Libraries are changing, despite their facades. And they're changing to high-tech service companies with embedded librarians, according to some library professionals. Of course, that assumes they aren't defunded out of existence.

For ladies and gentlemen of a certain age, the library is changing too fast. For kids, it's not changing fast enough. University students are caught in the middle. Their library experience must be like surfing: riding the edge of a moving wave, never quite cresting, never quite crashing. Such a state has to be thrilling, but ultimately exhausting.

One popular image of the library of the future comes from the cartoon Futurama. The temporally misplaced character from our own time, Fry, enters Mars University’s Wong Library with his friends. It contains the largest collection of literature in the universe. Zoom in on two CDs, one labeled “Fiction” and the other “Non-fiction.”

In many ways, the library of today looks much the same as the library of yesteryear. The card catalogs may be consigned to a basement storage area and the tables where they used to stand are studded with computers. But otherwise there are carrels and stacks, stairs and information desk, patrons and librarians.

Transition is underway: from a place where you go to get information to a place you go to create; and from a place you go to create to a service you use.

From kids to adults

Sarah Houghton, the director of the San Rafael Public Library in California and the blogger behind Librarian in Black, said the little kids who come into her library expect three things.

“Every screen is a touchscreen,” she told Ars, “and when it’s not they get confused as hell. Kids expect instant delivery of everything. If you can’t get it right that second, it doesn’t exist. When you tell them that a thing they want doesn’t exist digitally, that it’s a physical thing and that’s it, it blows their mind. If there is some book they need to write a report on, say, Mayan culture, and it’s not online, they get mad.

“I’ve encountered people in their mid-late 20s who have that same expectation.”

Although many libraries are slow to change, the expectations of today’s children make that change a certainty.

From books to tools

One of the biggest changes university libraries have seen in recent years is in the number and types of tools available to find information.

"With enhanced catalogs, digital surrogates, linked databases, and the hardware to bring all of these things to the fingertips of a library user, a library user becomes a walking catalog.”

“When libraries got rid of their physical card catalogs in favor of online catalogs, plenty of folks were worried that the experience of finding things, especially by physically browsing library stacks, would be diminished, ” Chris Bourg, Associate University Librarian at Stanford, told Ars. “(But) our catalog SearchWorks, has a feature which allows users to virtually browse the book covers of related items across 17 different campus libraries at once—something that would obviously be impossible to do physically.”

Daryl Green believes recall is one of the great improvements in the technological profile of the modern university library. Green is a rare books librarian at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and an author of the collection’s excellent Echoes from the Vault blog.

“I think that emerging technologies will only make recall quicker in catalogs and databases,” he told Ars. “A reader can trace a foot-noted lead with lightning-fast speed and determine whether the citation they’re following is something that requires their attention or not within a minute of seeing a footnote. Previously, this crucial step in the research process (following the breadcrumbs) was the most labor intensive, but with enhanced catalogs, digital surrogates, linked databases, and, most importantly, the hardware to bring all of these things to the fingertips of a library user, a library user becomes a walking catalog.”

Another change librarians have noted is the university library’s ongoing change to a multiuse space.

“We think of the library as a hybrid environment that consists of physical spaces, people, and objects; as well as a digital entity that provides online access to digital resources, services and tools,” Bourg said about Stanford’s libraries. “But the truth is that technology has simply provided libraries with new ways to fulfill our age-old mission of collecting, preserving, organizing and providing meaningful access to information in support of teaching and research.”

Green agrees.

“The nature of the academic library has always been to provide a platform for research, study, social activity and discovery,” he said. “I think, at its heart, the nature of the library will never really change, but the services that we provide and the role that we play in a student’s or researcher’s life will constantly shift.”

From building to service

Another denizen of the Stanford Library is Elijah Meeks. Not a librarian per se, Meeks is a “digital humanities specialist,” most recently the co-creator of the interactive ORBIS atlas of Roman history. He sees the university libraries in the future behaving like Google.

“I see libraries of the future, those that survive, as acting like high-tech services companies, mini Googles focused on a particular demographic and physical footprint. Like Google providing, as best it can, a massive variety of services, I see the university library doing the same. This Google Model would require more than the cool Google offices and transparent walls (we have some of those in some of our buildings). Instead, it needs small, agile teams focused on doing really good work and recognizing the value created by supporting a broad constituency.”

Steven Gass, associate director for Research and Instructional Services at MIT, sees the economics of the university library as militating toward a consolidation of collections. Satellites and branches have been closed all over the country and Gass sees the future of the university library as one of continuing consolidation of physical collections but mitigated with innovations like “embedded librarians.” These are librarians who live out in the different departments, labs and research centers of a university, responding to the specific needs of their scholars and students.

“Their job,” he told Ars “is to know what those are doing and be proactive and push out relevant material.”

The most extraordinary example of this concierge function may be the Welch Medical Library at Johns Hopkins. This library closed its physical doors to patrons at the first of the year. Patrons can download articles and other materials online or use its embedded librarians to access information, including books.

An important role that librarians are going to need to play, according to Gass, is that of online credibility coach. By and large, people know, or learn, often osmotically, what constitutes a credible source in a book. It is a safe bet that a book on Chaucer published by Oxford University Press is going to be more reliable than one published by Hustler. But how to do the same for material that is native to the Web?

“It is a shared goal among colleagues nationwide to promote good information learning skills,” said Gass, “how to identify quality information, to instill new academics with how to think about information, about its quality, to teach the 'tricks of the trade,' so to speak, in assessing accuracy.”

From the capital to the borderlands

This transition time is one of great opportunity for those involved in libraries, but all transitions, all borders and verges, are places of great vulnerability as well. Grand changes are possible here, but so are operatic failures. The future seems promising. It’s the present that worries some librarians.

“The myth that the information scholars need for research and teaching is, or soon will be available for free online is a dangerous one,” said Bourg, “especially when it is used as an excuse to cut funding to libraries. Right now libraries face enormous but exciting challenges in maintaining print collections and services where they are still necessary, while simultaneously developing strategies for collecting, preserving, organizing, and providing access to digital objects. I fear that if libraries across the nation don’t get the resources we collectively need to meet these challenges that we may be at risk of losing big chunks of our cultural record because of a lack of funding for digital collecting and preservation. “

If there is one thing that all librarians worried about, it was this: the de-funding of libraries. It has happened from the university research libraries all the way down to the neighborhood libraries that set expectations students bring when going to college.

Houghton traveled to Denmark last summer and visited the public library in a small, poor town.

“Their library was five times bigger than mine,” she said, “It had better computer technology, better everything.” The reason for that was simple, she said.

“We don’t invest in our libraries.”