The academic library of 3017 utopia or dystopia
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This presentation was delivered by Steven Chang and Clare O'Hanlon at La Trobe University, as a reflection on the ALIA Information Online conference 2017 and its implications for the future of library work and harnessing disruption.
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The academic library of 3017 utopia or dystopia
- 1. The academic library of 3017: Utopia… …or dystopia? Steven Chang Senior Research Advisor (Library) La Trobe University Clare O’Hanlon Senior Learning Advisor (Library) La Trobe University
- 2. Imagine what library work will look like in 3017. Capture this in one or two of your own words.
- 7. Our academic library rainbow 3017 Radical collaboration Strength in diversity Exploration & experimentation Reflective practice
- 8. James Neal, University Librarian Emeritus, Colombia University https://informationonline.alia.org.au/content/21st-century-information-professional-chaos-breeds-life Paula Bray, DX Lab Leader, State Library of NSW https://informationonline.alia.org.au/content/lab-culture-does-petri-dish-approach-work Sebastian Chan, Chief Experience Officer, ACMI https://informationonline.alia.org.au/content/museum-public-library Vanessa Crosby and Liz Stokes, UNSW https://informationonline.alia.org.au/content/engaging-emerging-data-ecosystems-23-research-data-things-unsw- and-uts-library Kate Bunker & Dr Tatum McPherson-Cowie, ACU https://informationonline.alia.org.au/content/unlearnings-we-screenshot-0 ALIA Online 2017 presentations we cited
- 9. Image attribution By Dllu (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons By Anil Duth (Own work) [CC BY 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons Pixabay https://pixabay.com/en/glass-water-overturned-close-2242379/ https://pixabay.com/en/utopia-city-forward-skyscraper-1890514/
Editor's Notes
- CLARE We’d like to get you to think about the very distant future – the academic library of 3017 Will we survive the challenges of impending automation, or will we thrive by evolving to harness these disruptive trends? Utopia or dystopia?
- CLARE
- STEVEN We’re happy to see a lot of optimism in your imagined world of 3017 – but I want to just note some fears and trepidations about the darker side of the looming spectre of automation and what it means for the sustainability of library work. Both the industrial revolution and the digital revolution have shared in common a phenomenon of huge job losses following automation including the extinction of entire industries (e.g. manufacturing, and video rentals and BlockBuster) At ALIA Online, the conference opened with a bang, as we heard a striking talk James Neal, University Librarian at Colombia University, in his opening keynote, tried to address the question of “Where are we going?” Two words he included were survival and extinction Terminal extinction (termination of a species, no descendants) vs Phyletic extinction (also known as pseudo-extinction, where one species evolves into another) The dream of modern technology was that it would unchain us from manual work to do bigger and better things. But as we know now, there is nothing inevitable about automation that will free up human labour to work on more creative and complex pursuits. In a world of downsizing and cost cutting, any excuse can be made to reduce the size of our profession rather than enlarge it, and automation is one of them. How do ensure that automation will create new innovative roles like data wranglers, learning technologists, co-investigators, to support a flourishing evolution in the future of work for our librarian species, rather than a wasteland of terminal extinction?
- STEVEN Here’s an example we found of a world someone else has imagined which revolves around these exact questions of what *kind* of evolution we’ll be undergoing Here’s a blurb written about this novel, Rainbow’s End: In 2025, “University of California–San Diego faculty are protesting the university library’s destruction. Why is it set to be destroyed? That’s right–complete online databases that make all physical knowledge representation unnecessary. If you’re interested in reading about your job’s hypothetical end, this is the book for you” Definitely dystopian, but…
- STEVEN One of the valuable things we took from ALIA Online were discussions on how to turn this around. The actual title of James Neal’s keynote was Chaos Breeds Life Made me think of a concept coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb called ANTI-FRAGILITY – this is a property of systems that increase in resilience as a result of volatility, shocks, and failures. He explains that anti-fragility is fundamentally different to resiliency (which is recovering from failure) and robustness (which is resisting failure), because anti-fragility is about an adaptive system that gets better from shocks and stressors. But this is a big dream of a unicorn system that feels a long way from reality – so requires a huge turn-around… Neal expressed a call to arms for “war-like responses” to challenges Quoting Churchill on “extraordinary, hectic…schizophrenic vision” needed for a rapidly shifting librarianship “Radical collaboration…deep systemic partnerships” to move us past our traditions of “passive kumbaya” If the old world of work is about top-down monoliths… How can we embrace a new world of work that revolves around fluidity, adhocracy, and a mindset of openness to challenging rule-based culture? Is a horizontal workplace even possible in a large bureaucratic organization like a university? I’ll hand over to Clare to answer that question…!
- CLARE The ALIA Online keynote presentations by Paula Bray and Seb Chan illustrated examples of libraries and museums thriving and innovating in the chaotic digital environment through diverse, radical collaboration and by fostering a culture of prototyping, iteration, play, exploration, and design thinking. They suggested that this was particularly crucial in the digital environment where it is impossible to make perfect. Paula Bray in particular highlighted internal library collaboration between digital experience and indigenous services as well as with their community. From an academic library perspective, Liz Stokes (UTS) and Vanessa Crosby (UNSW) illustrated some great examples of non-hierarchical, peer-to-peer learning through communities of practice, play and reflection in the emerging and sometimes unknown and chaotic world of research data management. They discussed the use of epiphanies and storytelling to aid reflection and defeat imposter syndrome and the importance of scaffolding and contextualizing content as well as having an open and non-hierarchical approach where people from all parts of the library were welcome and encouraged to participate in order to facilitate community building. to add an element of play and make the learning experience enjoyable and thus further facilitate community building– they used mascots (Frank the Gnome, Candid the Unicorn) and memes. As Liz said, They “put the tada in metadata”. Kate Bunker and Tatum McPherson-Crowie from ACU argued that it was essential to acknowledge, reflect on and respond to failures (or unlearn them) in order to move on from them and avoid ‘epic fails’. In one example the 'fails’ were captured and shared in the form of screenshots on Snapchat that disappeared after a short amount of time and could even be made fun with filters. They emphasised the need to support colleagues rather than punish or blame them for making mistakes. Using Snapchat and other tools and strategies helped them build a sense of community by creating a safe, non-hierarchical and fun space for learning and reflection and helped staff be more open and vulnerable.
- CLARE Story time Attempting to bring it all together, here is what a day in the life of a librarian in 3017 (and perhaps even sooner) might look like It is a beautiful spring morning and the library is looking particularly fabulous surrounded by native plants and birds with hints of rainbow shining through the leaves. As I enter, I am greeted by friendly staff from student services, IT, learning futures and the library in the La Trobe red who are busy helping students connect with each other and information in order to navigate and solve their problems with university studies and systems. I pick up my coffee from the orange community café on my way help student counsellors set up the chill out lounge for our weekly book chat with students. Students switch off from technology and chat about challenges they have encountered and we recommend appropriately themed books to them (and very often recommend books to each other that we have not thought of). After this, I head off to the green heritage zone to co-facilitate a metadata party with records and archives staff that we designed to engage academics with recordkeeping and help them contribute to, reflect on and learn from our organisational history and knowledge. I hover quietly through the calm blue silent study zone to get to our lunchtime journal club in our community garden with colleagues resident library ducks (our mascots) in the community garden in order to recharge before a busy afternoon hacky hour in the purple research commons with students and researchers from history and health sciences. Just as I was about to leave for the day, my glasses sent a notification that a book recommended to me by a student earlier in the day had been retrieved from underground and was ready to be collected.