“It suddenly occurred to me that the hottest tech start-ups are solving all the problems of being twenty years old, with cash on hand, because that's who thinks them up.”

From George Packer’s “Change The World” in this week’s New Yorker, an interesting look at the tech world’s new forays into American politics, as well as the myopic viewpoint so many tech nerds have when it comes to inequality. Interestingly, libraries are not mentioned once in this piece about the information revolution and its relationship to government and public services in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. Did I say interestingly? I meant depressingly. The answer to why seems summed up in these two quotes, the first from Nate Levine, co-founder of Delphi, and the second from Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn:

If you’re an engineer in Silicon Valley, you have no incentive to read The Economist. It’s not brought up at parties, your friends aren’t going to talk about it, your employers don’t care.

&

One of the things that we’re getting is, like, ‘I’m really glad I read that book, and I haven’t read a book in a year.’

Despite the lack of libraries in this article, and actually because of it, I think it’s important that librarians read it. (It’s behind the paywall, so go read it in the periodicals section.) As a profession, especially on the younger side of things, incorporating technology into our services is of paramount importance to us. We talk about it constantly. And the people who make those things just do not give a shit about who we are and what we do; what’s more, the principles by which they live their lives and build the tools we use are just different from those many librarians have. It’s like a freshman having a crush on the captain of the football team and scribbling his name in a notebook. They’re not doing it to be cruel, I don’t think. They just don’t know.

Having just survived my first budget process, I am more aware than ever of how much libraries need to consider the next several years of technological changes when making plans, especially for purchasing, and also very aware of how little of those things we can actually plan for, because they are completely out of our hands. Our downloadable materials budget could change instantly with the decision of any publisher to sell or not sell to us, or if Apple removes the 3M or Overdrive apps from their store, or if audiobooks are suddenly universally available as mp3s, or if Amazon starts selling Kindles for $10. There’s no use getting upset about it, because I don’t ascribe to malice what I can ascribe to ignorance. But it’s something to think about: the tech industry doesn’t know what libraries do (and could do in the future, with better tools) and doesn’t care. When I was a bookseller, I saw this sort of thing play out with Google’s interest and then disinterest in working with indie booksellers to sell ebooks, so I’m always ready for the other shoe to drop. 

I’m curious about how other librarians are thinking about this stuff. What it means to me personally is that despite not having much interest in hands-on tech stuff, while I’m studying for my MLIS I need to focus more on tech classes than public service ones. There is a paucity of people who believe in the principles and importance of librarianship but have the tech knowledge of these start-up kids. If I want libraries to be part of these conversations and these articles—and I do! I believe with all my heart that libraries should be and can be at the beating heart of any information revolution!—then I need to teach myself how to do these things instead of waiting for a privately-owned company to do it for me. Or at least be ready to have real conversations with these companies rather than pretending to be grateful when signing up for whatever they decide to design.

(Actually, I guess you see this across the book industry, which explains why many book apps and start-ups are super lame. First, they necessarily are created and exist outside popular apps and websites because the needs of book lovers are not already incorporated into the tools that everybody uses, because it didn’t occur to the people who made the ubiquitous tools to incorporate them. Second, most of these apps are not even really addressing an actual problem, because they are based around what the creators know how to do and a perceived market, rather than something that needs a solution. (See Dominique Raccah at Sourcebooks for a powerful example of what it looks like when the book industry focuses their efforts on identifying the actual problems of their customers and creating a solution.))

None of these thoughts are new, of course—I’ve known since I started pouring over MLIS curricula that I really should force myself to take the data architecture class instead of the oral storytelling one. And I’m internally conflicted about this, because I manage a staff of readers’ advisors, and I believe that skills like RA are very important to the future of librarianship as well. Most of being a good readers’ advisor involves soft skills like active listening, being able to read body language, and an alchemical ability to know a person’s desires better than they do. That is a learned skillset that you can train for, and develop for a lifetime, just like programming. And believe me, someday I’d like all the app developers to try their hand at it, if only so they can understand that the algorithms they are trying to develop are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to book recommendation. But when I read articles like this one, it seems clear that I will have to learn to speak their languages first.

“I do not trust people who don’t love themselves and yet tell me, ‘I love you.’ There is an African saying which is: Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt.”

“If you see that some aspect of your society is bad, and you want to improve it, there is only one way to do so: you have to improve people. And in order to improve people, you begin with only one thing: you can become better yourself.”