Get thee to a Library?

What is it good for? Potentially quite a lot of we get it right and maybe we must. At least we have to be able to access the source documents to vet what large language models throw back at us.

Coming towards New Year at some haste, why not commit the sin of starting a Substack post with a rhetorical question? See what I did there? Happy New Year to all who celebrate and do we have a plan for what we expect from publishers and libraries in the new year?

I have always loved libraries, beginning with the school library where the librarian would insist that we had to pick a book with a dull cover if we wanted to also borrow once with an exciting action filled picture on the front. Publishing is another love of mine and I have thoroughly enjoyed being one of the editors of medical journals.

This post is triggered by three headlines I came across in the last week. One was about the future of libraries and the divided responsibility for providing them as well as their somewhat unclear mission and role. The second was a LinkedIn post rightly, I think, taking scientific publishing to task for asking authors to pay to publish their work while expecting them to provide peer reviews for free, and then charge others to read. Open Access is essentially asking researchers to siphon money out of research grants and pay steep fees to publishers and this does obviously not sit well with funders, universities or researchers. Some funders will demand that researchers pay for the most expensive variant of Open Access, yet not fund the cost - I’m at looking at you there NIH. The third post was a reflection that holding and monetizing data was skewed across the Atlantic and that Americans were unlikely to lie back and accept a situation where Europe controlled 90% of the digital services served up to American consumers. I think you may beginning to guess what I think about all this.

Our local library has abandoned much of the traditional library service and become a citizen services hub, i.e. this is where the Local Authority will meet you. It is the passport office, birth and marriages (well the paperwork, or should I say bytework), a youth action bakery, the internet cafe and it will lend you books, DVDs (remember those?), computer games, board games, magazines and even let you read printed newspapers. This is great because the place is very unlikely to close down. What is less clear is how many trained librarians work there and what would happen if I went to them to ask for help in, say, verifying a claim made by an internet news source that I suspected to be providing factually false information. I don’t think they would direct me to wikipedia or google, and they would be able to order books in on specialist topics from other libraries if needed. Most people would do this on their computer at home though but users have different skills and in a democracy we can’t expect to get away with leaving part of the electorate out of the loop.

Oddly enough, the main strength I see in books is that they are (acidic paper aside) stable records and that forging them is fairly expensive. Needless to say, they can hold huge untruths but the untruth will be the same if you open them fifteen seconds later, unlike the fluid internet. It is also helpful to have a physical road atlas of the country in the event of Google Maps (other services are available) stop working for a fortnight. This is not a Substack about prepping but the internet is nice as long as it works and eBooks and pdfs are magnificent time savers.

Is the role of librarians - and by extension libraries - in the next decade not going to be about helping us curate information and educating us about how we can vet and verify what may be amplified in algorithms to come across as perhaps a majority view or interpretation in our personal bubble of incoming information? But I don’t think many libraries will be able to hold physical books in ‘stacks’ below ground as inmutable records for us to request when it comes to recent history and recent science. Let’s go out on a limb and imagine that blockchains could provide the inmutable, undeniable link back to the verifiable source. For example, this scientific paper was digitally signed and has an inspectable trail right back to the author - it came out not through a greedy publishing conglomerate but it came with verified peer-reviews digitally linked to the scientists who reviewed the papers and the enthusiastic, clever but lowly paid editors who endorsed it. Or in politics, these are the statements verifiably made by this person who now says he never entertained the idea of a two-state solution in the Middle East or for the UK to be a part of the EU customs union. Should libraries become one of the hubs or spokes in the distributed network of information, essentially taking a step back to their role of say the 16th century - providing counterbalance to the sucking up of information by tech giants who turned out not to be benevolent providers of free services to the world but somewhat darker, politically ambitious forces more interesting in running the world than serving it? Devolved, distributed, verifiable services may not become freely available but we can definitely afford them if we want them.