Stephen King, in the September 18 issue of Entertainment Weekly, worries about the evolution of pop culture—movies, TV, books, even radio. These businesses are evolving extremely quickly, but the changes may not be good, as there’s a real threat that companies we depend upon for good content may go out of business.
Mike Shatzkin, a consultant to the book industry, says that aggregation and curation are key to understanding what’s happening to newspapers, publishers, and bookstores. “Except for the writers,” he says, “all of us in the book value chain are part of the effort to aggregate and curate the offerings of writers to others.”
We libraries also aggregate by pulling things together in some way—our catalog of items owned, for instance. But we also curate by deciding what to select in the first place. In the past, “curate” was a word used to imply very careful selection and pruning of items in a museum or art collection, for instance.
In the digital world, with its proliferation of aggregators and overload of content, the word takes on a less precious definition. As Shatzkin puts it, “The importance of curation becomes more prominent. If having lots and lots of books in a store doesn’t have the power it used to (since, unlike the old days, you can easily buy a title online now if the store doesn’t have it), having the right books becomes more important.”
Many would say that librarians have a duty to pick out the good stuff so people can find it, and balance those selections with what’s selling well, and therefore what people want. But we’ve seldom used the word “curation” to describe what we do in the real world of, say, public libraries. With the proliferation of self-publishers and one author publishers, how will we manage this curation in the future—especially if book publishers continue their struggle to survive and we can’t depend upon their brand to give us a clue to the quality of the titles?
The bottom line according to Stephen King:
“When crap drives out class, our tastes grow coarser and the life of the imagination grows smaller. And when the good stuff’s gone? It ain’t comin’ back, son. That’s what I’m really afraid of.”
Here are some other thoughts that come to my mind:
Do we have the right titles in our building? This is a question we’re very comfortable with. After all, selection and weeding are what we do. But do we have the things most of our people want, when they want them, coupled with the ability to get them the long tail things that maybe only they want? Are our shelves clogged with the wrong stuff that nobody wants?
When we make book displays, maybe we need to think a bit more about what kinds of titles to feature. Are we highlighting just what’s already popular, or are we rescuing good stuff from the stacks and giving it a second chance in our “stores?”
We leaned, in the past, too far toward “just in case” instead of “just in time,” largely because we didn’t really have any other way to deal with the situation. But now, with the increaed ability to locate and borrow or buy the rarely needed items that our patrons might want, how should the rules of selection change?
What do you think of this whole issue? Doesn’t it apply to libraries just as much as to bookstores?
