Buildings, books, and bytes: libraries and communities in the digital age - Buildings, Books, and Bytes: Perspectives on the Benton Foundation Report on Libraries in the Digital Age

Funded by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation and prepared by the Benton Foundation, this study was prompted by the Kellogg Foundation's desire to inform its Human Resources for Information Systems Management (HRISM) grantees about where the public supports--or fails to support--libraries as they confront the digital world. With more Americans turning to home computers and the Internet for information, the Kellogg Foundation wanted to help its grantees develop a public message about American libraries that reflected both the library leaders' visions and the American people's expectations. The grantees spanned the library and information science world--library schools, large public library systems, university libraries, the Library of Congress, the American Library Association, the Council on Library Resources, Libraries for the Future, the Urban Libraries Council, community networks, video producers, and other key information providers.

Informing the study were the grantees' visions of the future, as embodied in written vision statements and telephone interviews; the public's view of public libraries; and the public policy agenda currently under discussion, especially as reflected in the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Grantees were asked to submit examples of how they were presenting their vision of the future of libraries in print and in public statements. The ways that grantees presented these visions publicly were distilled and later discussed with them in private telephone interviews. Augmenting the public visions and private concerns of library leaders were public opinion surveys--including one conducted in April 1996 by Lake Research and the Tarrance Group for this report--and a single focus group of sophisticated library users observed by library leaders. The results were discussed at a conference of grantees in May 1996 in Washington DC. The conference concluded with sessions to chart a strategy for the future.

The Benton Foundation had several key collaborators in the design and management of the Conference in May 1996 and in the preparation of this study: Leigh Estabrook, Dean of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois; Lake Research, a Washington DC public opinion firm; and the Tarrance Group, a survey research firm based in Alexandria, Virginia. Additional survey data were obtained from the Roper Center at the University of Connecticut.

At the Benton Foundation, Senior Program Associate Laura Weiss wrote this report. Program Officer Susan Bales and Laura Weiss supervised the research and sessions that contributed to the report. Executive Director Larry Kirkman provided project oversight. Program Officer Andrew Blau wrote the section on public policy. The Benton Foundation wishes to acknowledge the many contributions of Tom Reis, Director of Marketing and Dissemination for the Kellogg Foundation, whose guidance was invaluable in the design of this project.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

"You can take your kid to the library, but you can't take your kid to a website."--18-year-old high-school student

"If you plopped a library down. . .30 years from now. . .there would be cobwebs growing everywhere because people would look at it and wouldn't think of it as a legitimate institution because it would be so far behind. . ." --Experienced library user

This report is about libraries and the challenges they face in the digital world. But it is also about every noncommercial institution--from public TV to the freenets--that provides information to the public. It uses libraries as an exemplar of what can happen to even our most cherished public institutions when they face the onset of the digital revolution, a seismic societal shift. The report's findings about the intersection--and divergence--of library leaders' visions with those of the public hold lessons for everyone who values and wants to promote the public sphere of information and communications.

This study compares library leaders' visions for the future with the public's prescriptions for libraries, derived from public opinion research that forms the backbone of this study. For the purposes of this study, library leaders are defined by the institutional grantees of the Kellogg Foundation. This research suggests that libraries have their work cut out for them if they do not want to reside on the margins of the revolutionary new digital information marketplace. The younger generation--wedded to desktop computers--may provide a particular challenge. But this battle is not the libraries' battle alone. At issue is the very notion of a public culture--that nexus of schools, hospitals, libraries, parks, museums, public television and radio stations, community computer networks, local public access, education, and government channels of cable television, and the growing universe of nonprofit information providers on the Internet. This public opinion research affirms the need for alliances among these institutions to define their relative and collective roles in an expanding marketplace of information.