`We need libraries more than ever'

Published : Aug 26, 2005 00:00 IST

V. SRIDHAR

V. SRIDHAR

Interview with David S. Magier.

The world of libraries is undergoing a churn. The `information revolution', particularly the Internet, has had a profound effect on the way scholars do their work. Obviously it has also had an impact on librarians. However, the initial euphoria about the Net, that it would make libraries and librarians redundant, is yielding to a more balanced assessment.

The digital medium, particularly the Internet, offers new possibilities for scholars and library professionals. But this hinges crucially on international cooperation in preserving, conserving and organising library collections so that they can be shared by users globally. The Centre for South Asian Libraries (CSAL) is an example of such a collaborative venture. Unlike the colonial model, which resulted in collections being carted away from India, it works on the principle that by using digital technologies, material can be accessed by Western scholars without having to appropriate them physically. Sharing is thus a key word in this model.

David S. Magier is Director of Area Studies, Columbia University Libraries. He is also Librarian, South/Southeast Asian Studies, in Columbia. Before entering the field of library science he did his doctorate in linguistics. He has had a long association with India; his doctoral dissertation was on Rajasthani dialects, which he did from the University of California, at Berkeley.

Magier is also the president of the CSAL, which works with libraries in India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan (just starting) as well as those in the United Kingdom, United States, Japan, Australia and other countries where institutions have an interest in South Asia.

Librarians across the world consider Magier a pioneer in the use of Internet technologies for libraries. Since 1978, he has travelled all over the world training library professionals. In this interview he gave V. Sridhar in Chennai recently, he talks about the changing role of libraries and library professionals. An ardent advocate of open access, he also talks about what Western scholars and librarians are doing to counter the clout of large corporations that control the field of journal publishing. Excerpts:

What is the role of a library in the digital world? How have librarians coped with change?

More and more people are using digital information in a variety of ways - on their cell phones or accessing information from the Web. As society changes, and as people increasingly rely on electronic information, the role of the library essentially remains the same. Whatever the medium, the role of the librarian is to identify the most important information that people must use. This is especially so in a scholarly type of a library. A librarian must preserve the information, organise it and make it accessible to as many people as possible. That is the basic function of any librarian. Whether it is print or electronic, it does not really change.

Maybe the difference now is that there is an `information explosion'. Some people have speculated that because there is so much information available on the Internet, and because we have search engines like Google, we may not need libraries anymore. I think it is just the opposite. We need libraries and librarians more than ever before in order to make effective use of the information that is available. We need librarians to identify quality information, to preserve it, organise it and to make it accessible by cataloguing and data management. These are the hidden functions of librarians. It is just that we do not think of librarians in those terms. But the library professional has evolved to include electronic information in the same way as societies have evolved in using such information.

The general thinking seems to be that since the Web is accessible to people wherever they are, the library is redundant.

Yes, you still need a librarian. There are two perspectives to this. One, you need people trained in information literacy. It is a field of its own. How do you evaluate information? How to ensure that out of the sea of information that is available the best material - in terms of the usefulness of the content, in terms of its educational value and accuracy - can be easy to find? You can do a Google search on any subject and get a lot of hits on any subject you may choose. But whether the good ones are the ones you will find first is very much in doubt. You require a lot of intelligence to apply evaluation. That is the first point - evaluation.

Secondly, throughout most of the history of the evolution of human beings, the preservation of knowledge was in the form of written material. Despite a lot of ambitious projects the vast majority of human knowledge still exists in print, not in electronic form.

What percentage in your assessment?

I would not like to guess but I know it is not small. Take the case of the Columbia University library. We have nine million books and 35 million manuscripts. It is a vast wealthy library. The portion of that collection that you could find in electronic form - online or from commercial sources on a screen - would be less than 1 per cent. And yet we face a challenge. Young people, who are growing up in the digital era, expect that everything they need will come to them on their screens. They are not eager to go to the dusty stacks and look at old-fashioned books. It is constantly our effort to raise their awareness - that the books contain content that they will not get online and that they are just as important or even more important than some of the material that they can get on their screens. So, you need a balanced approach. You need both, electronic and print.

How has the role of the librarian changed in this evolving situation?

I think librarians need to make effective use of the evolving technologies. Technology enables all kinds of things. And when there are new technologies people rush in and try many new things. Of course, experimentation is good. The role of a good librarian is to look at the new technologies.

Librarians are not scientists but how can they apply new technologies to make knowledge more widely available? For example, there are a lot of things that an individual library cannot do on its own. Even if it may have a great collection it may not have enough resources. Take the Roja Muthiah Research Library [RMRL, in Chennai], for instance. It has a wonderful collection of unique material, important for scholars and students. It has socially significant material relating to a particular society. On its own, it can only go so far. But technology allows new kinds of collaborative projects. How to work with other institutions and partners around the world? Using network technologies it is now possible to share data and information to build an online environment that functions like a library. For more than 20 years I have trained librarians, scholars, students and government officials from around the world on how to use the Internet and how to network the information.

You are considered a pioneer in using the Internet technologies for libraries.

I have been using the Internet since 1978. The Internet was totally different then. It had no graphics, no multi-colour. There were no mice in use then. There was no www. There were only keyboard commands. We used telnet and gopher, early technologies that are not used much these days. I was using the Net for my own work in linguistics. In the library world they were just beginning to notice the existence of the Net. Initially librarians were saying: `What do we do with the Net? Should we start using it, or just ignore it? Is the information reliable? We know how to deal with books, let us just keep doing what we know.'

Gradually, users started demanding that libraries should help them find useful electronic information. So, there was need for a training programme for librarians to respond to this demand. They started looking for librarians who had a background or experience in working in the area. I was asked to devise a training programme. It was a very intensive programme - 40 hours of `total immersion'. I wrote a 450-page training manual and this programme covered every librarian at Columbia University. It was the first such programme in the world.

Other libraries heard of this and wanted to do a similar exercise. The point is that librarians needed to get trained to apply information literacy standards relevant in the case of books to information that was now becoming available in the electronic medium. The demand was very high. I was asked to go all over the U.S., and eventually, all over the world, to run such programmes. I have been to dozens of countries doing this.

But once people get trained, what do you do with the training that you now have? Okay, you can sit with the library patron and show them nice web sites and useful information. But beyond that, you would want to apply new ways to apply these technologies - not passively, like finding something and reading it on the screen - but actually create content online that make information accessible. This is new. In the past, libraries were simply collecting materials, organising them, cataloguing them and putting them on the shelves. They would have reference librarians to help the users. That is good. But now with electronic information, we have reached a point where libraries themselves are assembling information and presenting it online. And, this requires cooperation, especially international cooperation.

Is that also a way of avoiding duplication?

This is a very important issue. The potential loss because of the waste of human resource, time and money is very big. If two people are doing the same thing, it is a waste. But if 200 people are working, each doing their own local thing, without paying attention to what the others are doing, it is also a waste of effort. If we can collaborate and coordinate, while using the Internet to share the results, it would be useful while being efficient. This came out very well in your earlier interview with James Nye (Frontline, January 31, 2003). It is neither desirable nor necessary to grab collections. We (Harvard or Columbia universities) do not have to come to India and throw dollars to buy unique collections.

Now, the best results can be had by working with local partners, keeping the collections here, having them preserved, catalogued and indexed. Through cooperation this can be put online so that people can access it from anywhere. This is the trend now.

But who prioritises what is to be put online?

This is important because there is always more to be done than what resources permit. The first thing is to ensure that cooperation reduces duplication. Secondly, we try and take the accumulated resources - human as well as financial - and try to apply them in a prioritised fashion. But who should set the priorities? We have international meetings of librarians and scholars. The idea is to get a larger vision of what the priorities of the scholars are.

We know that these countries (in South Asia) are filled with many small local archives and library collections, which are unique. But they may not be well preserved. Or, somebody may have them, but may be just sitting on it; the doors may be locked and the person says: `I have my collection'. But it may not benefit anyone. The first step is to survey the resources that are available. CSAL supports this work in the region through its library surveys project. The next step is to find out what the major resources available in each locality are. Then we can sit with the scholars and prioritise. We can then say: `This material, in this language, of this era, is most needed now. Let us try and preserve this material by microfilming and digitising, catalogue and index it and make it globally available.'

You have said that funding for libraries after 9/11 in the U.S. has come down. How much have social sciences in general, and libraries in particular, suffered?

Remember, social sciences is a legitimate sphere of knowledge. A genuine approach to regional studies, say, South Asian studies, should be inter-disciplinary. You need a global view because you are talking about preserving all aspects of a culture, the accumulated knowledge of a civilisation.

Libraries are suffering. .... I think it is a cycle. At certain times social sciences received greater emphasis among the funding agencies but at other times history, arts and humanities received greater funding. Currently, if you are able to draw a line to contemporary affairs, you are more likely to get funding from foundations, governments and other agencies. But there are still large interest groups who understand that the world of today comes from the world of yesterday. If you do not have history, you do not have knowledge of culture, and you cannot really understand where we are today. You need the full view to understand a civilisation. I think educators understand this, but sometimes funding agencies do not. They tend to respond to short-term factors. After something like 9/11, they have started funding areas such as international affairs more.

We have our work cut out. It is very clear how much there is. What is not clear is how to prioritise the work. The first step, before we can even tackle the problem, is finding appropriate partners. It is not like pumping in dollars - a foreign aid type of thing. It is a matter of finding people with a vision and harness institutions that are ready to think in new ways and take on new tasks.

One problem with the library world in general all over the world is that it is conservative. It is conservative in the sense that a lot of professionals are taught, based on traditional routines, certain routine ways of behaviour - processing, cataloguing and so on.

Can you explain that in concrete terms?

I guess the most concrete way is to say that a lot of the training of librarians has always been how to catalogue a book, how to preserve it and so on? It is very focussed on the process, rather than strategy. Librarians need to have long-term strategy as well. This means working with partners who not only understand the process but also have the ability to step back and look at the big picture. They need to ask: `We are now in a digital era. This is how people are reading the information, this is the flow of what scholars need and how can we serve those needs most effectively?' We need partners with that kind of visionary thinking. Those are the ones we want to hook up with and try and bring funds from any funding source to move the agenda forward.

How has the CSAL's collaborative programme evolved? Where is it heading?

It started very modestly. Each of us has our own local mandates, to serve the needs of our own institutions. But at some point we realised that if we only served the local needs through local resources, we will never make it. That is what I meant by strategy, understanding the bigger picture. Even in the initial stages (the late 1980s) ...

Did this have something to do with the potential of utilising the Internet?

No, it did not start because of the Net. Librarians themselves had figured out the need for cooperation. They realised that they could not do everything on their own. But what the Net made possible was, gradually, since the 1990s, the extension of the culture of cooperation among libraries in the U.S. to the international realm. It was no longer just Columbia talking to Harvard and Chicago; it became Columbia-Harvard-Chicago-Berkeley talking to libraries such as the RMRL, the Sundarayya Vignana Kendram (SVK) in Hyderabad and the Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya in Kathmandu. The idea was now to get the partners here (South Asia) to use technologies in the collaborative venture.

The Net facilitated this; without the Net it would have been very hard. You know about the Urdu collection in the SVK. That is just one example. To purchase the collection, rescue it and save it for library use required lots of money, initial capital. Where did that money come from? Libraries such as those in Chicago and Columbia each put in $10,000. The librarians who were in charge of South Asia, like me and James Nye, had to take the money from our budgets which were normally used for buying books there and spend it here. But the collection did not come to the U.S. It stayed in India. How do I explain to my boss there that I do not have anything to show for having spent $10,000? What I can show is that users in my university can now access the material using the Net. This is the new way. Without the Net this would not have been possible, or at least, much more difficult. Of course, even without the Net it would still be right to preserve, catalogue and microfilm the material. But having the Net has made it easier to justify the expenses because the benefits are now available to a much wider universe.

The path forward for us is two-fold. One is to continue the work of surveying, as broadly as possible, down to even local archives and private archives. This will help us understand what are the gems, the unique material that people do not know exists or they know they exist but have no access to. Once we get fully into this, the next step is to get the scholars to help us prioritise the material throughout the subcontinent for preservation and cataloguing. I would say that digitisation is secondary. The first line of defence is preserving the material. It is very depressing when you see some of the material in some of these libraries. Books and manuscripts are crumbling. They are gone. It is history being wiped out. The first thing is to rescue these materials. Once this is done, we have to make it available to as wide an audience as possible.

It always seems that it is already too late to preserve collections, which are in danger ...

Things will disappear. We cannot do everything. But we also cannot afford to feel defeated. Every day, books that would have disappeared are being saved for future generations. When material is microfilmed it is preserved in a medium that will past at least 400 years. We cannot feel defeated because we know we are making progress. Of course, progress can never be as fast as we would like. Libraries are always under-staffed and under-funded, but they are still making progress. Technology has made things easier for us. It has made things more cost-effective. It has also changed the sociological environment in which librarians work. In the old days you had librarians sitting in their office in the basement with their books. It was people, books and catalogue cards; bas [in Hindi], that was it. Now the profession is looking outward. It is now books and people, around the world. There is recognition of the connectedness of the community, that we have to work together because we are all addressing the same issue.

You have worked in libraries for a long time. What changes have you noticed about the way they function and how they are used?

In terms of how they function, libraries are slow in changing. I said earlier that they are conservative. They have traditional ways of doing things. In the old days a library may have been viewed as being simply a warehouse of books. The view of what a library is for has changed. It is not just a place to keep the books. It is actually meant to serve the information needs. It is a much more dynamic view. In the old days - and the old days lasted until not so long ago - we had a whole generation of people who were trained in that narrow view of libraries. The administrators of libraries have been slow to pick up the new view. I am not complaining. It is just that it has been a natural evolution, which has reflected a generational change. Young people growing up in the digital world are going to become the administrators. They will have a different view of what it means to serve the information needs. That is why I think librarian training is extremely important.

You have been visiting Indian libraries for several years now. What changes do you see in them?

I think we are starting to see a bigger difference among libraries in terms of their pace of change. There are a large number libraries which are changing slowly, if at all they are. You also have some high-profile libraries such as the RMRL, which have started to capture headlines. They are changing more rapidly. They are trying to adapt. These libraries are applying technology and show things to people that would open their eyes (about Tamil studies, for example, in the RMRL). If other libraries, which may have excellent collections, do not look at the big picture and adapt themselves to change, they may be left behind.

The people who run a library, which has been around for a long time, tend to feel possessive about the collection. I can understand this. For 18 years I have been shaping the collection of South Asia at Columbia. I take pride in the fact that my work is reflected there. But I get much more pride if everybody from around the world can use that. If I just kept it locked up like my private stamp collection, what good does it do anybody? There has to be a balance between a sense of proprietary pride and the realisation that the value of something you own is only useful if it serves people. Then, access is more important than ownership. That is the bottom line.

People are finding that balance slowly. Along the way they would have different degrees of suspicion about change. They may ask: `Who is this fellow from New York or Chicago who wants to microfilm our collection. Why? Is it for commercial exploitation?' So, we have to work hard to gain trust. We have to show people that our agenda will benefit them as much as us, that the benefits will be global.

You have also been championing Open Access. Can you tell us something about your work in this field?

It is a vast field. The open access movement has grown in the last few years, especially in the West. There is greater realisation that if we do not observe and react to the flow of information in terms of its ownership, there will be consolidation of ownership. Large corporations will control larger and larger quantities of content and knowledge. Owning information is not like owning a factory. When you own information and you restrict access for profit, it has negative consequences for society. Society has to find a way to deal with the problem. Open access is a way in which libraries and scholars try and gain some power in the equation with commercial interests so that we do not get into a situation of entirely monopolised content. It is not socialism, but it is simply a statement that there needs to be a balance for the sake of society. Otherwise, all the information will be only available to the very rich or to large institutions paying for super expensive journals. It would not be appropriate for the field of scholarly study; it is certainly not appropriate for the development of societies.

How do you correct the imbalance?

There are ways. There are very intelligent things that people can do to counteract this. A corporation may own a journal and they may have a monopoly over it. They can charge what they want and we have to pay. But where did the articles in the journal come from? Who wrote them? Not the corporations. It is the scholars who wrote them. They are not getting any money. Their motivation to write is not from profit.

The scholar says: `I have done my research. I am writing an article so that the rest of the world knows what I have done.' It is a question of prestige. It is a question of sharing the information, of scholarly communication. So, what if they do not give their articles to the journals published by the corporations, and instead, give it to an open access journal? They can work with the universities and libraries to find ways to disseminate their articles in new ways, employing new kinds of publishing that go around the middle man.

Library leaders have formed lobbying groups that work with government agencies to try and bring in legislation that curbs monopolistic tendencies. Librarians are also working with scholars to create new publishing mechanisms. There are the new online journals that are competing but are not commercial operations. Some of them are free, but some of them are not - they are simply run on a cost recovery basis. Some of them even have a system by which scholars who are publishing pay a small amount to help fund the infrastructure that disseminates their work to the rest of the world.

Sign in to Unlock member-only benefits!
  • Bookmark stories to read later.
  • Comment on stories to start conversations.
  • Subscribe to our newsletters.
  • Get notified about discounts and offers to our products.
Sign in

Comments

Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. They cannot be abusive or personal. Please abide to our community guidelines for posting your comment