The Benton Report: a response - Buildings, Books, and Bytes: Perspectives on the Benton Foundation Report on Libraries in the Digital Age

Library Trends, Summer, 1997 by Leigh S. Estabrook

INTRODUCTION

These Library Trends articles approach the Benton Report from a variety of useful perspectives. Most critical are those which find fault with the research methodology or research questions. The study has its limits. It was exploratory, the focus group was only one group of white middle-class users, and the report--written for a popular audience--does not present as much detail about the methods or findings as it would were it presented in a scholarly paper. At the same time, its findings are powerful.

Over 20,000 copies of the Benton Foundation's report have been distributed with much discussion resulting from people's reading of it. When I speak or write about the findings, I have found intense interest from librarians, many of whom comment that the findings mirror issues they are confronting on their jobs. What do the findings mean? To what extent are they valid? Do they suggest we need to alter public perceptions of the library in the digital era? Or do libraries need to change their services? Perhaps it is the thinking of library leaders, as defined in this report, who are out of sync with the field or the public?

Before trying to answer these questions, it seems helpful to begin with some background about the report--why did the Benton Foundation conduct this study? Some of the criticisms seem to come from a misunderstanding of its purpose and potential use.

BACKGROUND

Three years ago the W.K. Kellogg Foundation began what it has called the HRISM (Human Resources for Information Systems and Management) initiative. Driven initially by the vision of Dan Atkins, dean of the School of Information at the University of Michigan, this initiative expanded to include at least three other schools of library and information science (including the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), the American Library Association, the Urban Libraries Council, Libraries for the Future, the Council on Library Resources, Harvard University, a school for disabled children, the Library of Congress, and the New York Public Library, among others.

The Kellogg Foundation's mission is to help people help themselves, and they have become convinced that information services are critical to achieving that mission. The Kellogg Foundation strongly believes in libraries and has been willing to support them as institutions, but the foundation's commitment is not to libraries. It is to services for which they believe libraries are central--i.e., making sure that communities, social service agencies, and people have access to the rich information resources of this "digital era." The Kellogg Foundation has invested in libraries and library associations in the hope that these will play a central role in our changing society, but I have heard at least one foundation spokesperson say that if libraries fail to take up that role, they will look to other ways of carrying out this initiative. In other words, if libraries are not responsive or do not move quickly enough to assert leadership in providing access to, and increased use of, digital information, Kellogg will fund other agencies that will.

Several years into this initiative, the Kellogg Foundation brought together all the HRISM grantees to see how the different organizations could work together, particularly in building a common and united focus. Included in this meeting were representatives from the Benton Foundation. A major strength of this foundation is creating public messages for public causes.

It was a difficult and frustrating meeting. As one might expect, given the diversity of the group of grantees and their significantly different foci, it was difficult for us to discern how we might work together in any formal sense. Moreover, during that meeting, it became apparent that many of us differed in our thinking about what role libraries, in particular public libraries, should play at this time of rapid technological change. We could not reach consensus on what a public message might say that succinctly and clearly captures the essence of the role that libraries play. This is what led to the Benton study, funded by the Kellogg Foundation. (It also drives a follow-up grant from the W.K Kellogg Foundation to the Benton Foundation to expand on this initial project. Among the activities included in that grant is a set of additional focus groups.)

The study sought to accomplish what a meeting of HRISM grantees and other library leaders could not: first, to understand the shared beliefs of library leaders about the future of libraries in a digital era as represented by the HRISM grantees; and second, to understand how the American public views libraries in a digital era. These were in the context of saying, "if we were going to try a national public relations campaign--which requires a common voice--for libraries, what should it look like?"

The methodology of the study began by looking to see if the written grant proposals of HRISM grantees revealed any shared vision. Then, drawing on the themes of the written proposals, it sought to explore further the vision of these leaders of the public library in the digital era.