The future of (Dutch) libraries

Andrew keen spoke at Bibliotheekplaza in Amsterdam last week and had this to say about it:

Last week, I was lucky enough to find myself in the fair city of Amsterdam in the company of several hundred Dutch librarians. I was addressing Bibliotheekplaza 2009, an annual convention of Dutch librarians focused on using the tools of the Web revolution to modernize libraries. Borrowing the wisdom of my Twitter buddies, I argued in my speech that while most libraries today do represent the most crusty and dusty of the ancien media regime, they also have a great opportunity to become the next-generation curators of digital information.


My audience of Dutch librarians agreed with my argument that, in the midst of today’s chaotic digital revolution, we need reliably curatorial libraries and libraries more than ever now. Like in Britain, librarians in Holland are under tremendous pressure to reform. Unlike in Britain or America, however, the Dutch, with their trademark foresight, are actively investing in libraries of the future. The two most innovatively interactive libraries in Holland are the central public libraries in Amsterdam and Delft both of which have both radically reinvented themselves for the new digital age.


At Bibliotheekplaza, I chatted with Rob Visser, the guy who has been driving the remarkable digital revolution at the Amsterdam public library. Instead of the dustiness and crustiness of the typical 20th century library, visitors to Amsterdam’s central public library will find not only books, but a restaurant as well as a children’s theatre and a public radio and television studio. The library, which is open every day from 10.00 am to 10.00 pm, also holds a series of cultural festivals – such as the upcoming week of poetry – which it then broadcasts on the Internet.

Warriors in disguise?

in the Arts section of The Guardian: 18/03/09. An article by Michele Roberts describes her training as a librarian and concludes
"Librarians are necessarily heroes and warriors - albeit in disguise". I wonder what she means ....

2009 is the Year of the M-Library

I've just seen a post from The Distant Librarian entitled "Is 2009 the year of the m-library?" I think it could well be, or if not 2009, then 2010.

I think library users, especially those enrolling for university this year, will expect to be able to access at least some library services via mobile devices and I think it's important that we meet that demand. Of course, my own project for the Arcadia Fellowship could prove me entirely wrong!

One interesting thing to note from the post above is that there is now an M-Libraries page on the LibSuccess wiki.

Why you can't find a library book in your search engine

This is an interesting article in the Guardian about searching for books online and finding your nearest library that has the one you want. I was surprised to read that OCLC are quite resistant to this idea. Their WorldCat is a great tool, but not everyone knows it's there, so why not make it possible for search engines to access WorldCat and make sure it's well badged in search results?

Despite the internet's origins as an academic network, when it comes to finding a book, e-commerce rules. Put any book title into your favourite search engine, and the hits will be dominated by commercial sites run by retailers, publishers, even authors. But even with your postcode, you won't find the nearest library where you can borrow that book. (The exception is Google Books, and even that is limited.)

That's strange, because almost every library has an electronic database of its books - searchable either at the library's own website or via its local council. The wrinkle is that at the book level, those databases aren't accessible to the search engines; and you may not be able to search all the libraries in your area at once.

Yet there is an alternative that few people seem aware of: Worldcat (worldcat.org), which offers web access to the largest repository of bibliographic data in the world - from the 40-year-old Ohio-based non-profit Online Computer Library Center (oclc.org). But Worldcat suffers from the same problem on a larger scale. OCLC shares only 3m of its 125m records with Google Books; none of them show up in an ordinary search.

Apparently OCLC are considering making WorldCat records easier to search, though, according to this post: OCLC, Record Usage, Copyright, Contracts and the Law

How users view librarians?

Following on from John's comments I thought this was an apt representation of how library users see us -- the 'librarian action figure': http://www.mcphee.com/amusements/current/11247.html

I, sadly, have one...

More relevant is that according to a 2006 report 'College Students’ Perceptions of the Libraries and Information Resources:A Report to the OCLC Membership'. Dublin, OH: OCLC, 2006 , only 2% of students start a search for electronic resources from a library website...and I guess that this figure has decreased even further over the last 2 years!