A knowledge management perspective on the serial futures of libraries --
Georgia Harper, Fall 2006
Overview
Librarians are quintessential knowledge managers. In fact, the entire field of “library science” evolved as the solution to the problem of how to help people find what they wanted to read from among the explosion of books made possible with the invention of the printing press (Maltz & Ehrlich, 1995, p. 1). Whether librarians work in museums or archives, or public, academic, school, or special libraries, they collect and organize knowledge assets such as books, recordings, journals, artworks, sculpture, and artifacts of every type, and provide information and knowledge about the collection to help patrons find and use these assets. They do this for the most part as a public service, using public subsidies to fulfill the important policy objective of facilitating public access to information. “[A] people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives” (James Madison, 1822).
Librarians and libraries have had this field mostly to themselves for more than a century. Their knowledge management systems, among them cataloging, indexing, interlibrary loan and the reference desks they staff, are designed for managing knowledge about physical objects that reside in physical slots on physical shelves. All of that is changing. New types of service providers, whose focus, values and service products are different from those of the library, are competing with libraries to provide information about and access to the world’s knowledge assets, including the assets in libraries. These new service providers conceive of knowledge assets divorced from the physical locations to which librarians remain wedded. Where shelf space and concern for the time it takes to find something on a shelf no longer exist, new knowledge managers deal with “a world of infinite variety and little predetermined order; a world of dynamic structure, shaped differently for each observer” (Anderson, 2006, p. 159).
Additionally, library collections and catalogs hold an ever-decreasing percentage of the world’s knowledge, and are used by fewer and fewer patrons every day (Calhoun, 2005; De Rosa, Dempsey & Wilson, 2004; Marcum, 2005; Rainie & Shermak, n.d.). Changes such as these cannot safely be ignored. Whether one manages knowledge and information about books, music, movies, artwork or any other cultural artifact, the business is changing, radically. Coping with this change requires that libraries, librarians, and the systems they use to create, manage and transfer knowledge change too (Dempsey, 2006).
The challenges I will describe in this paper affect the knowledge management strategies of all types of libraries, but some types of related cultural institutions have additional social and cultural functions that may be less vulnerable to disruption. For example, museums are more likely than public or academic libraries to be physical destinations in the cultural milieu of the future. Special collections and archives are also likely to continue to attract visitors to their physical locations even after the information contained in their holdings is available online. Research libraries and school libraries that have special relationships with teachers, students, faculty and researchers are similarly likely to retain a physical importance in the life of their communities of specialized patrons. But academic and public libraries whose principle functions revolve around managing and lending collections of books are likely to suffer catastrophic consequences of failure to act today. Nevertheless, all risk seeing their knowledge management function stripped from their portfolios if they wait too long to act.
Get with the program
This paper’s message is simple. The time to act is now. The argument opens with four different perspectives on the challenge libraries face if they want to keep their customers. First, Clayton Christensen’s, The Innovator’s Dilemma, describes the forces at work when radically new ways of doing business upset traditional approaches, and suggests how to structure the library’s innovative services development effort to best succeed in this challenging environment (Christensen, 2006/1997). The next three views suggest knowledge management strategies that take advantage of the disruptive opportunities the Internet makes possible. The fifth section is a summary. The sixth section poses more fundamental questions about the future. Section seven is the conclusion.
1. The Innovator’s Dilemma
Innovations make our lives easier. Innovations make our lives more complicated. New things are fun. New things are scary. Like it or not, new is everywhere. How people cope with new can make a very big difference in their lives, especially if they are at the helm of big businesses, or even big libraries. The Innovator’s Dilemma describes how even well-managed businesses, often the leaders in their industries, can fall victim to the effects of disruptive innovations (Christensen, 2006/1997). Disruptive innovations usually “come out of left field” with inferior functionality at first, but they find niche markets, grow and improve. Eventually they overtake their industry’s leaders who have often waited years to figure out how to use the disruptive inventions for their existing customers. In fact industry leaders ignore these new inventions precisely because they do not appeal to their best customers. Christensen chronicles repeated failures in the disk drive industry, discount merchandising, the steel industry, motorcycles, electric motor controls and mechanical excavators, among many others, to capitalize on disruptive technologies, even when those same companies were able effectively to capitalize on both modest and radical innovations that helped to sustain their growth in existing markets.
Should libraries care about disruptive technologies and business failures?
You can bet on it.
Failure to act in the face of disruptive technology is nothing new. It was first described in 1942 by Joseph Schumpeter in the book, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, as “creative destruction.” Examples are everywhere as Christensen’s analyses make clear (2006). Lawrence Lessig relies on this construct to explain how telecommunications industry players resorted to legal privileges to prop up older technologies that would not otherwise have survived in head-to-head competition with newer disruptive technologies (Lessig, 2001). Wikipedia’s creative destruction entry contains citations to many authors who rely on this theory to explain various economic upheavals (“Creative destruction,” n.d.).
Christensen does not examine the Internet, but it offers countless examples of both sustaining and disruptive technologies, some of which are destroying markets for traditional goods and services like those libraries offer. The Internet (the network itself) is a platform for innovation (Lessig, 2001). The Web, one of the best exemplars, further creates new opportunities to organize, manage and provide access to the same knowledge libraries have been managing physically. Thus far, most libraries have used the Web to implement incremental sustaining changes, such as computerizing catalog records and collection management, changes that improve the delivery of products and services to current customers. But, as Christensen points out, the race to implement sustaining technologies is not where the competition that will crush industry leaders comes from – it comes from implementing the disruptive aspects of a new technology, usually by newcomers serving users the mainstream ignores, or worse, disdains. Thus, entrepreneurs such as search engine company Google, and product aggregator Amazon, see an opportunity for new, fundamentally different ways of doing not only the same things, but entirely new things. These new services will destroy the market for the kind of knowledge management service libraries provide.
Google and Amazon started small and could be easily dismissed. At first they only appealed to those who are not even among a library’s customer base, then perhaps to fringe segments of the customer base. But over time, the quality, functionality and cost of their innovative services improved enabling them to attract more and more “good” library customers away. Eventually the library’s base will be gone. Without customers, even big libraries can collapse.
Anderson writes compellingly about this phenomenon in the digital world in The Long Tail (2006). He shows how Internet based companies exploit disruptive Internet technologies to shift demand away from established businesses and other service providers like libraries. He documents the shifts in music, video, books, even rice pudding! He shows how the Internet has energized the used book market, whose vendors, like libraries, exist as separate small repositories where it is difficult for a customer to be sure of finding any particular book. Today, used books sell right along side new books at Amazon, at a substantial discount.
These changes threaten libraries today. Debates occurring in Lawrence Kansas and even here in Austin illustrate how libraries face their demise. The voters who must approve big bond proposals to build new libraries variously see the library as irrelevant at one extreme, vaguely relevant in the middle and extremely important at the other extreme (Hirschey, 2006). Libraries simply have to recognize that a significant and probably growing segment of their support (that is, their public financial support) is eroding as former patrons find new ways to get information. Libraries thus, must adapt to the new state of their industry with new competitors like Google and Amazon, who take advantage of what the Internet enables, to facilitate self-directed information search and retrieval.
Google and other search engines cater to down-market customers who are not the library’s main clientele. They do not care if the new products or services are as good as a library’s – the services and products have other qualities that are more important than the qualities that library services possess. They are quicker, easier and, well, they are “good enough.” This is classic disruptive technology. Christensen would therefore caution that the library’s future in the knowledge management business is very limited: most industry leaders who shun disruptive technologies are eventually forced out of business.
Unfortunately, the more common response from industry leaders is to dismiss technologies that appeal only to small down-market customers because the technologies’ qualities fall below the performance threshold the industry’s current customers expect. Blogs are an example. Mainstream media disdains them because they are not accurate or professional – but “blogs pick off the mainstream media’s customers one at a time by being niche where their old-media precursors are mass.” (Anderson, 2006, p. 186). Similarly, librarians might view Google’s quick, easy and just good enough search qualities as unacceptable by library standards (“down-market” and inferior). Such search results are neither accurate, complete, nor tailored appropriately. A search query that returns 10,000 responses, the vast majority of which will be entirely irrelevant, cannot be compared to a finely honed, skilled, personal response to a reference inquiry. But Google (and Amazon) are picking off library customers one by one …
Ultimately, Christensen recommends that successful business leaders who do not want to be crushed by disruptive technology entrepreneurs respond to such innovations differently. He notes that the values and processes of large established businesses are inherently unsuited to exploiting “down-markets,” and he recommends locating the opportunity to exploit the new technologies within small independent sub-units or spin-offs to facilitate success. These types of entities are much better able to develop a disruptive technology in small new markets, and grow the technology into products and services that will one day appeal to mainstream customers. He cites as examples large high-tech companies that acquire small companies without merging their operations into the parent, and that spin off divisions responsible for products that only have small niche markets.
2. The Future of Work
Thomas W. Malone’s, The Future of Work, augments Christensen’s advice by offering insight into the management structure Christensen’s independent sub-units or spin-offs should have to succeed (2004). He observes that reductions in the cost of communication make decentralized governance and decision-making possible. He believes that smaller, less structured, more democratic business organizations tend to be more highly motivated, more flexible and more creative. Such qualities have obvious advantages in responding to disruptive technologies.
Many businesses are either already decentralized (loosely hierarchical) or moving in that direction. For example, Linux and Wikipedia illustrate creativity and freedom within loose hierarchies and can claim tremendous accomplishments without much centralized control. Research universities and consulting firms typically have the same qualities. Whole Foods stands as an example of a business that works on a democratic principle: team members vote on whether to retain new hires after an initial 30 day trial period. eBay illustrates participatory democracy where the buyers and sellers who use the service are constantly polled about how the site works. The “E-Lance Economy,” eBay, and the Internet itself exemplify market-driven decision-making, where the fundamental business unit can be a single person who contracts with others to accomplish the various goals of an integrated business concern. This kind of organization allows individuals to fully integrate their personal values into their work, the ultimate in benefits, according to Malone. He also observes that when decentralized companies grow and succeed, they take away market share from those that are centralized, less flexible and creative, echoing Christensen’s arguments.
Other authors amplify Malone’s ideas. Anderson illustrates how democratizing the means of production and distribution lowers the cost of transactions in information, and enables an explosion of creativity (2006). More producers, more products, and more innovative technologies for finding them (such as collaborative filters) allow better matches between new products and new markets (Anderson, 2006; Maltz, 1995). Decentralizing decision-making to the market itself directly competes with decision-making by centralized gatekeepers (who try to decide what should make it to market at all) by benefiting both buyers and sellers alike.
Thus, libraries should take advantage of the Internet’s downward pressure on communication costs to better compete with other information providers for customers. They can utilize decentralized, more creative, flexible and motivated business organizations, and support user-centered, self-directed information search and retrieval. Libraries should delegate significant authority for decision-making further down their hierarchical structures. The small sub-units or spin-outs Christensen recommends need to be run by smart individuals empowered to think differently about how to achieve institutional goals.
Other of Malone’s principles apply to managing library customers. They should be coordinated and cultivated rather than commanded or controlled. Librarians might cultivate unlikely patrons by catering to their strengths such as self-direction and motivation. For example, where a more typical reference interaction might involve finding what the patron wants, an interaction with a more independent seeker could involve providing Web access to all the information needed to enable the patron to conduct her own search, in effect a form of instruction about how to do a good online search. The patron might not find “as good” an answer, but again, that’s not necessarily as important to her as it is to the librarian.
Cultivation could also mean trusting customers to decide how much personal information to share with libraries to enable more powerful collaborative filtering services (Albanese, 2006a). Libraries might also consider coordinating with other libraries to minimize wasteful duplication of effort, for example eliminating local catalogs and freeing the time and money devoted to them to focus on newer more innovative services (Calhoun, 2006; Marcum, 2005; Racine, 2006).
3. Small Pieces Loosely Joined
David Weinberger’s, Small Pieces Loosely Joined, jokingly calls itself a unified theory of the Web (2002). The book is about what the Internet enables and what it shows us about ourselves. He says the Web has exploded long-held assumptions about space, time, matter, who we are, and how we learn. He calls the Web a disruptive technology, echoing Christensen’s terminology. The qualities that Weinberger ascribes to the Web definitely fit the description.
Weinberger would probably agree that libraries should exploit what the Web is best at, recognize what it enables, and stop trying to overcome people’s natural tendency to embrace it as “the” solution to every problem, if they want to be successful in the future. It short, it really has changed everything. He offers a poignant example from his personal experience:
So, this little Mosaic viewer wasn't a real threat. Oh, it was a nice enough toy, but the big time corporations we were dealing with — aircraft manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, multinationals that practically had their own governments — wouldn't be satisfied with such a dinky little piece of software.
Thus did denial set in (Weinberger, 2002, p. viii).
Anderson makes similar observations in quoting Paul Graham’s description of the “grain” of the Web, and how Google is aligned with it, making what Google does seem effortless (2006, p. 70). Anderson cites MySpace as naturally exploiting the Web’s strengths, aggregating music with the people who listen to it and in turn generate more content about the music in reviews, news and other fan ephemera (p. 89). Christensen would agree, had he spoken about the Web – identify its qualities that may not appeal to current customers; find the customers they do appeal to and match them to a service you can provide with the disruptive technology. Albanese recognizes the same phenomenon in urging libraries to embrace social networking tools to better manage access to their collections (Albanese, 2006a).
Libraries can readily apply Weinberger’s observations: the physical constraints that made libraries valuable collections of real-world information are falling away, and in the virtual world, connection with information and with the people who can help us to grapple with and understand it is easy and effortless. Libraries must take more advantage of people’s connectedness to each other, not just to the library. They can offer more appealing views into their stores of knowledge by utilizing recommender systems, reader reviews, best seller lists, ways to organize and share reading lists, ways to meet people who are interested in the same books and documents – online book clubs, in effect. Features such as rank by price, author, genre, “others like this,” “others also bought,” links to concordances, tags and text analyses are proving valuable to buyers and sellers alike. Amazon is joined by many other sites, such as gnooks and KindaKarma, in connecting people and information in new ways. Libraries should also adapt and connect their knowledge assets to people in social groups using new knowledge management systems.
4. Working Knowledge
Davenport and Prusak’s 1998 work, Working Knowledge, provides a fourth framework within which to view the library’s role in knowledge management. The authors recommend that knowledge should be managed at every stage of development – from creation, through codification, and when transferred. Each step in this process offers opportunities to better exploit what an organization knows. The authors usefully distinguish explicit knowledge, “know-what” that is relatively easier to document and transfer, from implicit knowledge, “know-how” that is quite challenging to capture. Each requires a different strategy to manage effectively.
The authors address directly the role that librarians should play in organizations that desire to better capture and exploit knowledge, concluding that librarians “will have to change their objectives, activities and cultural predispositions,” if they are to thrive in the new world of knowledge management (1998, p. 111).
It is certainly true that the library adds value to information when it organizes works, indexes them and provides explicit information to patrons, such as bibliographic records and information, and more subjective information that is hard to articulate, such as research strategies and tips for finding difficult types of items. Libraries also add value when they create and share knowledge about how to find the works located in their physical collections through finding aids and organizational signs. Getting at this knowledge, however, requires a trip to the library.
Today a patron can acquire information and knowledge without help from the library. The library cannot transfer specialized knowledge if the patron is not interested. Recall also that the share of the world’s knowledge contained in any one library collection is a small fraction of what is available to the patron, and a shrinking fraction at that. And consider as well the expanding used book market that delivers books to the door for less than the cost of interlibrary loan. The future of library knowledge management looks bleak indeed (Albanese, 2006a; Anderson, 2006).
For many purposes today, thrown together, on-the-fly search results are acceptable, but can more sophisticated, nuanced knowledge about what’s available be “placed on the screen” along with less valuable, perhaps less accurate, probably incomplete results?
Several initiatives will try to answer these questions: the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), which already provides online access to its bibliographic records (WorldCat beta, 2006), is working with search engine companies to make library holdings contained in OCLC’s database available right alongside Web documents and pointers to books for sale in Yahoo! and Google search results (Open WorldCat, 2006). OCLC also enables customers to borrow from libraries other than those nearby (online interlibrary loan) with WorldCat Resource Sharing (2006). Might these efforts help libraries to serve users who are not motivated to “visit the library,” even virtually? Or will the market for Web-based knowledge under-price even an ostensibly “free” library service if the library’s cost to create, codify and transfer knowledge is too high?
The bottom line is that cost-intensive knowledge management must compete with automated Web-based services. Acquiring knowledge by searching for, finding, and borrowing (and returning) a book is expensive. De Rosa, et al. note that in 2003 it cost a borrower with an annual income of $50,000 about $26.00 (apparently not counting the cost of gasoline) to come to the library, borrow a book and return it (2004, p. 8). If it costs the same or less in time and money to buy a new or used book from Amazon or the local book store, what is the future of library knowledge management, even services that fully utilize all the Internet enables? Indeed, what is the future of borrowing from shared collections?
5. Innovative Knowledge Management Directions
Libraries may be at a crossroads with the legacy knowledge management systems they currently use, but there are still many options going forward. It may be fruitful, however, to think in terms of serial futures: 10 years, 20 years, and 30 years out. There are probably those who believe there is no future for libraries’ complex knowledge management systems. One need only study OCLC’s Social Landscape and Christensen’s charts and graphs to conclude that this may well be true, especially if libraries do nothing in response to the challenges facing them (Christensen, 2006; De Rosa et al., 2004). But they still must get from here to there. Doing business as usual, then having a big “going out of business sale” and closing the doors is not a plan.
The next 10 years. One realistic path forward would include adapting to disruptive technologies by reaching out to customers who are different from the traditional base. Libraries can do much more to make the information, data and knowledge they manage as easy to access as all the other information, data and knowledge freely available elsewhere. The down-market for fast, easy and cheap has the potential to become the main market as search capabilities, automatic cataloging and indexing, and digital delivery and reading technologies improve. Today many savvy consumers love library services, but some day, they’ll be able to have most everything libraries offer, with amazing bells and whistles as well. If libraries want to be the entities offering them those services when that day comes, they must get on board now, according to Christensen. Their purely traditional service customers will dwindle to zero.
But how libraries deploy new systems is as important as what they deploy. For example, social networking systems and collaborative filtering are not a good fit with traditional library processes or values and must be developed within separate organizational structures to assure their success (2006, p. 114). Albanese points to a fundamental conflict that explains the value misfit: the ethical obligation to protect patron privacy interferes fundamentally with meeting patron’s needs through social networking and collaborative filtering technologies and innovative services such as reader reservation lists (2006a; “Code of Ethics,” 1995). He observes, however, that adult consumers have made up their minds about how much privacy they want in other contexts, and should be allowed to do so in libraries. Until resolved, however, this conflict would seem to require the deployment of technologies that retain individually identifiable information in spin-offs, with other names besides “libraries.” Racine also suggests a change of name for innovative services, to downplay the association of libraries with “only” books in the minds of many information consumers (2006; De Rosa et al., 2004).
The next 20 years. Anderson indicates that vendors must reduce the cost to deliver items in their inventory that may not have wide appeal as close as possible to zero. But the Open WorldCat plan to make lending as easy as buying (“get it now from a library”) still passes costs, in time and money, to the customer. Unless these costs are lower than competitors’ costs for selling and delivering both new and used books to the door or desktop, Open WorldCat probably will not succeed. In fact, its initiatives could well be characterized as sustaining rather than disruptive. Christensen would warn that such strategies often fail. Digital delivery is probably the only viable alternative for lending in the future, especially as it becomes commonplace for purchases. But then digital borrowing would be indistinguishable from “pay-per-view,” simply one choice among many, for those who want only temporary or limited access to materials.
The next 30 years. Ultimately, the future of the book may be completely different from anything current business models contemplate (Lynch, 2001; Videl, n.d.). The networked book, media rich and fully integrated with other texts and media, and freely available to anyone connected to the network, is not so farfetched as it might seem today (Videl). Although publishers depend on sales of copies to generate profits, there is evidence that some authors are not following this model. Each author today has a choice, and some are choosing to distribute their works without imposing cost-related access barriers on their audiences, for example, by publishing with Creative Commons licenses or through any number of other online, open access Web sites (Creative Commons, 2006; Bailey, 2006).
The explosion of blogs attests to the utility of publishing models not predicated on controlling access to and use of copies. Software to democratize production and distribution is flooding the market (Anderson, 2006, p. 52). Alternative publishing models are disruptive technologies that will one day compete head-to-head with New York’s powerful publishing houses. Controlling, counting, and selling copies is not the only way authors can make their living – it is just the traditional way with physical books. The mainstream never sees disruptive technologies as desirable at first. But they do not stay undesirable very long. When their day comes, as Christensen would predict it surely will, will lending have any role to play at all?
Back to the near future. As for those many years before new markets and business models mature potentially taking all the libraries’ borrowers with them, libraries still must satisfy demand for the knowledge management services they currently offer such as the reference desk, online catalog records, and physical access to analog collections. Additionally, libraries exist as public places, which have value aside from the service of knowledge management.
Thus, while libraries adapt as best they can to disruptive technologies, they still must advertise aggressively what they are, what they have, where they are going with service and how they provide value. So, part of their resources must go to sustain and energize their base and part must go to market to the new down-market customers – no small task.
6. Future Research
Anderson suggests that when people can access once obscure resources and can rely on filters and recommenders to decide what they want to read, watch or listen to, demand for individual items held in library collections will rise. Will libraries have a role in meeting that demand?
There seem to be two competing visions for the future of the book (Institute for the Future, 2006; Lynch, 2001). On the one hand the public can access on the Web increasing amounts of data, information and knowledge, including books, for free or licensed under terms that allow relatively free use. These free resources include documents of every description, newspapers, articles on every subject imaginable, open access scholarly journals, Creative Commons licensed media of all kinds, free downloads of music, images, video and software.
On the other hand, publishers offer the public ebooks saddled with digital restrictions technology and contracts designed to lock down the content, prevent creative personal use of it, and separate it from the network of social uses. Traditionally, libraries have collected publishers’ works and made them available for temporary uses (borrowing), publicly subsidizing time-limited access to otherwise costly information. Let’s assume for the moment that libraries can continue to manage subsidized public access to a locked-down collection in collaboration with its vendors, but what might be their role in the first domain, alongside or in collaboration with Google, including but not limited to Google Book Search and Google Scholar, MySpace, and the myriad of other organizers and managers of knowledge freely available on the Web?
Taking this line of thought one step further, and acknowledging that the library’s future is inextricably bound up with the book’s future, isn’t the networked book we see on the Web today, freely available, interactive, rich with cultural expression, a disruptive innovation that may eventually topple not only publishers but destroy the market for the libraries’ collecting, storing, maintaining and lending functions related to those publishers’ properties?
If books that reside on and are fully a part of the network flourish, is the social policy of subsidizing access to information that has thus far been implemented by publicly funding libraries, satisfied instead by simply subsidizing access to the network?
Assuming that publishers will continue to sell and offer views of (borrowing) cultural expression locked down and separated from the network, will we achieve the public policy of subsidizing access to this kind of resource by subsidizing pay-per-view for a library’s patron base?
In either of these competing visions of the future, is there any role for a library as collector and manager of physical objects? Assuming yes, what is that role? Assuming no, what other library functions requiring physical space and human interaction might we predict would continue into the near-term, mid- and long-range futures, and what would that space and those interactions look like? In other words, what should the library of the future, built today, look like, and who will work there? What will they manage, and for whom?
7. Conclusion
Libraries must find, fund and empower creative, entrepreneurially-minded individuals to envision the series of steps that, when taken seriously, will create a viable path forward. Those who care about the library’s social function today and who believe libraries have a role to play in the future must be fully engaged in figuring out what that role will be. The highly innovative and super-competitive networked environment demands this of those who merely do not want to be left behind, and those who wish to lead in exploiting the opportunities the network offers. Long-term strategic planning requires dedicated resources. Libraries must dedicate them now.
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