In my youth I spent a lot of time in libraries and to my recollection, there were various staff roles. There's a lot of labor involved in running a library and most of it was done by clerks and pages. Actual librarians were somewhat scarce and they weren't just shelving books, a lot of their responsibilities were pretty high level, such as assisting patrons with research, designing the library's various educational programs, and curating collections of significant works.
I can see how automation features like self checkout could replace some of the pages and clerks, but not the librarians. If for instance a journalist or historian (or anyone as it's a public service!) is doing research for their work, and needs to access the microfilms of old documents, the librarian is there to assist, and their function is invaluable - their existence is an investment by our society in increasing the accessibility and accuracy of facts. It seems like we need more people performing that function in the modern day, not less.
Yes, even the "best" modern web search tools still don't come close to human curated subject headings. Library science survived the blockchain fads, hopefully it will remain resilient to the AI hucksters who already think google is just as good as an academic database, having never actually used one.
And the modern web search tools don't even try to be good at searching, but some engagement-bullshit-here-is-something-that-might-interest-you contraption.
I love listening to bootlegs (recording of a concert that is not official, mostly done by fans). I happen to be a fan of a band that has quite dedicated fan base and tons of bootlegs. I remember, and I'm quite sure of it, that I could type "<BAND> <SONG> <YEAR> live" in youtube search and get pages upon pages of exactly that. Recording of the song by the band, in given year.
Today if I type "tool right in two live" I get:
actually what I requested - 12
official audio - 1
cover song - 4
other song by the band - 12
full concert - 4
"reaction" video - 4
And after that there are mostly "reaction" videos, yea, just what I wanted. Try it out, it's actually funny (and sad).
Curation is hard and only getting harder with the sheer amount of content produced every year. AI/ML (whatever you want to call it) should be a tool to help librarians sift through the amount of content they need curate, but not think of it as a replacement for a human.
I see libraries as very useful and like to hang around books. A few times I had to ask for a librarian's help with research I was blown away by the speed and quality of the response. For example I needed a list of FM transmitters in Europe above certain power and after failing to create one via a bunch of national registries asked for help -- and got exactly what I needed in a few hours.
That said, let me be the devil's advocate. I see two key functions for librarians: research and access to unusual media, like microfiche. For research, the librarian does not need to be co-located with the library. Several librarians can work in a central location, like a research university or a national library, and serve the whole country.
Microfilm or microfiche can (and probably should) be digitized and served out of the central location anyway. When someone was using the readers every week in a library it made sense to keep them everywhere. But now the use plummeted and machines (at least in some libraries) are always broken. We should scan those films and support a more modern access to the archives. My 2c.
A big part of libraries and librarians is knowing their local community. Think about helping local adults learn to read or local authors publish a book. But also being local helps them curate a catalog that is informed by the community. If I walk into a library in city A, it is more likely to have books about city A on hand. This is much harder to do at a national level. IMO, the hyper local nature is also one of the big differentiators for the library to avoid being usurped by something like Amazon.
> For research, the librarian does not need to be co-located with the library. Several librarians can work in a central location, like a research university or a national library, and serve the whole country.
Schemes to do this sort of thing repeatedly fall across time and industries.
The first problem is that people overestimate the amount of efficiency there is to be had. Oh, if we put them in a central location we can make 80% of them redundant. Ha! Librarians don't currently spend most of the day idle and somebody has to do the work they currently do regardless of where they're located. Meanwhile putting people in a central location generally makes things less efficient because now they're in a different location than the patrons and you've added communications overhead and, in the common case, a layer of middle management.
The second problem is that knowledge is local. When a patron comes in and wants to know about historical buildings in the library's city, or local regulations, or community events, the local librarian knows where to find the information because that's where they are. The librarian 100+ miles away may not, because they're most familiar with where to find their locality's information rather than some far away place.
The third problem is that diversity is advantageous. This is the sort of "laboratories of democracy" or "competitive markets are better than monopolies" effect. When everything is under one roof it becomes bureaucratic, resulting in ossification and resistance to change. Including changes that improve efficiency or outcomes. Whereas independent systems can each try a different thing and find out what works best in parallel, then look at how the others did and adopt their way of doing it if it seems better. Centralization efforts stamp that benefit out, and its long-term effect is cumulative because the benefits of the alternative accrete over time. This ultimately eats any nominal efficiency gains from the limited amount of legitimate redundancies that could be achieved through centralization.
The fourth problem is that central locations tend to become a single point of failure. Having multiple copies of information stored at multiple independently-operated facilities has high resilience. Centralized systems have systemic risk, and the best known way to mitigate that risk is to redecentralize the system to remove the monoculture.
In general if someone proposes to centralize a decentralized system to "improve efficiency" you should suspect them of malice, because the most steadfast proponents of centralization are generally adversaries who want to monopolize the system or adversaries who want to corral the system all into one place so they can more easily butcher it.
True. Though as a regular reader...well, more like skimmer, of The Guardian - that level of fluff is SOP for them. You can (at best) guess whether they're omitting important background and details from a story to simplify it, or to fit their desired editorial tone, or out of ignorance.
My local library service in England has had the "Open Access" scheme in place since before the pandemic.
I don't think there have been any major problems with it.
You need to go through an induction course on things like fire safety, then you use your library card and PIN to enter the building out of staffed hours.
It's very convenient to be able to go at any time from approx 08:00 to 19:30 every day.
The "tailgating" problem is a little overblown - you're encouraged not to let others in, but they know that you can't do anything to stop it, and they don't expect you to put yourself in any danger.
There are still staffed hours throughout the week, and these work on a sort of rotation so that a neighbouring library will likely be open if your local one is unstaffed.
That's probably why they just had a landslide election to overturn the old order.
Also, as an outsider, UK housing prices outside of London are actually quite affordable. With the current strength of the dollar a lot of very nice places in the UK are at price parity with Arkansas/Mississippi.
Realistically how much money are they even saving trying to cut librarians? They couldn't trim the fat somewhere else in the budget? Seems like a waste of time and money to try and "automate" this when they can find the funding elsewhere
For a bit of context, "Nearly one in 10 English councils expect to go bust in next year"[0]. Which means they're forced to make brutal cuts across all services. It's not necessarily that they don't like librarians.
> Officials in some local authorities are proposing that libraries can be operated at times without any professional librarians, relying on self-service technology, smartcards for entry and CCTV.
Like Amazon's "Go" self-service stores, which are working out so well for them?
> Officials in some local authorities are proposing that libraries can be operated at times without any professional librarians, relying on self-service technology, smartcards for entry and CCTV.
But none of the jobs of self-service technology, smartcards for entry and CCTV are currently done by librarians.
My local library inherited the staff from other libraries that closed well over ten years ago. This means they have a constant staff of circa 5 people, meanwhile they do no real outreach into the community nor are they friendly, and I am fairly certain they get fewer than 10 people through their doors each day. I believe that libraries are an essential public resource, but I don't think it’s productive to have resources that are essentially beyond scrutiny as that in turn leads to a very poor service.
Libraries end up being fairly local, so local leadership matters. There are some amazing library systems in the US, and some that are terrible like you describe.
There are two kind of issues here: one is the preservation of human information fully knowing that sparse books are hard to change/destroy, while digital information on centralized sources is terribly easy to change, and we all know the power of information, so the interests of some to temper it for a large variety of reasons; the other one is the need of a sustainable economics. In certain period of prosperity even low output activities might be tenable, in a deep crisis they tend to be untenable.
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I can see how automation features like self checkout could replace some of the pages and clerks, but not the librarians. If for instance a journalist or historian (or anyone as it's a public service!) is doing research for their work, and needs to access the microfilms of old documents, the librarian is there to assist, and their function is invaluable - their existence is an investment by our society in increasing the accessibility and accuracy of facts. It seems like we need more people performing that function in the modern day, not less.
I love listening to bootlegs (recording of a concert that is not official, mostly done by fans). I happen to be a fan of a band that has quite dedicated fan base and tons of bootlegs. I remember, and I'm quite sure of it, that I could type "<BAND> <SONG> <YEAR> live" in youtube search and get pages upon pages of exactly that. Recording of the song by the band, in given year.
Today if I type "tool right in two live" I get:
actually what I requested - 12
official audio - 1
cover song - 4
other song by the band - 12
full concert - 4
"reaction" video - 4
And after that there are mostly "reaction" videos, yea, just what I wanted. Try it out, it's actually funny (and sad).
That said, let me be the devil's advocate. I see two key functions for librarians: research and access to unusual media, like microfiche. For research, the librarian does not need to be co-located with the library. Several librarians can work in a central location, like a research university or a national library, and serve the whole country.
Microfilm or microfiche can (and probably should) be digitized and served out of the central location anyway. When someone was using the readers every week in a library it made sense to keep them everywhere. But now the use plummeted and machines (at least in some libraries) are always broken. We should scan those films and support a more modern access to the archives. My 2c.
Schemes to do this sort of thing repeatedly fall across time and industries.
The first problem is that people overestimate the amount of efficiency there is to be had. Oh, if we put them in a central location we can make 80% of them redundant. Ha! Librarians don't currently spend most of the day idle and somebody has to do the work they currently do regardless of where they're located. Meanwhile putting people in a central location generally makes things less efficient because now they're in a different location than the patrons and you've added communications overhead and, in the common case, a layer of middle management.
The second problem is that knowledge is local. When a patron comes in and wants to know about historical buildings in the library's city, or local regulations, or community events, the local librarian knows where to find the information because that's where they are. The librarian 100+ miles away may not, because they're most familiar with where to find their locality's information rather than some far away place.
The third problem is that diversity is advantageous. This is the sort of "laboratories of democracy" or "competitive markets are better than monopolies" effect. When everything is under one roof it becomes bureaucratic, resulting in ossification and resistance to change. Including changes that improve efficiency or outcomes. Whereas independent systems can each try a different thing and find out what works best in parallel, then look at how the others did and adopt their way of doing it if it seems better. Centralization efforts stamp that benefit out, and its long-term effect is cumulative because the benefits of the alternative accrete over time. This ultimately eats any nominal efficiency gains from the limited amount of legitimate redundancies that could be achieved through centralization.
The fourth problem is that central locations tend to become a single point of failure. Having multiple copies of information stored at multiple independently-operated facilities has high resilience. Centralized systems have systemic risk, and the best known way to mitigate that risk is to redecentralize the system to remove the monoculture.
In general if someone proposes to centralize a decentralized system to "improve efficiency" you should suspect them of malice, because the most steadfast proponents of centralization are generally adversaries who want to monopolize the system or adversaries who want to corral the system all into one place so they can more easily butcher it.
I don't think there have been any major problems with it.
You need to go through an induction course on things like fire safety, then you use your library card and PIN to enter the building out of staffed hours.
It's very convenient to be able to go at any time from approx 08:00 to 19:30 every day.
The "tailgating" problem is a little overblown - you're encouraged not to let others in, but they know that you can't do anything to stop it, and they don't expect you to put yourself in any danger.
There are still staffed hours throughout the week, and these work on a sort of rotation so that a neighbouring library will likely be open if your local one is unstaffed.
https://beta.southglos.gov.uk/open-access/
Also, as an outsider, UK housing prices outside of London are actually quite affordable. With the current strength of the dollar a lot of very nice places in the UK are at price parity with Arkansas/Mississippi.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/feb/28/nearly-one-i...
Like Amazon's "Go" self-service stores, which are working out so well for them?
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/04/amazon-ends-ai-power...
But none of the jobs of self-service technology, smartcards for entry and CCTV are currently done by librarians.
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