Becoming digital: policy implications for library youth services - Children and the Digital Library

Abstract

The author frames the policy issues surrounding children and digital libraries by establishing two criteria for decision making: (1) Does this policy facilitate access to information by children and young adults? and (2) Does this policy enable the library to provide better service to children and young adults? The intellectual freedom issues are discussed along with the range of responses to them, including the use of filtering software and the teaching of information literacy skills. Both the digital challenge to conventional collection development policy and the problem of equity are linked to the issue of access to information. The outcomes for children from digital libraries are weighed, and a policy metanarrative is constructed from the conflicting images of the child in the digital world by including the computer as an active protagonist interacting constructively with the child.

Introduction

Nicholas Negroponte (1995), founding director of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, writes persuasively about an emerging digital world that is defined in electronic bits, not the physical atoms that comprise books, magazines, and videocassettes. This transformation from atoms to bits is both irrevocable and unstoppable, he claims, and the rate of change is exponential.

Much of the literature on digital libraries also seems to be making the claim that the transformation from libraries with walls surrounding collections of print to virtual libraries with access to unlimited electronic resources is both irrevocable and unstoppable. This is not to say that there have been no skeptics or voices of caution. Walt Crawford and Michael Gorman (1995), for example, write about the fallacies of what they term "technolust" in the library community and argue for the addition of digital materials to collections of print and other media, not the replacement of print with digital artifacts. David M. Levy and Catherine C. Marshall (1995), both researchers associated with the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, have also been critical of the assumption that libraries will become completely digital, pointing out that collections have never been completely print either. Much of the discussion of digital libraries, however, has been informed by a kind of technological imperative and a belief in their potential for providing better information services. Karen M. Drabenstott (1994), for example, in her Analytic Review of the Library of the Future, offers the following as a "shared vision of the future": "There is an evolving shared vision of the new information world. It is a world of ubiquitous, reasonably priced digital information in any and all media, available to everyone from a computer, television, palm, or wrist, as predictable, ordinary, and universal as a toaster" (p. 7).

The rate of change to the new information world described above, if not exponential, is faster than many might have predicted. In 1994, 20.9 percent of all American public libraries were connected in some way to the Internet; in 1996, this number had grown to 44.6 percent, an increase of more than 100 percent (Bertot et al., 1996, p. 13). The percentage of schools with Internet access increased from 35 percent in 1994 to 50 percent in 1995 (National Center for Education Statistics, 1996, p. 9).

What Drabenstott describes as a "shared vision," however, is actually the product primarily of individuals associated with large research libraries and electronic library utilities. It has its origins in a perceived paradigm shift from acquisition to access in many large libraries, in the need to control or reduce the costs associated with acquiring and storing large complex collections, and in the explosion of a number of enabling technologies which facilitate digital access to information.

Librarians serving youth in public and school libraries have been early and active adopters of information technologies of all kinds. Frances Jacobson (1995) is exemplary of these reflective practitioners; in addition to her own thoughtful implementation of digital resources in the library that she manages at the laboratory school at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, she has investigated the meaningful integration of information technology in other high school library settings and shared her findings with the professional community. Scholars such as Delia B. Neuman (1993) and Paul Solomon (1993), among others, have contributed to a small but growing body of research on young people's use of electronic media. The Science Library Catalog project of UCLA was an extended research study of children's use of electronic catalogs which yielded a number of findings that have contributed to our understandings of the ways in which children search for information in a digital environment and have led to the development of more age-appropriate interfaces to electronic catalogs (Borgman et al., 1995; Hirsh, 1995; Walter et al., 1996). In spite of these and other indicators that children and young adults comprise an important segment of the emerging digital library user community, the particular needs and interests of children and young adults have not been highlighted in the general professional discourse on digital libraries.