‘‘ A


RECENT Guardian editorial1


took as


its subject the cyber attack on the British Library and its ongoing aftermath.


The editorial criticised the library sector’s emphasis on digital and cautioned against assuming “that the digital world is so ubiquitous, and so well-served by search engines, that who needs bricks and mortar, paper copies or librarians at all any more?” Despite acknowledging that libraries must be funded to offer both physical and digital collections and services, it asserted that the British Library cyber attack “offers a timely warning about assuming that the future of libraries is online”.


Rise of digital


While it is welcome that a prominent national media organisation has drawn attention to this issue and mounted a spirited defence of libraries and “real librarians”, the overriding tone in the piece is that digital is an aberration, a risky digression from a core mission grounded in print books. This is misguided and ignores how widespread and largely positive the rise of digital in the library sector has been. By this same logic, the risk of hacking and cybersecurity breaches would mean a move away from online banking or digital healthcare. Which would of course mean the loss of the myriad benefits associated with them. The editorial also fails to distinguish between online information in general – with very real issues of accuracy, reliability and provenance – and the digital collections, services and other activities of libraries. While the means may have changed from in-person and physical to remote and digital, the ends, in terms of managing, sharing and preserving information and


January-February 2024


Rather than retreating from digital, the real issue is the need for greater government investment and leadership on cybersecurity...


engaging people around its use, are exactly what they always have been. Rather than retreating from digital, the real issue is the need for greater government investment and leadership on cybersecurity, as the Guardian itself has highlighted2


. However, by


the same token, careering down a digital-only path would be equally erroneous. Nowhere is this more in evidence currently than in the wrong- headed intention of the Ministry of Justice to destroy original paper copies of historic wills after a planned mass digitisation programme.


Richard Ovenden, Bodley’s Librarian at the University of Oxford, has rightly criticised this intention3


. The MoJ’s


assumptions, such as that digital copies will be accessible and useable in perpetuity; that there won’t be a need to create future digital copies as technology advances; or that only a small subset of what they deem to be “noteworthy wills” should be retained in paper, are unnervingly wide of the mark.


False choice


Digital or physical is ultimately a false choice, it is not a binary either/ or, as any music fan who listens to Spotify but also buys vinyl will tell you. Rather than diving headlong into a digital-only future or retreating into a romanticised past of paper and print, today’s libraries are a synthesis of digital and physical, but with people at their heart.


Yet the wider societal view of libraries is still rooted to a large extent in the past, in the ever-pervasive connection between libraries and print books. A now-deleted 2018 column in Forbes by Panos Mourdoukoutas4


,


which argued that Amazon stores should replace public libraries, is just one particularly egregious example. It completely ignores the vast digital


Tom Shaw (@shawthomas123), Deputy Director, Libraries & Collections, King’s College London.


space that most libraries now occupy alongside their physical manifestations, or the equally important role libraries play as cultural hubs, events spaces, locations of human connection or beacons of hope in their communities. But the notion that a library equals a building with print books and nothing more is deeply embedded in public consciousness and is increasingly problematic. Even AI-generated images of a library of the future are full of print books and look little different to the libraries of today.


Appreciation


There are no easy answers to this. But an important priority is to find ways of promoting wider social appreciation of libraries as digital as well as physical entities. Ultimately, we need to find ways as a sector of inculcating the kind of civic pride in digital that there still is in libraries’ physical manifestations. IP


References


1 www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/14/the-guardian- view-on-the-future-of-libraries-an-old-question-of-human-dignity- in-a-new-form


2 www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/dec/13/uk-at-high-risk-of- catastrophic-ransomware-attack-report-says


3 www.ft.com/content/f0efcce4-2c77-4e16-98d9-a0f879cbbb4b


4 www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jul/23/twaddle-librarians- respond-to-suggestion-amazon-should-replace-libraries


INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL 35


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