"Perspective of an Amateur Librarian and Professional Entrepreneur"

Taken from www.leadership98.com

Supplemental Material Prepared for the Library of Congress
Leadership Lecture Series
June 25, 1998

Donald G. Jones
President, Library of Congress Millennium Foundation and Spirit Enterprises, Fond du Lac, Wisconsin

When I was a little boy-and I really was little, once-I would go work with my mother on occasional Saturdays. Mom is a retired librarian who worked at the Illinois State Library. While she put Dewey Decimal numbers on book spines or prepared catalog cards, I would sit under the table, reading my own books and inhaling that incomparable ambiance of old books and journals. I love libraries. And I am the worst kind of library lover, because I can't get those old images and old smells out of my head. Why worst? Because the biggest threat to the future of libraries is too much affection for their past. All library lovers share this affliction. It is not fatal, but it could be debilitating if we do not supplement that respect for our heritage with anticipation for the future.

How, you may ask, can reverence be an affliction? And how can a 200-year-old, federally chartered and beloved institution, the biggest and best library in the world, the intellectual heir of Alexandria and Jefferson, be threatened? It is threatened because the library world, and the Library of Congress' well-earned position of leadership, are about to be shaken by the digital revolution.

Everyone talks about a digital-this and a digital-that. What do I mean by a digital revolution?

Two things. One is something that has driven and, in turn, been driven by that revolution. Over the past ten years there has been a notable, if not startling, shift in the demographics of business entrepreneurs. This shift has roughly correlated with the explosion of software products, distributed computing, and public networks. Young people, people in their twenties, have become not just an important part of newly forming companies in this digital world, but in many cases the dominant part. It is almost as if some mutation were introduced into our species about 30 years ago that imparted a way of perceiving possibilities, and how they can combine in novel ways, that are barely imaginable to the ancestors (the rest of us). Moreover, we are only at the leading edge of this new generation gap. Don Tapscott, in his 1998 book Growing Up Digital, defines 80 million young Americans under the age of 20 as the "Net Generation." They are the ones growing up digital, and he proffers four themes that characterize this generation gap:

1. The older generations are uneasy about the new technology-which the kids are embracing.
2. Older generations tend to be uneasy about new media-which are coming into the heart of youth culture.
3. Old media are uneasy about new media.
4. The digital revolution, unlike previous ones, is not controlled only by adults.

Themes 1-3 could be applied generically to almost any time in the Twentieth Century. Theme 4 is unique, and it accounts for the extraordinary influence that young people are having in business and in inventing the new structures and paradigms that will shape much of our society in the early part of the next century.

Tapscott adds that "the concept of education is also changing as we move from the paradigm of teachers as transmitters of information to students learning through discovery and through new media. The teacher's role is still critical, but changing-to structure the learning experience, motivate, provide context, and integrate disciplines. N-Geners who are used to interactive learning will be increasingly unsatisfied with the old model."

So that is one aspect of the digital revolution-the qualitatively different leadership role that young people will play and are playing.

But this youth self-empowerment does not carry with it wisdom or experience. Those of us who, at least by dint of our age, ought to have acquired some of both, have a larger than usual responsibility to, as Tapscott says about teachers, structure the learning experience and provide context. There are exciting and productive new kinds of partnerships awaiting those who would try to understand the world on the other side of that generation gap and pool the resources. The role of the mentor is stronger than ever-as long as the mentor is also willing to be a student.

The second, more specific aspect of the digital revolution is the separation of information from paper and the potential instantaneous availability of that information to anyone, anywhere, over a worldwide network. Today it is called the internet, something that is easier to name than to describe. It changes remarkably fast as new technologies and uses of technology create new possibilities. But it is the possibilities, the new uses, that we should keep our eyes on, not the technology.

Virtually all information that is being generated today is going first into an electronic format. This is not just a new way of typesetting, even though we print much of the output. Or just a new way of making photographs, even though we use color printers to produce photo-like pieces of paper. True, right now electronic formats are largely intermediate steps to traditional hard copy representations. That will change, and indeed it is already changing. Remember that the first cars looked like, and were called, horseless carriages. Those cars served pretty much the same function as horse-drawn carriages-the engine simply took the place of the horse, but was less reliable. For a while. The two means of propulsion existed side-by-side for several decades. But eventually people figured out that automobiles were something altogether different from horseless carriages, with vastly different possibilities. They began to build automobile infrastructure-roads and filling stations-and horses went from historical necessities to recreation. Think of electronic, or digital, representation of information as the equivalent of the internal combustion engine. Its value is not as an alternative way to print books any more than the engine was an alternative way to pull carriages. Electronic representation is not married to printed pages, and given some infrastructure, it will create its own applications and possibilities..

No one can predict how this will unfold-neither the technology nor the impacts. The best we can do is observe, day by day, what is happening and prepare to be quickly adaptive to what will emerge.

None of us thinks hard copy representations of knowledge are going away. Now, and maybe for a long, long time to come, they are the only guaranteed way to preserve knowledge so that it will be accessible decades and centuries and millennia from now. There is no assurance that there will be a WordPerfect or dot-GIF or 5-1/2 inch floppy Rosetta Stone in "Tomorrowland." But that is a separate problem, and it will not prevent a steady dilution of the comprehensiveness and pre-eminence of print on paper by growth of new media. We are already seeing the leading edge of that phenomenon in the slow decline over the past four years in requests via traditional means from the public to the Library of Congress for assistance and materials-down about 20 percent in that time. Concurrently, the number of "connections" made to Library of Congress electronic resources-notably the website and THOMAS-is growing at about 65 percent a year. While these numbers are only crude measures, the trends are striking and suggest a significant shift in library use patterns.

The dilution of the dominance of print directs our attention to what is diluting it-new ways of using information. I have a few examples.

In 1991 Paul Ginsparg, a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, set up an archive of new research papers on his office computer. He allowed other physicists to have access to his computer over a network.. He had never intended this as more than a convenience for a small group, but it grew, now serving more than 35,000 researchers. There is no cost to users of the system, so these "e-print archives" have been a shot across the bow of publishers of traditional scientific journals. This development is forcing publishers to question and rethink the value they add to the scientific publishing process. They will not always like the answers they get. Today you or I can go, via the Internet or other electronic routes, to Ginsparg's archive and read reports of new research as soon as they are submitted. Many will eventually by published in the journals of record, but they will hardly be news by then. Moreover, as results are made available, comments and extensions are invited. In a way not possible before, the papers themselves improve by virtue of being aired early. And finally, results are made publicly available far quicker than when the primary means was through printed journals. This is only the beginning of a trend towards on-line publication and interaction.

Our inclination is to argue that the printed journal is the permanent, authorized record and will continue to be. It has been around, and successful, for decades. There are thousands of them, filling research libraries and research needs around the world. Our natural reaction is to view on-line papers as useful supplements. But doesn't this sound a bit like viewing automobiles as an interesting supplement to horses? Or the telephone as an interesting supplement to the telegraph?

Here is another new use. I can put in an "order" for news, which is delivered to me over the net the way my newspaper is delivered to my front door. But the electronic editor of what I might call the Daily Don Jones knows my interests. I am interested in news about automobiles, cable television and internet, what young people are thinking about, and entrepreneurship (among other things). So it provides large doses of that news, far more than the printed paper, and it leaves out the soccer results and gossip news that I don't read anyway. There is a growing market for such compilations. But this also creates a readily accessible self-identified customer base, never before known, for additional information on those topics. Reporters, for example, will write in-depth material, far more than can fit into a mass-distributed format, just for that "new" audience. So the new medium has created a new market and, consequently, a new opportunity for generation of ideas. Now there is writing about topics that never appears in conventional printed form, but exclusively in enhanced versions on the web. The interactive Wall Street Journal, for example, provides me with in-depth articles and interactive discussions about them that will not appear in print. Those electronic articles are produced by the same journalists who are writing in the paper edition, written to the same standards. But we can no longer consider the paper edition alone as the official news to be archived.

One more example. It is common to hear complaints about consolidation in the publishing world. Large newspaper chains are buying up independent community papers. Small, specialty book publishers are going under or being bought up by mega-publishers. Little magazines have a hard time surviving. And the big book retailers make it harder for the neighborhood bookstores to survive. Yet at the same time there is a proliferation of independent publishing in the digital world. Last year I drove a car around the world as part of an international competition. I kept a journal and made a visual record as well. Every couple of days I published my journal on a website. My friends could not only keep track of my progress, but they could also share my thoughts as I went. I did not need the New York Times to decide to publish my story; I did it myself.

Did millions or thousands read it as they would in the Times? No. And that was not my intention. One of the advantages of electronic publishing-a lesson already demonstrated by the Ginsparg Archives--is that it cost me relatively little to inflict my opinions on the world. And the world was free to read them or not.

But there is a big difference between electronic publishing and traditional self-publishing on paper (those books and monographs doomed to obscurity because no one will know about them). For electronic publications there are sophisticated internet cataloging and indexing mechanisms working full time to know what is out there. They are a powerful matchmaking service between people who share interests. So all of a sudden I have the realistic potential of reaching many people who might be interested in what I am writing. This segmentation of the electronic publication marketplace offers a way for an individual, or a small organization, to distribute ideas, or to sell them, far more effectively than the traditional way of trying to find a publisher. In that sense self-publication is a counter-trend to the constraints on ideas and discourse that people fear will accompany the amalgamation of print publishers and distributors.

These self-publishing developments and self-organized matchups of people with similar interests are outgrowths and guarantors of our democratic system of government and initiative-based economy. And you who have been conservators of the tradition and liberating force of literacy and knowledge have a vital role in what is to come.

Let me suggest some concerns of the digital age that we, as hopeless, sentimental, passionate library-philes, ought to have.

First, there will be a diminished distinction between data, information, and intelligence. Libraries have always represented a value-added sorting mechanism for information. They have helped us to find information that has been collected and sifted by people with some degree of expertise or passion. The process of publishing itself forced choices to be made-not always choices we would agree with, but generally biased toward quality or broad interest. And publishing has been tempered by the existence of laws to protect against misappropriation of ideas or deliberate falsification that could cause harm. But where will those "learned" influences be exercised in the anarchy of the internet? What will be the role for teachers and critics?

I already mentioned personalized news collections. But soon we will have something more versatile-intelligent software that will observe the way I use information-what I read, what I write, how I associate one kind of information with another, what sources of information I rely on. Like my own personal reference librarian, those intelligent, learning software agents will help me to build my own electronic library. I will be able to find information on a screen with the same ease that I can walk to my bookshelf and pull out a familiar book that I remember from the past.

Here is a second concern. What will be meant by "publishing?" For a few dollars I can establish my own home pages and publish my books, journals, rantings, or brilliant new ideas. Once I have done that they are out there, available to anyone who can find them. And there are software tools I can employ to make it more likely readers will find what I have published. So there is essentially no threshold for publishing. The traditional gatekeepers-the publishers and librarians-are going to find, as did the cafes along old route 66, that there's an interstate-an electronic superhighway-that doesn't go through their gate at all.

Third, this distributed collection of data and information will become more and more a resource. People will turn to it to satisfy curiosity or gather information or marshal facts for arguments. But the information research that I perform in front of my computer screen is vastly different from information research performed in the library (and with a librarian's help). Why? Not just because so much of the material is unverified, but because 99 percent of the information available is no more than a few years old. One of the fundamental roles of libraries and formal education is to place new information in the context of history. There is little history represented in this immense new information resource. People, especially young people, who rely on it for their view of the world will be cut off from 10,000 years of wisdom, things learned the hard way, and many ideas and values that shaped our society.

What does this portend for the Library of Congress? I want to reinforce three critical roles that the Library has begun to undertake in this digital world. These are critical roles because you are better able to perform them than anyone else, because you have a responsibility that Mr. Jefferson would not shirk, and because defaulting would have left the Library as a marginal player in the world of ideas.

First, find ways to introduce into the digital world greater levels of confidence in the authenticity of information and sources of information. This is an element of the print and library tradition that is sorely needed wherever information and knowledge is available. An invaluable service will be guidance to users of electronic information on how to evaluate what they are finding. Several years ago the Purdue University Library posted a simple checklist on the web to help its users think critically about an author's credentials and potential bias or conflict of interest as well as about the original source of the information. It is a reminder that practices you take for granted in your work are going to have to be expanded and reinforced in the new media-and in all likelihood there will be no wise librarian in the loop to help with those interpretations.

There are really two overlapping issues of concern to librarians, and these will both be addressed in the Library of Congress' "Reference Service in a Digital Age" conference on June 29-30, 1998. The first issue, more personal for librarians, is how they can provide new, direct services to individuals. This assumes, correctly I think, that their expertise in finding, sorting through, and assessing research material will be broadened to include the proliferating new media. But the other issue may be the more important one: How to provide that expertise when there are no direct services, when there is no librarian in the loop. So this becomes a matter of how librarians can be part of the dynamic process of improving the design of automated, and user-directed, reference and inquiry systems.

A second role for the Library of Congress: Making certain that the knowledge base, wherever it is, has the kind of balance that libraries have traditionally provided. You have begun this process with innovations like THOMAS and the American Memory Collection, but this is just a taste of what has to be done. The digital world may be a product of the end of the 20th century, but the real world goes back a bit farther. It will be difficult, in the face of all the demands for digitizing current and new information, but somehow we must also incorporate our history into the digital database as well.

Third, it is time to rethink and redefine your responsibilities as leaders of the library community, because the concept of the library community is changing. Such issues as stewardship, organization of information, access to information, collections, and use of the information to serve your constituents look different when the digital world is included. If people seeking information are more likely to turn to Yahoo or some other internet information gateway than to a library, then you have to find ways to work with the Yahoos of the world to share resources, knowledge, and experience. There is danger that libraries may become marginalized if they do not step forward and craft an active participation in the change taking place.

It has been reassuring to see the extent to which the Library of Congress has been embracing these roles in the past several years, which is reflected in the breadth of Library presentations and tutorials on digital library issues in connection with the 1998 American Library Association annual meeting.

It has been reassuring because one could succumb to the temptation to assume that the Library of Congress is buffered from the tumult of the messy, bubbling commercial digital world because it is steeped in 200 years of history and charter. If we are tempted, there are some relevant, nearby counter-examples that bring us up short. Consider the US Postal Service, which looks wistfully at the multi-billion-dollar express package delivery systems it might have captured instead of Federal Express or UPS, or as it looks at the growing momentum of shifting commercial transactions that currently use the US Mail to on-line services. History and charter are no guarantors of importance. Or consider that only 20 years ago the Department of Defense was the driving force in development of new communications technologies. DOD was able to create standards, and manufacturers jumped to meet their needs. Today DOD, like the rest of us, buys commercial technology. That is where the best technology is to be found, and that is where the best young technological talent is expending its efforts. Technological and market leadership can shift very quickly these days. And where the leadership resides, the standards will be determined.

I saw similar, and even faster, shifts in dominance in business arena I spent my early career in-cable television. Cable was originally a means to provide standard television reception to homes too far from transmitters to receive signals. It was a supplement to standard television. If we adopted an old usage, we would have called it "antennaless-television." There is no need to belabor the story of cable-cum-satellite-cum-HBO, CNN, MTV, and much more other than to remind ourselves that there is a process of technological innovation combined with entrepreneurial energy that ensures continuing revolution.

So why am I telling this to the Library of Congress? Partly because Donald Scott invited me to do so. But mostly because I represent a lot of people who want to ensure that the Library of Congress, indeed all libraries, continue to exert their leadership and stewardship in unpredictable times. But the hard part is yours, because you have to figure out how to make the transition. There is no formula, there is no expected outcome. There is only a process of opening up, adapting, and innovating.

Libraries are, by nature, very good at capturing and keeping track of what was. It is the nature of collecting. The challenge now is to build on that stewardship and create what will be.

I have some suggestions about what might be.

Recognize your strengths, and be humble about your weaknesses. I watch with wonder the young people-teens and twenty-somethings-who understand this digital world in ways I never will and who are building new companies, new social institutions around functionalities of rapid access to vast information that most of us would never recognize.

For example, many of our financial systems are still based on older ideas that assume limited access. Credentialed people make a lot of money on trading commissions and on the slight differences between buying and selling prices. But a group of youngsters has found that there's plenty of profit to be made in the buying and selling of NASDAQ stocks by working faster, using computers at home, and taking a smaller profit. They don't need credentials or tickets to the stock exchange. Similar phenomena are occurring throughout financial systems. In the past the retailer earned his markup by providing specialized information and unique services. That advantage is disappearing as consumers can look up and compare product specifications themselves, find the wholesale prices, and shop around electronically for the best deal. So retailers are going to have to alter the way they think about their businesses so they can again provide something value-added that customers can't find for themselves. This is already a major change in the sale of new cars. And closer to the world of libraries, Amazon.com has used its innovative information resources to entice customers to order with a mouseclick. At one time it appeared that the streamlined ordering and distribution systems was Amazon's competitive advantage. Now see that its unique appeal is the information it provides and the way it is embellished by reader-customers. Amazon provides a version of an on-line automated librarian to make recommendations, and that makes Amazon a success.

This digital world is part of a collection of forces that is altering the climate for innovation, business, and competition. All of us, private and public sector, have to function is a world of shrunken time and distance (the digital world), global markets and competitors, lowered barriers to introduction of new businesses and competition, and ample capital to invest in high-risk/high-payoff ideas. It is inevitable that such a mixture will lead to faster innovation, greater change, and increased pressure on all institutions and organizations to be more adaptive. And to be more adaptive means to be more open to ideas from all realms and all sorts of people.

I see the best examples of these consequences in the young entrepreneurs I work with. It astounds me how quickly they conceive of new enterprises because they grasp the potential of combinations of new technologies and ideas. I do not try to keep up with them; I try to learn from them. I recommend that process for everyone. Go out and find some kids. Enlist private sector partners who know the new technologies and are experimenting with their uses. I see glimmers of entrepreneurship in the Library as well in areas like the National Digital Library, THOMAS, the on-line American Memory Collection, the Library of Congress/Ameritech National Digital Library Competition, BeOnline, Digital Table of Contents, and more. This is a strong start. The Library can go on to find ways to leverage its seal of approval-the LOC imprimatur-as a way to add value to information in the digital world. But don't wait for the digital entrepreneurs to come to you. Go, as students, to their turf and begin to establish some collaborations. There are wondrous possibilities in existing and new areas of digital librarianship that can emerge from those collaborations.

One of the useful, maybe the most useful, observation I can make about my years as an entrepreneur is this: Good ideas get better when they're shared and built upon. I have tried to outline some of the larger forces that I think will alter the Library's role as well as its opportunities. But I don't pretend that the changes will be obvious or easy to deal with. Your greatest asset is your ability, as a community, to generate and incorporate new ideas and build on them. I have no idea how you will do that, nor do you have any idea how you will do that-beyond being receptive and curious. In that sense your future is very much determined by how you approach it.