Realizing the Vision of the 21st Century Library:
Librarians’ Skills for Tomorrow Today
Paula Kaufman
Juanita J. and Robert E. Simpson Dean of Libraries and University Librarian
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Shanghai International Library Forum
July 12, 2012
ABSTRACT
Today’s libraries are in the midst of enormous change as they move toward
transforming themselves to realize the visions of what have become
euphemistically called “21st century libraries.” This paper focuses on the skills
librarians will need to create, sustain, and continue to change libraries in the next
twenty to twenty-five years by identifying some of the drivers of change and
speculating on the changing focus and successful outcomes of public libraries
around the world. Attention will be given to the implications of librarians’
successful skill acquisition on their patrons as well as to the need for professional
lifelong learning.
INTRODUCTION
For many years I have kept a file I call “You Can’t Make This Stuff Up.” It’s filled
with things that people said or did that confirmed why I never wrote that great
novel I long to write: I simply don’t have the imagination or the chutzpah – the
gall– to say or do the kinds of things I’ve documented in my file. Among other
things, the file contains statements or accounts of deeds that make me wonder if
I live on a different planet than some people, some alien place where I see things
very differently from the speaker or doer. Here’s an example. Earlier this year I
interviewed candidates for a high level position at my university. Our committee
met with many talented individuals and posed tough questions to them, listening
for evidence of their deep understanding of the challenges that all organizations
confront in today’s fast-paced environment. I was pleased by the thoughtful and
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sometimes creative answers many of the candidates expressed, but
disappointed and even surprised by others. The most profoundly disturbing
comment came from a high-level administrator at a major research university,
who stated firmly that continuous change is not sustainable. She went on to
explain that her staff can’t deal with, nor does she expect them to deal with, the
current pace of change. Of course we all have days when we share that feeling,
but those days are, and should be, few and far between, for we all know that
change is coming at us faster and faster. Those who understand that and who
can deal with and capitalize on it will thrive. Those who don’t, won’t.
Who knows this better than we librarians? We’ve been living with and
capitalizing on change well before our formal beginnings as a profession,
embracing new methods and new technologies even before books started
flowing from printing presses. Just one example is how the iconic U.S. library
pioneer Melville Dewey helped make library holdings more accessible by
capitalizing on the mass-produced typewriter that appeared in the U.S. market in
1874, just two years before he launched the American Library Association and
Library Journal, and which allowed us to replace handwritten catalog cards with
ones that were more legible and more easily consistent. I think we are an
excellent example of a group that not only copes with, indeed thrives on, change,
but that initiates change. We understand deeply that we live in a fast-paced and
fast-changing world, and we know that our patrons do, too. If we are to provide
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the services that they need and demand, and that they will need and demand in
the future, then we had better continue to change and change and change again.
We all know that there’s a persistent stereotype of librarians that may, in fact, be
fading slowly. Listen to the blurb on the back of Larry Beinhart’s comic thriller The
Librarian.
How did nebbish university librarian David Goldberg end up hunted by
Homeland Security and on Virginia’s ten most wanted list for bestiality? It
begins so innocently when Goldberg starts moonlighting for an eccentric,
aging conservative billionaire whose final wish is to leave behind a
memorial library about himself.
And it ends, of course, in good thriller tradition, with the billionaire’s plot to steal
the presidential election being stopped by Goldberg and two librarian colleagues.
Beinhart paints contrasts between stereotypes and skills and between nerdiness
and daring. Paradoxically, we librarians feed these contrasts; we often both
overestimate and underestimate ourselves, proud of what we continue to
accomplish but uncertain that we have what it takes to know what and how to
change and transform our libraries while knowing what and how to cling to what
our users want. As I talk about the skills workers will need in the twenty-first
century, think about whether much of the workforce and workforce planners
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shouldn’t be looking to us as a model of a group that has demonstrated its
capacity to change time and again.
Of course, we know that more big changes are on the way. We must think
deeply about the skills we and our future employees must have if our libraries are
going to serve our patrons well in the next decade or so.
CONTEXT
I must start this section with two disclaimers. First, I don’t work in a public library,
although I do serve as a member of my local public library’s Board of Trustees. I
have worked in libraries and library-like organizations for more than forty years,
and I currently lead a large public research university library whose mission
includes engaging with the public. Although my library does not design services
specifically for patrons outside of our academic community, we do provide them
with some services, and we work closely with the public libraries in our area to be
sure that among us we provide the broadest possible range of services and
resources to everyone in the local communities. Second disclaimer: I have
always lived and worked in the United States and so do not pretend to reflect any
other cultural norms in the remarks I’m going to make. Even if not everything I
say is applicable in your environment, I hope you’ll find most of it useful and
perhaps some of it to even be provocative.
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Our public libraries are many things to many people. They have offered some of
today’s services since their beginnings; other services are relatively new or
feature new modes of offering traditional services. Public library services can
include a full range of literacy programs, from infancy through senior years; a full
range of content in tangible and digital media; space for individual use and group
activities and programs; and a full range of individual, group, and community
services and activities, from personal book collecting to preserving family
treasures, from learning to entertainment, and more, all designed to meet the
lifelong learning, active citizenship, entertainment and informed decision-making
needs of their patrons and all overseen by dedicated professional experts.
The quality of a public library is an important component of a community’s quality
of life. All public libraries offer their communities special services that meet
special needs, and the best public libraries change the lineup of services and
service emphases as the needs of the community change or in anticipation of
changing needs. This is not new, it’s obvious, but it’s worth pointing out and
remembering as we begin to look at what are likely to be the drivers of change in
the next decade or two.
We all know that change will continue to underlie the services that public libraries
offer. Some of the coming changes may seem clear. In a recent OCLC study,
U.S. public librarians anticipated that there will be more online use and more
nontraditional service points. Most of those surveyed think that there will be a
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national digital library that their patrons will use, although there is not much
agreement on when it will happen. Happen or not, digital content will
predominate. But, that is not the only trend that will drive the new skills our
workers will need. Let’s turn to unpacking what more digital content may mean
and to speculating on what other drivers of change we will confront.
WHAT’S DRIVING CHANGE IN THE COMING DECADES?
Last year, the Institute for the For the Future for the University of Phoenix
Research Institute issued a report on what it anticipated would be the skills
needed by the work force in 2020, then only nine years in the future. To
understand the context for those changes, the Institute identified some important
change drivers, a list to which I have added several others that I think are
important for our domain.
1. Longer lives and the improved quality of older lives mean that people will
be working longer, past what we now consider to be the traditional ages
for retirement. This will change the nature of careers and the need for and
nature of learning. Multiple careers will have become more commonplace
and there will be increasing focus on lifelong learning for professional skill
development as well as for personal fulfillment and entertainment.
2. Shoshana Zuboff has described the “informated” organization as one that
reflects a strong and fruitful interdependence between the human mind
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and smart machines. (Zuboff, p. 414) That interdepdence will continue to
strengthen and more and more smart machines and systems will continue
to change the nature of the workplace. As smart machines continue to
replace human workers in doing repetitive and routine tasks, a new kind of
human-machine partnership will emerge, one in which smart machines
and robotic technologies will supplement and extend the capabilities of
human workers. Smart workers will leverage and build on the mutual
strengths of humans and machines, which will create new levels of
collaboration and codependence.
3. Massive increases in computational processing power and in the number
of sensors and their diffusion into everyday objects and environments will
make the world a programmable system, unleashing torrents of data.
Those immense amounts of data will present an opportunity for people to
see patterns and designs on a scale never before possible.
Supercomputers such as Blue Waters, the supercomputer capable of
sustained performance of 1 petaflop that is just coming on line on my
campus in Illinois, will allow breakthroughs in nearly all fields. By 2020,
Blue Waters’ capabilities will have been dwarfed by more robust
supercomputers around the world that will enable new breakthroughs that
currently are unimaginable.
4. Factual, a new company with the mission of identifying and holding every
fact in the world, may be the bleeding edge of a new market sector or
revolutionary force, much as Google has been in its domains. Factual’s
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founder, Gilad Elbaz, says that “(d)ata has (sic) always been seen as just
a side effect in computing, something you look up while you are doing
your work. We see it as a separate layer that everyone is going to have to
tap into, data you want to solve a problem, but that you might not have
yourself, and completely reliable.” (NYT 3/25/12, p. 6) Collections of huge
quantities of data will enable modeling of social systems at extreme
scales, from phenomena such as global pandemics to routing an
individual’s way to work. The unprecedented torrent of data expected by
2020 will affect our work and our personal lives, demanding our ability to
interact with data, see patterns in them, make decisions based on them,
manage and preserve them, make them accessible, and use them to
design for desired outcomes.
5. A new media ecology is emerging from new multimedia technologies.
This will impact the ways in which we communicate through video
production, digital animation, augmented reality, gaming, and media
editing, and by creating, among other things, a new vernacular for
communication. These new media will place new demands on attention
and cognition. New platforms will require people to engage in activities
that we associate today with social media, such as managing one’s online
personal reputation and protecting one’s identity. Workers will need to
approach content more skeptically and with the realization that less and
less content will be permanent and fixed, and thus will be more difficult to
identify and locate.
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6. Social technologies will drive an unprecedented reorganization of how we
produce and create value. Calling on a new level of collective intelligence
and using resources embedded in social connections with multitudes of
others, small organizations and individuals will be able to achieve the
scale and reach that have been attainable only by very large
organizations. This means that we will be able to do things outside of
traditional organizational boundaries that we cannot imagine today.
“Learning to use new social tools to work, to invent, and to govern at these
scales is what the next few decades are all about.” (IFUP, p. 5) A new
generation of organizational concepts and work skills will emerge not from
the traditional management and organizational theories with which we are
so familiar, but rather from fields such as game design and neuroscience.
7. The world is growing smaller and more interconnected. The environments
in which most of today’s workers may be comfortable are not very diverse
and are not the environments that will predominate in the rest of the 21st
century. Workers will be interacting increasingly more often with people
from many locales around the world and from cultures and with
backgrounds that are widely diverse. Organizations will look and operate
very differently than those in which we work today. Merely associating
with colleagues from around the world will be insufficient for success in
2020 and beyond.
8. Librarians value privacy. Last year, Rupert Murdoch’s U.K. newspaper
The Sun was brought down by revelations of its use of digital telephonic
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technologies to invade the privacy of targeted celebrities. This set of
incidents is just the tip of the iceberg of the coming sea changes in
society’s view of and value for the privacy of individuals. Library workers
will have to cope with the growing ubiquity of capture and surveillance
technologies and devices. Digital intrusions will be more pervasive and will
become the norm for our own and our patrons’ work and personal lives,
raising the expectation that law enforcement and others will cross
boundaries that we now consider to be impermeable. Workers will be
challenged to be more skeptical in carrying out their work and to be more
daring – more David Goldberg-like – in standing up to and holding off
intrusions into our patrons’ privacy.
9. Working environments that feature collegiality, trust, mutual respect, and
teamwork have long been important factors in an organization’s success.
By 2020, organizations will be challenged to build and maintain collegial
climates among workers who are distributed regionally and internationally.
Rich technologies that facilitate strong working relationships will emerge,
but by themselves cannot take the place of the human factors required of
leaders, managers, and workers alike to create and sustain positive and
productive working environments. This will be particularly challenging as
workers feel declining loyalty to organizations when they move from
workplace to workplace as facilely as we move from website to website
today. Leadership may be the most important key to successful
organizations in the 21st century.
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21st CENTURY SKILLS FOR PUBLIC LIBRARIANS
Knowing that these and other forces will drive changes in the next ten to twenty
years, we turn now to look at some of the skills that will be necessary to leverage
these changes into excellent service for our public library patrons and into
satisfying careers for public librarians and library workers.
1. Critical Thinking. Critical thinking skills have always been important to
our success as librarians.
As the division of labor between human
beings and machines continues to shift, skills that help develop unique
perspectives and insights will be critical. In addition to applying critical
thinking skills to just about everything we do, it will be increasingly
important to expand our information literacy programs to include teaching
our patrons how to approach their information needs critically, both to
meet their immediate needs and as a life-long skill.
2. Interpersonal Skills. Interacting with people and communicating clearly
have always been important skills for librarians. Although robots and
other work machines that will be more ubiquitous within the next decade
or two will be able to carry out routine and repetitive tasks, they will have
neither the ability to sense and assess the attitudes and emotions of the
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people around them nor the capacity to change their responses in reaction
to them. Yet, it is these abilities and skills that are so critical to working
effectively with other human beings, to building teams, and to carrying out
successful interactions and collaborations. Finely developed interpersonal
skills also are essential to managing and leading other people. As the
world in which we work becomes more virtual, the ability to work
productively with our patrons or with team members who may be
distributed geographically will become increasingly important in either
face-to-face or virtual modes.
3. Situational Adaptability. Rote-based machines cannot assess problems
and develop innovative solutions beyond their established rules bases.
The ability to respond to unique or unexpected circumstances of the
moment will be a vital component of both low-skill service-based jobs,
such as those held by many of the clerical employees who work in our
libraries, and of positions held by workers in high-skilled professions such
as librarianship. Some of you may be familiar with Bunny Watson, the
librarian in the 1957 movie “Desk Set,” in which she successfully battles
EMERAC, the machine brought in to replace her and her staff. Bunny is
one of my heroes and a role model for the value of expertise and
situational adaptability.
4. Cross-Cultural Competency. If we are to thrive in a “global world,” then
we must be able to operate in different cultural settings and with
colleagues and patrons from diverse cultures. Successful workers will
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need to recognize and communicate points of connection that transcend
their differences and that enable them to build strong relationships and to
work together effectively. This requires adaptability to changing
circumstances and an ability to sense and respond to new contexts.
5. Computational Thinking. As the increasing flood of data becomes
deeper, we will require workers with various levels of computational
thinking skills, the ability to translate vast amounts of data into abstract
thinking and to understand data-based reasoning. The fundamentals of
programming, the use of simulations, statistical analysis, quantitativelybased reasoning skills are just a few examples of the skills that will
become core competencies in most of our workers’ positions.
6. Data Management. The increasing flood of data also will require
management. Whether the amounts of project-generated data are
enormous or small, created by large teams or by individuals, those data
will have to be managed or risk inaccessibility or disappearance. The
organizations or individuals who create, collect, or analyze data will
manage some. Factual and its competitors and successors will manage
some. And other companies and organizations will emerge to attempt to
tie together all or subsets of these data in ways that untrained individuals
can find and use. Academic libraries now seek workers who have the
skills to manage, curate, and steward data; public libraries will also need
workers with these skills in order to help their cities and municipalities,
their patrons, and their own organizations cope successfully with
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managing the torrent of data anticipated to inundate us in the very near
future. Within a decade, data literacy will be an integral part of the
curriculum of libraries’ information literacy programs.
7. New Media Literacy. The continuing increase of user-generated media
requires that workers become fluent with new formats, be able to “read”
and “write” in them, and have the skills to assess them in the same ways
in which they currently use and assess more traditionally formatted
content. These skills may come more easily to librarians and library
employees than to workers in general because we have a long history of
adopting and adapting to new formats for our collections, to describing,
organizing, and making them accessible, to building our skills to support
our users’ needs in them, and to teaching and training our patrons in basic
literacy forms and formats.
8. Multidisciplinarity. Those of us who work in academic libraries are well
aware of the increasing trend of researchers and teachers working across
multiple disciplines. Whether addressing society’s grand challenges or
one’s own issues, library workers will have to have the capacity to
“converse” in the languages of many disciplines as well as the capacity to
understand the basic sources of information in and among them. This is
an area in which librarians have always excelled, helping patrons
articulate what they really need, why they need it, and how they plan to
use it, and then, through a strong understanding of the structures of many
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disciplines and the sources of information in each, marrying the right
sources to meet our patrons’ needs.
9. Collaboration Librarians are excellent collaborators, at least among
themselves. We have a long history of working together to accomplish
more than we can accomplish alone, whether it be development and
operation of online library systems or negotiating for more favorable prices
and terms for content, we have developed a set of enviable collaboration
skills. As demands grow, and as the driving forces we have identified
exert their influence, those collaboration skills will be tested in new
domains. New collaboration partners, from museums and cultural
institutions to data repositories to commercial organizations to health and
social service organizations to, well, to whatever you can imagine, will be
important to our success. Collaboration skills, knowing how to “get cozy”
(Kaufman) with institutions in new domains and in environments around
the world will require many more than the skills we now use, including
creative thinking and risk-taking, to move outside of traditional and
comfortable domains.
10. Lifelong Learning Libraries of the future will continue to rely on human
capacities for teaching and learning, criticism, and insight. Because public
libraries will continue to have the special responsibility of providing a wide
array of learning opportunities for their patrons during all phases of their
lifetimes, library employees will need knowledge of pedagogical
methodologies and the skills to develop and deliver a wide array of
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learning programs to patrons with a wide array of learning styles and
capacities. As importantly, libraries of the future will need to invest much
more heavily than they do today in supporting their own employees’
growth and development.
11. Securing Privacy. The ubiquity of capture and surveillance technologies
is becoming a way of life in many of the places in which we live and work.
Yet, we still all expect a high degree of privacy and confidentiality in
trusted public institutions, and most especially in public libraries.
Increasingly, library workers will need the skills to conduct their business
in ways that protect patron privacy; just as importantly, they will need the
skills to advocate clearly, loudly, and politically for laws and norms that
prevent libraries from becoming places in which the chilling effects of lack
of privacy make them places to which patrons do not come to read, search
for information, or learn new skills in private.
12. Career Management. As longevity increases, opportunities not only to
change jobs but also to change careers will necessitate skill career
management. Workers will need the skills to assess their own suitability
for different careers, learn about the potential advantages and
disadvantages of those careers, acquire the knowledge and skills to
change careers, and control their futures. To be successful, they will need
to be self-directed, adaptable and flexible, and they will have to
demonstrate a high level of tolerance for risk. They will also need to
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demonstrate and apply all the skills we have already identified, and
perhaps more, if they are to make successful changes in their careers.
13. Leadership Finally, libraries will not continue to be relevant and
successful without skilled leadership. Leaders will have less and less time
in which to articulate and imbue a vision within their organizations or to
change organizational climates and cultures. Leading 21st century
workers in 21st century libraries will require leaders who can envision
future needs, who employ, support, and develop a changing workforce,
who take risks in new domains and with new partners, who are more
visible in local national, and global communities as a force for change, and
who develop leaders from among their employees.
IMPLICATIONS
For Libraries
Libraries have survived and thrived because they are adaptive learning
organizations. Over the next decade or two, this characteristic will be even more
important as we face a time when many profound changes will be happening at
increasing rates of speed. Of all of the change drivers we have identified,
perhaps the most important for public libraries is the extension of longevity and
the concomitant improvements in the quality of life and health as one enters what
we now think of as “old age.” Libraries will be challenged to offer services to the
wide range of municipalities, businesses, health and social service organizations,
as well as to individuals whose demands will be for what we think of as
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traditional, while others from those groups will be clamoring for services designed
to help them cope with and succeed in the emerging environment. Libraries
must be alert to the changing environment in order to both plan and deliver an
entire range of services – alone or increasingly in collaboration with other
libraries and other types of organizations – and to adapt their workforce planning
and support strategies to ensure alignment with future skill requirements.
Investments in training and development for library workers will be a key factor in
a library’s future success. Recognizing that skilled library workers will be valued
increasingly in many sectors of the marketplace, libraries’ will be obligated to
develop strong recruitment and retention policies, including offering salaries that
are competitive in the marketplace. Library leaders must become accustomed to
losing skilled workers to other organizations, and consider those losses, and our
ability to recruit skilled workers to fill constantly changing positions, measures of
our success. For what is the alternative? If we don’t help employees develop
and use their knowledge and skills, they will not reach their potential and we will
have unskilled, unproductive, and unhappy employees. It will be a stunning mark
of our failure.
For Individuals
To be successful in the next decade or two, librarians and library workers must
recognize the drivers of change at their emergent stages and plan and prepare to
adapt and cope with the results. Librarians and library workers who are unable
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or unwilling to learn or to change simply are not suitable for work in today’s or
tomorrow’s libraries.
Librarians and library workers also will need to take more control over their own
career development. They will need to continually assess their skill sets, acquire
more skills, and be adaptable lifelong learners. Library workers must be more
aggressive in demanding support from their employers for training and
professional development, but they also must be willing to invest their own
resources in sustaining and acquiring skills and expertise.
With the opportunity to have multiple careers throughout one’s extended lifetime
comes the responsibility for managing them. Individuals will be in charge of their
own destinies, foregoing traditional security for the opportunity to demonstrate
their value along other career paths. Librarians’ knowledge of organizing and
managing information, as well as their strong interpersonal skills, their emphasis
on providing excellent service, and their commitment to protecting patrons’
privacy and freedom to access and use information are all transferrable to many
other industries and market segments.
CONCLUSION
Libraries are among society’s most intelligent and adaptable organizations. They
can marshal knowledge and expertise and bring them to bear on whatever
problem they or their patrons are confronting. Public libraries will continue to be
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the place where individuals come to find what they want to know, where they are
safe physically and intellectually, and where they can learn how to do many
things that are essential to their lives and to the lives of our countries.
Nearly 100 years ago, H.G. Wells wrote:
With the invention of writing…(a)n increasing number of human beings
began to share a common written knowledge and a common sense of a
part and a future….It is a thin streak of intellectual growth we trace in
history….(I)t is like a mere line of light coming through the chink of an
opening door into a darkened room; but slowly it widens, it grows. At last
came a time in the history of Europe when the door, at the push of the
printer, began to open more rapidly. Knowledge flared up, and as it flared
it ceased to be the privilege of a favoured minority. For us now, that door
swings wider, and the light grows brighter….The door is not half open; the
light is but a light new lit. Our world to-day is only in the beginning of
knowledge.
That was written in 1920. Today, we are at another time in history, when the
door has opened wider and much more quickly.
I have been a librarian for nearly forty-three years, and throughout that time I
have witnessed amazing transformations in our libraries. You will all have the
opportunity to experience see other unimaginable transformations throughout the
rest of your lives, whether you continue your careers as librarians or you make
one or more changes in your careers. Or you won’t, if you do not lead or
embrace those changes yourselves. Public libraries and the individuals and cities
they serve will not thrive without our foresight, expertise, skills, and risk-taking.
We will continue to have opportunities to reinvent, revitalize, and set our libraries
on new paths with new partners. Carpsimus diem. Keep on seizing the day!
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Abbrev for notes IFUP
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