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NOTE: This has been expanded into a chapter in Libraries, Community, and Technology,
After what seems like a lifetime, the question is still being asked and must be answered: Will the Internet (and other "free" electronic resources) replace the public library? Futurists and other fortune tellers continue to predict our demise, as they have for several decades. City councils and county boards continue to hope they can solve budgetary problems by eliminating us. Entrepreneurs continue to sell fly-by-night products as replacements for us. Those who don't have a clear understanding of what libraries are and why they exist seem most likely to ask this question. Since it looks like we will be stuck answering it for the rest of our lives, it is worth reviewing the main aspects of our answer.
The public library is a government institution and is concerned with fulfilling needs, while the Internet is concerned with meeting demand. The hard truth is that a public library is part of local government, not a foundation or business. As such it exists to meet local needs and that is the only rationale for its existence. "Needs" can be broadly defined, but should not be confused with public demand. Tax dollars would not be approved for anything short of actual needs, with those needs being prioritized to match funding. Librarians forget this at their peril and that of the institution.
The Internet, like all commercial ventures, is after disposable income. Some of its features could qualify as needs - e-mail, access to information, virtual communities, but most do not. Porn and genealogy are reportedly the second and third largest uses of the Internet, after e-mail. While there is demand for these services, is there a need that the community should address with tax dollars? If you are unsure, just ask any member of your library board, city council or county board.
The public library is an educational institution, while the Internet is only incidentally educational. Libraries were founded for explicitly educational purposes, as described in the Report of the Trustees of the Public Library of the City of Boston, 1852. They are funded by local government because they meet an educational need. No other proposed mission explains why tax dollars should flow to them. Libraries are very good at this educational mission. It is very American for education to be self-guided, open to a maximum number of influences and assisted by someone with technical expertise. Education in this sense is a very broad term, but it is not meaningless. Pornography is not particularly educational. Outdated, poorly written and inaccurate material is not educational and may even be its opposite. Some material is more educational than others, such as popular texts on science or world affairs. When librarians select materials for their library, they are (or should be) using criteria that place a high priority on educational value.
The Internet, despite the great hopes of some prophets and pundits, is a vaster wasteland than any other medium. The majority of sites are commercial and have no interest in an educated consumer. Pop-up ads, stealth web sites and spam constantly interrupt Internet users, making TV and radio look good for their relative respect for the viewer. There are many fine educational Internet sites, most of them put together by teachers, librarians and other educators, but they are clearly the exception.
The public library is affiliated with its community, while the Internet is affiliated with profit making ventures. A public library is in a unique position in a community. It belongs to the community, is nourished and guided by it and has its best interests at heart. A systems analyst might identify the library as a subsystem of the community, with its sole purpose being to serve the larger system. Like Consumer's Reports, it is impartial, promoting that which it judges best and most useful. It is not selling any particular product or line, unless democracy, education and an informed citizenry count as products.
In the main, the Internet is affiliated with everyone except the consumer. Some sites exist to sell directly, while others promote various products, ideas or schemes. Rare is the service that does not have a hidden cost, whether it be advertising banners, tracking software or registration requirements. Some companies truly take the consumer's side, because it is good business practice and builds a long term relationship that has commercial value. Sites that put the user first because they deserve to be first are vanishingly rare and likely to be associated with libraries, universities and other government agencies.
Libraries exist to broaden people's outlook, while the Internet can encourage virtual enclaves. Libraries are designed to house a wide diversity of opinion. Pro-life and pro-choice books sit next to each other. Adjoining books may depict the American Revolution as sparked by economic concerns, a desire for liberty, the political will of the masses or a revolt of the colonial elite. Ideally, each title in a library represents a fresh viewpoint, so that readers can examine them and come to a personal decision. It is possible to read narrowly in a public library, but the collection, its arrangement and cataloging and the staff do not make that easy.
On the Internet, it is easy to become caught in a closed loop. Football sites link to other sports sites, not to Shakespeare or politics. Commercial sites provide links to their subsidiaries, not to their competitors. Major corporations, such as Disney and AOL can build large on-line corporate spaces with few connections to the larger world. In such an environment, it is easy for groups to form enclaves, where the only sound is a reinforcing echo. Such closed systems are not good for individuals, communities or the human race.
Libraries are selective, while the Internet's main value is its lack of selectivity. Despite claims to the contrary, libraries would not select everything if they had the space and money. The number of items required to best serve a community is large, but it is not infinite. Since libraries have a purpose/mission, some items further that mission and others don't. For most libraries, collections of hate literature would not serve to improve or educate the community, though such a collection may be appropriate in a specific scholarly/research setting. Other titles can be judged (yes, librarians make judgments) to be misleading, dated or inaccurate. Additionally, there is the data smog factor. How many biographies on Thomas Jefferson are enough? Ten? Twenty? Two hundred? For a public library, as opposed to a research collection, there is a point at which more becomes less. In a twisted form of Gresham's Law, the bad books drive out or at least conceal the good ones.
All kinds of texts are equally valued on the Internet. Borderline fraud, pop culture, government publications and classic literature all carry the same weight. There is no selector to winnow out the wheat from the chaff. Because of this, even rather narrow searches return thousands of hits, with the trash far outweighing the treasures. While wandering through such sites can be entertaining, it is no way to run a library.
Library materials possess an authenticity and authority that most Internet documents lack. Librarians operate with a safety net when selecting. Most materials they consider have clear authors, willing to take credit/blame for their works. Often, the documents have been polished and checked for libel and inaccuracies by an editor. If not, a publisher is proud enough of the work to put their name and reputation behind it. Additionally, most items are reviewed, so that someone else's opinion can referenced before purchasing.
A great many Internet documents don't have a clear author. Corporate pages are often collaborations, with no individual's name attached. In other cases, the author may disguise themselves to conceal a conflict of interest. Even when a name appears, there is no guarantee that it is genuine. Few pages have been professionally edited and the publisher and author are identical most of the time. There are sites that review web pages, but their approval is no required before a site is "published". Search engines have standards for accepting listings, but the quality of the site is less important that its novelty or collness.
Library collections are coherent and serve a specific goal (see above), while coherent is not a term usually applied to the Internet. Library collections, large and small, are like jigsaw puzzles. It is made up of selected pieces that make up a whole. Librarians can tell if an area of the collection is weak, absent or over-run with dated material. Collections may expand or contract, but they have a shape, a form, a purpose. Just as the library is a subsystem of the community, the collection is a subsystem of the library. Individual items will come and go, but the purpose remains,
The Internet lacks coherence because it lacks a mission. It is amorphous and polymorphous, taking on a variety of shapes depending upon the viewer. For some it is a way to keep in touch with family and friends, while others use it to pursue a hobby or a business opportunity. Being many things to many people is a useful attribute, but having a clear and focused mission is equally valuable.
Libraries collect the knowledge and wisdom of the ages, while the Internet is a dumping ground for the immediate and ephemeral. Because the library has a mission and makes selection decisions based on that mission, the resulting collection consist primarily of digested material. Once people have time to consider an event, place it in context and put it down in a thoughtful fashion, it is ready for the library. Libraries don't collect first drafts, fifth grade projects or the rantings of the insane (well, not often). This is not to claim "classic" status for everything a library buys, but in general library materials are more likely to be knowledge or wisdom, rather than data or information.
One of the Internet strengths is it immediacy. Chat rooms and messenger software work in real-time. A savvy Internet user can quickly tell if a movie or book is going to go "big time" or flop. E-mail gets delivered immediately, even if it doesn't get read for days. On-line news is updated much more frequently than newspapers, though 9-11 showed than TV and radio are much more agile than the Internet in covering breaking events. Internet pages rarely deal in lengthy discussion and most are shorter than a newscast or newspaper article, in keeping with our shortening attention span. Data, information, knowledge and wisdom are all have their place, but most people experience a shortage of wisdom, while no American is short of data and information.
Libraries and their collections exhibit a permanence that the Internet does not attempt or value. Data and information have a short shelf life, but knowledge and wisdom are long term commodities. Libraries have Lao-Tzu, Augustine and Aristotle on their shelves. While some works inevitably become dated and should be removed, libraries keep out-of-print works for which there is still a need. Their judgment is often different from that of the marketplace, because there are different standards and forces at work. The marketplace discards title when the title no longer returns a profit. A library selects and retains a title because it benefits the community.
The transience of the Internet surpasses that of the book publishing industry. When a book goes out of print, it is still available as a used book, often for less than a new copy would cost. Internet sites can disappear with astonishing speed and leave no trace of their passing. Others change ownership or direction, completely obliterating what went before. On-line newspaper keep small (or no) archives.
A library does not add an item until it has fit in into an organized structure, while the Internet relies on partial, slipshod and self-serving indexing. Every item added to a library collection uses an established standard record. Each is cataloged and assigned subject headings from a shared and limited vocabulary. The subjects are linked with see and see also references into a syndetic structure. Books are given a call number, so that similar books are shelved together in a standard way. Collections, whether small or massive, are arranged for searching and browsing in the most elegant and useful way ever devised by humans.
The Internet is disorganized in a way that mixes human and computer failings. Computers organize the Internet, but without any purpose in mind. Files are in order, but that doesn't make them easier to use, just easier for the the computer to retrieve. Human intervention makes the situation worse. It is possible to use metadata (a hidden portion of the HTML that makes up web pages) to provide subject headings, keywords and descriptions for web pages in a way that would mimic cataloging. On the whole, this has been a pipe dream. Most metadata is supplied by the author of the page, who is unlikely to have any skill in assigning subjects and is under no obligation to be consistent, accurate or truthful. All the incentives run the other way. They are not supplying metadata to help people decide if they want to visit the site, they are using it to build traffic of any kind.
Libraries have staff to assist users, while Net surfers are encouraged to flounder around. People expect to find what they are looking for at their library. When they can't, they know that help is at hand. Libraries have specially trained staff, intimately familiar with the collection to assist people. The staff is the most important part of the library, since a good staff can make up for collection shortcomings, but no collection has value without a quality staff to select, organize and assist in its use.
There is no help desk on the Internet. Many pages need special plug-ins to view properly and these change and upgrade at a dizzying speed. Knowing that it is easy to find something on the Internet, but difficult to find something specific, users are encouraged to surf. It is easy to identify people surfing a library's collection. They look lost. People surfing the Net are equally lost, but at least they are entertained. Too bad. If they had a librarian with them, they might learn something.
Edition note:
1.0 was posted on PUBLIB in 1995.
1.1 was published by School Library Journal later that year.
2.0, 2.1 and 2.2 were published on this site in 1999
3.0 was published on this site in February 2002.
Adapted from a chapter in the book Public Libraries, Technology and Community : a Neo-Traditionalist Approach by Andy Barnett, which is scheduled for publication by McFarland in Fall 2002.
Note: This page is not in the public domain, though it may be copied for any non-commercial use. I appreciate being informed if it is being posted, reprinted or used in a newsletter.