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"..in dire need of quantitative easing"

from Victoria Ward, Tuesday, September 22, 2009

The Tefal Toast'n'Egg - do students need this more than a library?

Emily Bell, director of digital content for the Guardian was talking about the media tending to proliferate where they should concentrate on doing less but better, but she might just as well have been talking about the internet.

MLA London is in the throes of setting up the fourth of the four planned pilots (the first three are the exchange programme that we blog about most frequently, an innovation fund for museums and archives and a distributed pilot taking place in four local libraries in London, called the Modern Local Business Library). This last pilot is apparently the most simple, while being deceptively complex. It’s about equipping a number of local librarians to engage more effectively with businesses through a train the trainer programme, and so involves a triple whammy of skills – being a good librarian, being good at putting yourself in the shoes of and at engaging with the business, and being a good facilitator. This trio is quite a bit harder to find than we imagined when setting out, but MLA London has found it in the commissioned provider and I’m sure we’ll find a talented set of trainers to take the show on the road.

So November will see a train the trainer programme in 2 sittings and then each trainee will, we hope, endeavour in turn to train a number of businesses in their own setting and report back to us on it. The information literacy training materials (for this is our badge for it) will also be available independently.

We’ve been having some fun with the kinds of case studies that will trigger lively conversations. The consultant has come up with a set and we’ve burrowed back into our evidence base to re-examine what we have too. I’ve a nice coupling of two bits of directly contradictory evidence here now in view for the first time. Clive Holtham, Professor of Information Management at Cass Business School was quite sharp in our first round of research about not Starbucksing the local library: those who want the bang and crash of the barrista and the smell of babycinos can go to a Starbucks, he says. A library is about books and a retreat for the travelling business man. But I’ve a first hand account of the opposite, where the knowledge management programme at the Asian Development Bank has as one of its greatest achievements so far throwing out the books, inviting in a Starbuck’s franchise and getting in an interactive Google maps, which is now the focal point of much corridor conversation and regarded as a terrific knowledge transfer space all round.

The death by desktop delivery argument argues that the internet has made fast things that could better be slow. Well yes, but tell that to the students in Mombasa who are, without books, without libraries, just getting hooked to the internet for the first time. The leapfrogging of library by new technology in the third world is only true in part though, as the urge to build physical manifestations of the power of library seems as strong as ever.

In a detour along a byroad of this enquiry into the role of the library in modern local business life, I fell over a delightful book by Alberto Manguel called “The Library at Night” which offers a biased but still pungent critique of the shallow ubiquity and lack of depth and feeling the web offers:

“[A] sleight of hand is achieved, every time a reader locks onto the Web, by stressing velocity over reflection and brevity over complexity, preferring snippets of news and bytes of facts over lengthy discussions and elaborate dossiers, and by diluting informed opinion with reams of inane babble ineffectual advice inaccurate facts and trivial information, made attractive with brand names and manipulated statistics.

But the Web is an instrument. It is not to blame for our superficial concern with the world where with live. Its virtue lies in its brevity and in the multipicity of its information; it cannot also provide us with concentration and depth. The electronic media can assist us…in a myriad of practical ways, but not in all and can’t be held responsible for that which they are not meant to do."

The frontispiece of the book fires the imagination about what libraries are and can be for:

• The library as myth, order, space, power, shadow, shape, chance, workshop, mind, island, survival, oblivion, imagination, identity, home.

Ominously, though, this potency, the very stuff of knowledge transfer, might shrivel way if today’s students (tomorrow’s business people) are not romanced back into libraries: according to the Telegraph, in a recent survey by Currys two thirds of students said they would rather give up library access than live without the internet.

Perhaps there is hope though. Manguel’s book concludes:

“Every new technology has advantages over the previous one, but necessarily lacks some of its predecessors attributes….Human imagination is not monogamous nor does it need to be, and new instruments will soon sit next to the PowerBooks that now sit next to our books in the multimedia library.”

I should perhaps mention that The Telegraph’s hot tips for new student technologies include an audio pen called a Livescribe and the Tefal Toast’n’Egg.

I feel a Modern Local Business Library Toast’n’Egg business breakfast club coming on.