Imagine if you stepped up to a pitcher labeled ‘half & half’, poured some in your coffee, took a sip, and found it was actually vanilla flavored soy milk?

Last Monday night I went to Participatory Culture Offline, a Creative Commons Salon at GAFFTA immediately followed the next morning by a Pacific Library Partnership-sponsored event at San Francisco Public Library called The Future of Libraries 6.0.  Both events featured some amazing speakers, but I was far more inspired by the Participatory Culture salon than the so-called Future of Libraries.  The interactive projects discussed at the salon took risks and offered new ideas and perspectives on ways to engage users in subject matter and media itself.  The Future of Libraries summarized a lot of activities going on in libraries right now while it offered surveys of existing tools and technologies with a heavy dose of ‘we’re doing it wrong’ factored in.  I don’t entirely disagree, I think we are doing quite a few things wrong, but I find it even more frustrating that I got a mouth full of vanilla soy milk.  

There was a long session about the state of ebooks that day, perhaps anticipating the upcoming Library Journal Ebook summit.  I don’t mean to diminish the importance of these kinds of conversations, they are essential.  Years ago, Amazon went out on a limb and tried a whole new business model when they created the Kindle.  Since then it seems every book retailer has done something similar, and now libraries are in a real bind having been more or less cornered out of the marketplace.  I wish libraries would consider stepping out and making a change in their business as model that is just as huge a transition as Amazon’s.  Years ago I suggested we should be making our own open-hardware reader device, it is likely too late for that to be worthwhile now, but there are other fantastic ways we can change.

I don’t think that our future is prioritizing the collection of information objects and the dissemination of content. Our collecting activities don’t need to go away; that is part of what the library is.  It is a collection of resources.  I do strongly believe that public libraries should leverage their media collections to host localized conversations about media and community issues both in their buildings and on the web, and as librarians we should be using this awkward moment in publishing/epublishing to focus on that kind of service.  In a lot of ways, briefly being nudged out of the game as convenient providers of fresh information containers has been really healthy for us all.  We have an opportunity here to bring the library back to its roots as a salon where people exchange ideas, our websites can serve as digital junto spaces, our buildings can host community-driven and community-run conversations, and we can draw subject matter from our collections to inform these conversations.  

For this reason, the Creative Commons salon (slideshare here) felt more like the future of libraries than The Future of Libraries did.  There, a series of speakers talked about ways to engage audiences as co-creators.  Jake Barton spoke about the amazing 9/11 Memorial Museum, most notably (to me, at least) about the augmented reality iPhone app that displays an overlay of the disastrous 9/11 scene as an overlay on your phone’s screen as you pan around ground zero.  Anne Bast of the SF MoMA, who actually has an MSI from the University of Michigan School of Information, spoke about how they changed the antiquated no-photography policy at the museum to something much more welcoming for their visitors.  Their blog is pretty great too.  Kathleen Mclean spoke of some of the innovative interactive projects that the Oakland Museum has embraced in recent years.  The whole thing was wrapped in a talk by Nina Simon that spoke to the need for more constraints and more scaffolding in designing user experiences for participation.  Often a blank canvas is harder to step to than one with an existing pattern on it that needs some altering.  Anyone who has done a craft program at a library probably understands that metaphor.

Folks, the future of libraries is designing spaces for participation, both online and offline.  Let’s look outside of our comfort zone and find that future.