connected building

New library design is increasingly important in supporting innovations in learning, pedagogy and improving learners’ experience.

There has been considerable national investment in ‘library’ spaces in the last few years. ‘Designing Libraries’, the Aberystwyth University based database for sharing best practice in the planning and design of library spaces, lists 473 projects including 187 new builds and 202 refurbishments since 2004 (http://www.designinglibraries.org.uk/). New library design is increasingly important in supporting innovations in learning, pedagogy and improving learners’ experience. The new library is at the intersection of the physical and the virtual; it is a democratic building. In this new democratic building there is an ingrained culture of openness.

Let us take a ‘walk’ through this connected building of dynamic interaction, scholarly activity, mobile communications, pervasive computing and ubiquitous wireless. On entry, video walls display scrolling directions and news, another video wall displays real time tweets from users of the library explaining what they are up to or looking for in the building or across the university; this facilitates interaction and sparks new conversation. Augmented reality tags installed at critical points in the journey provide smart phone users with tours of the building and inform users how the space and services might be used, where certain resources or help might be found. Throughout library users provide crowdsourced and backchannel feeds on screens describing good finds, tips, help and advice on using the library; and online photographs are geotagged to show the locations of resources or services. QR codes lead smart phone users to content, books and resources. The building is fractal, agile, changing to suit the demands of learners and the academic calendar. For example, high use services around assignment deadlines such as short loan, binding and printing can be co-located for convenience, and moved back to more traditional and familiar locations once the frenzy has subsided. Experiments with bokodes (http://www.bokode.com) provide users with information about the book stock and journals collections, information previously only accessible by administrative and library staff.

Large interactive touch screens allow instant access to resources. Capture cams record group work scribblings. Geotagged photographs of the building are just some of the ways that user generated information pervades – the richness of any building is most apparent to those who use it. Wireless power mats using magnetic induction charge devices for users. Expresso book machines print and bind books on demand. Devices have communication and computing capabilities, connected to other information devices in the environment and to other people. There is embedded technology in everything from books to furniture to the building itself. In the main gathering area there is a recital, and yet there is a refuge of silence and scholarship away from the cacophony and electric hum in the silent study area.

This is a place where the web meets the world (O’Reilly and Battelle, 2009), where occupiers feel part of a collective whole; they can influence and effect change and contribute to the stimulus of their surroundings. It is a highly symbolic place for the university in increasing motivation, productivity, recruitment and retention. It demonstrates at least some elements of sustainability and an awareness of carbon emissions.

Libraries were always more than book repositories. They have always been social learning spaces for people to study, gather, work collaboratively and interact with resources and technology. They have always addressed space and design issues through technology and improved design, whether by providing microform and film to liberate space 60 years ago or through the use of papyrus scrolls some time before that. Libraries were always a forum for meetings, sharing information, educating, agitating, organising and entertaining. In the early nineteenth century they were sometimes called mechanics institutes or perhaps the Athenaeum; now we call them learning resource centres, information commons, knowledge centres, knowledge hubs or idea stores.

Libraries have always been a forum rather than a scriptorium. Recitals, exhibitions, meetings and workshops have been the stuff of libraries in all sectors through the ages – the journey of the library is now reaching its apogee in the shape of the ‘Get it Loud in Libraries’ campaign by Lancaster public library, which since 2005 has staged live band concerts in among the book shelves. By sparking controversy it has also generated great interest and encouraged 3,500 young people into the library who otherwise might never have visited. Lancaster is not alone: this is happening in libraries from Auckland to Wigan and Wokingham.

This decision by bands to play more gigs in ever more diverse places and for libraries to open their doors to welcome them is a direct and unimagined consequence of web technologies creating paradigm shifts in the respective industries. In the music industry the web has changed the business model and in libraries the very idea of a library is being questioned to the extent that we can in all seriousness ask: ‘If libraries didn’t exist would we build them today?’

References