A Tipping Point for Libraries

By Al Weber, President, Tweed-Weber, Inc.
 
At a meeting in the summer of 2012, the chair of the board of a county library system made an observation that fundamentally changed my thinking about libraries. She said (and I’m going to paraphrase here, but only a little), “The Internet is having the same impact on libraries today that the Gutenberg press had on libraries in the 15th Century.” It turns out this individual, whose intellect and insight I am growing to admire more and more with each additional interaction we have, sent me down a thought path that’s worth sharing.

First, a little history. In 1439, Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg, known to us as simply Johannes Gutenberg, printed 180 copies of the Bible, in the first production run of his invention with mechanical moveable type, what we now call the printing press. Prior to this time, all books were manuscripts, hand-written one at a time, taking months, if not years to produce. Availability of these “books” was to say the least, limited. To make the point, in 1300, 139 years prior to Gutenberg’s world-changing invention, the Vatican Library listed 443 “books.” It is thought to have been the largest library in the world at the time. By 1500, 61 years after those first Bibles came off the press, that number had grown to over 3,500 volumes. By today’s standards, that would be a small community library. By the standards of the time, however, that number kept the Vatican Library solidly in first place.

Libraries throughout the world began to grow. In 1598, Bodleian Library at Oxford University, one of the larger libraries outside of the Vatican at the time, contained 2,500 volumes. Over the next 250 years, Bodleian’s collection grew to the size, where by 1849 the library housed 220,000 books and 21,000 manuscripts. It took only 65 more years for Bodleian to pass the one million volume mark (in 1914).

1981, 67 years after Bodleian reached its historic, seven-figure level of books, marks the year in which IBM brought personal computing, one of the earliest versions of electronic information machines, to the non-expert masses. This represents yet another “disruptive” technological moment in history. Since then, information technology has become faster, smaller, cheaper, and dramatically more user friendly. Knowledge and information has become available in massive quantities to enormous numbers of people. 

The degree of change in available reading material created by Gutenberg’s press pales in comparison to the proliferation of reading material available today. In 2010, less than 30 years following the introduction of the IBM personal computer, 2.7 million titles were self-published in the United States and electronic books (e-books) have enabled over 295,000 publishers to bring even more books to the e-market. Learning, once the province of the privileged, can be experienced by virtually anyone who wants it.

Add to this, the growth of access to the Internet. Wikipedia (which I accessed on line of course) says of the Internet, “There is no consensus on the exact date when the modern Internet came into being, but sometime in the early to mid-1980s is considered reasonable.” Which makes it reasonable to say that in 1983, just 30 years ago, there were virtually no Internet users. Wikipedia also reports that, “As of June 2012, more than 2.4 billion people—over a third of the world's human population—have used the services of the Internet. To make things even more exciting, the Pew Research Center reports that as of August 27, 2013, 70 percent of Americans have high-speed Internet connections at home.*

What does this mean for libraries? At the risk of repeating the title of this posting, they have reached a tipping point and having done so, will never be the same again. There will certainly be a continuing demand for printed books. Libraries will still need to provide printed copies of best sellers and other books to the millions of people who enjoy reading them that way. (In a recent survey of over 1,700 library patrons, 71.7 percent of respondents reported they believed books would be very important in five years, while 57.1 percent reported that e-books would be very important.) But I think the writing is on the wall (as well as this posting) that library leaders will be faced with the continuing challenge of learning what their communities need and finding innovative ways to meet those programs, services, and resources.

*Kathryn Zickuhr and Aaron Smith. "Home Broadband 2013." Pew Research Center, Washington, D.C. (August 26, 2013) http://www.pewinternet.org/~/media//Files/Reports/2013/PIP_Broadband%202013_082613.pdf, August 29, 2013.