Song+On+The+Radio

by Mark Ray

In a recent trolling through Portland's vintage shops, I found the same AM/FM radio/8-Track player that I had in my headboard as a pimply adolescent. Thanks to the GE "Big Mouth" radio/tape player, I kept current with the pop hits of the 70's on 62 KGW. Later, I migrated to KYTE FM and when there was too much disco, I popped in a Barry Manilow 8-track. It wasn't even stereo, the radio had one large speaker that filled my humble bedroom with sufficient sound. And AM radio sounded as good as it could on the Big Mouth. Since I no longer had the original, I snapped up the GE "Big Mouth" radio/tape player and brought it home, sans power cord. A few weeks back, it rocked my backyard with some monaural FM goodness.

Like all good messages, this gratuitous introduction serves to set the ground for today's question: are libraries, like radio, limited by their inherent playlists and target market? And by extension, do they face the same challenges as radio does in an iPod/on demand marketplace? And if so, how do we overcome these limitations?

Equating libraries to radio stations is probably best left at the metaphorical vs. literal level. But a comparison of these two bastions of 20th Century media distribution reveal more than a few parallels. Both offered free access to information, entertainment and media. While libraries provided a greater degree of choice in materials and allowed for them to be loaned, like radio, libraries were composed of a fixed, albeit regularly updated catalog of content. Where radio offered no choice (aside from changing the station), libraries offered what was on the shelves, either as a result of the collection itself or what was not already checked out. But both outlets were alike in three key areas. They were free. They were public. And they were 'closed catalogs.' As we look to re-imagine libraries for the last 90% of the 21st Century, the first two attributes remain compelling. The last issue of a closed catalog will warrant some further study.

Free is a very nice price, particularly in tough economic times. Both libraries and radio offered access to a wealth of content that required little more than a library card or a nine-volt battery. Thanks to both, one could stay current with the news, not to mention reading or listening to the latest in print or music. You didn't own the content (unless you kept the book or taped the radio) but such behaviors were dorky and problematic. If you really liked the book, author, artist or song, you could always buy it at a local store.

While many of us view the web as a free-for-the-taking repository of content including music, graphics, video and text, two issues suggest that the web may be cheap, but not free. The first is nothing new, we are all aware of the underbelly of the web--its porn, privacy issues and perils in the form of viruses, malware and the like. There is a hidden cost and price for what we perceive as free, both for users and producers. The latter also face the rapidly diminishing value of intellectual property as fair use, copyright, academic honesty and attribution become as quaint as music on the AM dial. The second issue is the emerging web-for-pay movement as the online marketplace evolves and realizes that giving things away and expecting advertising to pay the bills is, well just as flawed as FM radio. Add to this the growth of the 'app-ing of the web' in which Apple and other entities are creating exclusive pay-to-play 'suburbs' to compete with the decidedly urban free web. And so users are faced with the prospect of a free, dangerous and wide open web or a subscription- or hardware-based network that requires much more than a nine volt battery to play.

Libraries have fared poorly in competing against the free web. With online up-to-the-moment news, opinion and information, there has been no way for a collection librarian working with conventional media to keep pace. The resource-rich online environment makes the acquisition of format-based media like tapes, CDs and books good money chasing bad. But as the web becomes less free, both in access and access to content, libraries may well be able to step in and provide either mediated access to what's out on the free web and/or access to resources that were once free, but now require an app or a yearly fee.

The public nature of libraries, like radio, resonates as defensibly noble, democratic and egalitarian. By marked contrast to cellular networks, the cable company, Sirius, and yes, even iTunes, libraries and the radio speak to a fundamental belief that information, ideas, literature and entertainment don't have to come with a price tag, so long as you're willing to put up with a two month circulation period or advertisements for the Shane Company. But that freedom comes with the inherent limitation of what the collection librarian or station manager decides should be on the shelf or on the air.

This is the key problem with both libraries and radio. And the reason they both face extinction. Shelf lists and playlists fly in the face of a world that has come to believe that choice and on-demand convenience is worth the price of the player, service or wireless provider. The emergence of the Nook, Kindle and iPad signal that magazine, book and newspaper publishers are in the midst of the same revolution that has rocked the music, television and movie industries. As collectors and redistributors of content, both radio and libraries will feel the same pain as the industries that fill their shelves and airwaves. The iPad suggests that things will get worse for libraries before they get better. Up until now, books on the web have been limited to kludgy prehistoric classics found on Project Gutenberg or Google-bootlegged excerpts. Sorry Amazon and Barnes and Noble, but your devices were never game changers. You are Betamax to Apple's Blu-Ray.

By contrast, the iPad will revolutionize print in the same way that the iPod revolutionized music. I'm not the first to say that, but I will continue to believe it over the next few years that it will take both the iPad and the industry to make a fully realized online print experience. Many are already doubting the iPad, even as it sells millions of devices. Remember the first iPod? It was hardly great. It took years before the technology fully caught up with the device.

Where does this leave libraries? In the long term, it may well destroy libraries as we know them now. I think it will transform the reading experience into a right now multimodal, interactive, collaborative, 3D and uberlinked experience that will make paperbacks seem like 78 records. Imagine reading Twilight on your iPad simultaneously with your friend in another country at the same time you can see, talk to and/or text your friend on a video link while embedded video, audio and other content streams as you read through the book. Did we mention it will read it for you? In seventeen languages? With a choice of narrators including what's-his-name that everyone's drooling over? Yeah, I can hear what you're saying. There's nothing like curling up with good book. Well, now there is. And I'll happily sell you my collection of Tommy Dorsey records.

But there is a shred of hope in the apocalyptic implications of the device that Jobs wrought. Interestingly enough, libraries and the iPad/iPod/iPhone/AppStore complex have more in common than one would first think. Both Apple and libraries offer a mediated information and resource experience. Unlike the Wild Web, the benevolent fascism of Apple's App Store ensures that almost every application sold or hawked in their storefront conforms to strict programming, interface and content guidelines. Sounds like a library doesn't it? In its own way, Apple is conducting a type of collection development as they grow their online presence. For years, their music and video store followed similar standardization in pricing, format, documentation, presentation and classification. Dewey and the mavens of Sears Subject Headings would be proud.

Here's where my argument gets complicated. I think libraries can incorporate all three concepts in an outwardly contradictory fusion. We can be free. We can be public. And yes, we can be a closed catalog. And all three make sense in 2010. I've already made the case for free and public. How can you be American and not support those ideas? Libraries own those. But how does a closed catalog make sense in wide open online information marketplace? The answer? Apple is making it work. They are selling a better online experience (for the price of a device and a nominal charge per song, video, television show, book, magazine or application). More importantly, they have stuff that people want.

If that's working for Apple, why can't libraries do the same? Sure, we'll never be as cool as Apple, Steve Jobs and the iconic devices they create. But if people are willing to PAY for a better experience, wouldn't they likewise NOT PAY for a somewhat better experience? That's even more American, particularly in this Tea Partying world we live in. What if libraries provided a slick, easy-to-use, fashionable, well-managed, carefully-mediated and compelling alternative to the gritty urban landscape of the web? What if they provided access to just-in-time resources that were credible, well-packaged, self-citing and useful? We're not talking about dusty collections of 10-year-old reference materials. We're talking about eBooks, online databases, research tools and services that are available whenever the user needs them? I won't use the words 'virtual' or 'cyber' for the librarianship that I'm suggesting. Like the Zune, these labels are as cool as a Nook. But we're talking real-time dynamic librarianship, available via online links, messaging or texts. Some libraries have already gone down this route. It's a good path to take.

There is nothing wrong with a closed catalog so long as that catalog is a good one. Like a good radio station with the right songs and the right DJ, Apple is proving that people will listen to a different tune from the cacophony of a chaotic web. They will choose quality over quantity. People will pay for things that make them happy, solve their problems and answer their questions.

Why can't libraries do the same? Because we still spend our money on books, magazines and newspapers that millennials have little use for. We buy materials once or twice a year, not once a month. Our spaces are dusty, dull and conventional. We think incrementally, not exponentially. Our heart is in the right place--we are perfect information mediators. But our patrons see kludgy, not insanely great. We have a great service, but a crappy app.

To be continued