Librarian Rant #1

Who controls the information? 

Think about it.  Books used to be the go to source for everything.  Want to fix a pipe?  Go to the library, check out a book on plumbing, and read the directions and fix the pipe.  Want to know the circumstances surrounding the War of 1812?  Go to the library and check out a book.  By the physical act of reading a book, you were able to find the information of the ages at your fingertips.  Everything you could ever want to know was right there.  By buying and owning a book, you had the information at your fingertips to come back to whenever you wanted.  It became a personal reference.  Everybody had access to this information.  Go back 30 years, and almost every family had a set of encyclopedias on their shelves - a set of reference books that covered all kinds of information about the history of the world, science, and everything in between.

20 years ago, more people had started to shift to digital information, but it came in the form of CD's.  We had a CD copy of the World Book Encyclopedia that we relied heavily upon for years.  Many of our documents and family records were transferred over to CD's at the time.

Fast forward to today.  How many people still own a hard cover set of encyclopedias?  How many people still have bookshelves, even?  We've come to depend upon the internet for most everything.  Want to fix a pipe?  Find a YouTube video that shows you how, step by step.  Want to know the circumstances surrounding the War of 1812?  Search for information on the internet, and you are good to go.  If you're serious about finding reliable, valid information,  you'll go through the online portal at your local public library and access their online copy of the encyclopedias.

Family documents, pictures, and more are now all stored on the "cloud" - some mysterious server that you can log into from a distant location on any device and access from anywhere.

But, ask yourself this:  who truly controls this information?

People have gotten rid of their books and home reference collections at an alarming rate.  As libraries have gone digital, they have ditched their hardback reference collections.  Have you been in a library recently?  Have you checked out the size of their reference collection?  I was working in libraries 10 years ago, and I remember when we began weeding the in house reference collection as more digital references were added.  The entire second floor of that library used to be reference collection.  Over the course of the last 10 years, the reference collection has shrunk down to 6 sets of shelves on the second floor, next to the information desk.

The vast majority of our information is online. 

For the sake of argument, let's say that the internet is down, and you have a pipe that breaks and needs to be fixed.  Do you know what you're doing?  Do you have a physical book that shows you how to fix the pipe?  Or are you going to have to turn off all the water into the house in order to keep the house from flooding?  What will you do then - sit around with no water until the internet comes back up?

What if the power goes out?  And you decide to read a book by candlelight... oh wait... all of your books are on an electronic device.  That will keep you going for a few hours, but what will you do if the power on your device runs out before your power comes back on? 

And then there's "the cloud".  Your information is safely stored on the cloud.  Or is it?  What if the server goes down?  What then happens to your information?  Where are your pictures?  Are they still around, or are they gone forever?  Banking statements?  Do you have a hard copy, or are they all stored on the bank's servers?

You laugh at me....  go ahead, it's okay.  I'm a librarian.  I work in the information world.  We know the number of cyber attacks that happen on our information grid every single day - and it's a phenomenal number.  One of these days, someone is going to succeed on a massive scale, and our internet is going to go down for days and information will be lost forever.  And then what?

Librarians sit and talk about the potential loss of information when we get thoughtful.  There is just so much information that is now solely available online.  If online access goes down, then what?  How will we get this information back?  Libraries are no longer the repository of all print information.  Even the Federal Government has moved much information online - but the Library of Congress and the National Archives hold hard copies of many of these documents.  Not many other places still hold these documents, though.

And still, librarians sit and fret.  So much information has been moved online, into "the cloud".  Physical access to information is harder and harder to find.  Average people are getting rid of their books at an alarming rate, figuring that information will always be available.  Hundreds of years of stored information, most of it being moved online for "easier access".
 
Ask yourself this:  What happens if the internet goes down?  What happens if one of the thousands upon thousands of attacks upon our computer systems succeed, and hundreds of thousands of pieces of information are lost forever?

The loss of information from the Library at Alexandria will pale in comparison.