Turning The Page: SLJ Celebrates 50 Years

The technology of the book has gone through a number of transitions in its long history--from clay to wax to papyrus to vellum to cloth to paper. Books have been stored as tablets, scrolls, and folios, and they've been bound in horn, leather, cloth, and paper. The role of the librarian has changed as well--from scribe to guard to copyist to archivist to selector to teacher.

I'm already looking forward to the next iteration, when well-designed books made of silicon, plastic, and metal will replace cellulose as the reading materials of choice. Why? Paper books disintegrate. They go out of print. They're expensive to produce, bulky to store, and back breaking to move. Their very physical nature means that access to them is limited. While I'm sentimental about the memories that particular books have evoked in me, it's really the excitement of the story, the perspective of the author, and the lyricism of the language that I'm reacting to when I say, "I love books."

The wide-scale use of the mature e-book will have a more profound--and far more sudden--effect on the role of the librarian than the invention of the printing press. Furthermore, this revolution will occur within many of our working lifetimes. Just as printed books replaced hand-copied manuscripts, freeing books from the chains that once bound them to library tables, e-books will free the content of books from any particular physical space. How will e-books change our workspaces, tools, and jobs?

The physical library. While homeschooling and virtual schooling are growing in popularity, they serve only a small fraction of students in preschool through high school. Most families expect schools to shelter their children as well as to educate them. But will the library remain a physical entity when all of its resources are accessible via an affordable, practical e-book?

The library of the future will house the technology infrastructure needed to ensure that e-books are connected to each other and the rest of the world. It's also the logical place to house the technical staff which will supervise e-books. A production lab equipped with powerful computers that perform high-end, graphic-editing, video-processing, and number-crunching tasks will also be part of tomorrow's library.

But if we want the library to remain as a physical learning space, we must create facilities and environments that kids and teachers want to visit. That means the library must have comfortable chairs; a pleasant ambience; and a friendly, low-stress, safe, and forgiving atmosphere--and, yes, a coffee shop. The library must also have flexible spaces that can be used by individuals, small groups, and entire classes. Conventional books that have value but haven't yet been digitized may remain on library shelves, but they will eventually be shipped to historical societies or university archives, where they can be better preserved.

Although e-books make virtual communication readily available, the library will provide a place for collaborative learning and face-to-face, social interactions. Storytelling, puppetry, crafts, crayons, debates, and presentations will continue to enrich every child's library experience. And while the education of most students will feature highly individualized courses that meet their specific learning styles and goals, interpersonal and collaborative skills will also be an essential part of the curriculum.

As librarians, we'll have to compete with businesses and other institutions to attract customers. Since libraries are no longer the only information game in town, it will be our skills--especially our interpersonal skills--that will entice patrons. In other words, librarians themselves will be one of the prime reasons that people visit the library. If the library is not a wonderful place for learning, socializing, and relaxing, students and teachers will use their e-books in settings that are.

Resources. The school librarian, of course, will still select commercial digital materials for students and staff. While librarians may purchase some single-title resources, for the most part, they will acquire access to collections of digital materials, which will supplement state-provided resources; the Internet; and standard e-book resources, such as dictionaries, thesauri, and atlases. And, of course, librarians will acquire and track the licenses needed to use these products, and create budgets to purchase them.

Materials will need to be selected even more carefully to support the curriculum and specific instructional needs of teachers. With so much information available, maintaining a highly usable library Web page, tailored specifically to the needs of an individual school's curriculum, will be one of the librarian's primary jobs.

The librarian's expertise, available online and accessible through e-books, will still be the single most valuable resource the library has to offer. We'll need to possess not only the expertise to locate specific materials, resources, and information, but the know-how to use expert systems that rely on artificial intelligence to answer our patrons' tough questions.

Jobs. Teachers and administrators must come to us for help with problems that only we can solve. On the other hand, classroom teachers will continue to send kids to the library only if the librarian is better at helping students find information or complete a task than the teacher himself. As printed textbooks become obsolete, librarians will use their experiences and skills (gained while designing Web pages and Webquests) to assist teachers in creating highly individualized electronic textbooks that are read on e-books. We will still need to be experts in children's and young adult materials--regardless of their format--that meet the needs of both struggling and advanced learners. And we'll need to continue to provide teachers with staff-development programs on the latest information technologies and resources.

With the growing glut of information, it's no surprise that information-literacy skills will become more important to students' future success. As a result, librarians will need to focus more on helping students define their information-related problems and questions; search ever-larger amounts of available information; carefully determine the reliability of sources; interpret, organize, and analyze information; construct powerful ways to communicate their findings; evaluate and reflect on the effectiveness of their products and the efficiency of the process; and make safe, ethical decisions while online.

In the end, administrators and parents will view librarians as indispensable because of our knowledge of individual children and their special needs, and the personal relationships we form with them. In Neal Stephenson's novel The Diamond Age (Bantam, 1995), a youthful heroine is guided through a rough childhood by an e-booklike device called A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. This wonderful tool is a self-paced, library tutorial that skillfully offers just the right amount of information and advice. Although the girl doesn't realize it, the primer's lessons are powerful and useful because they've been created by a caring human mentor--a guardian angel. In the future, the best schools will be the ones that provide the best teachers; the poorer schools will rely increasingly on economical technologies.

Librarians need to lead the fight for intellectual freedom in their schools--battling against the censorship of digital resources, advocating for patrons' rights to privacy, and helping to enforce copyright laws. We also need to have the expertise to advise students on the proper use of all information technologies. And we need to continue to be not just the brains of our schools, but their souls as well.

In my darkest dystopian fantasies, technology directors select not just library materials, but programs for an entire library. If enterprises like "Libraries R Us" are one day able to provide library resources and services virtually and cheaply, what will prevent schools from outsourcing our jobs? It's a question that those of us who want to continue working in education need to answer soon.

There isn't a guaranteed place for librarians in tomorrow's schools. As the needs of our patrons and schools change, as technologies evolve and the definition of education is transformed, our profession needs to create a new role for itself. But we've done it before, and we can do it again--if we look upon the challenge as an opportunity, and seize it with excitement and optimism.