The Role of Libraries in the 21st-century

Thursday just gone, I joined other Kluge Center alumni to discuss the 'role of libraries in the 21st century.' This event was hosted in Cambridge and gathered all past UK-based Library of Congress (LoC) research fellows. Some had spent a full year at the Kluge and others - like myself - only a few months post-PhD. Some were secure in their academic careers and others - like myself - were early career researchers, so shall we say less secure. Kluge Center staff also joined us, as well as directors of research and collections from Cambridge (University of Cambridge) and London (British Library).

This ceiling greeted me each morning, provided I was looking straight up, on my way into the Kluge Center.

With all the expertise in the room, polite divergences on the topic inevitably emerged, despite this - nobody realistically thought we could pinpoint libraries' precise role in combatting current geopolitical tensions within the hour. Still, here are the main threads from that open discussion and where - maybe helpful - tensions arose:

1. Libraries as 'hosts' vs libraries as 'actors'

   
   

   Some suggested the Kluge's main role was to host academics and enable them to publicly disseminate their research, mainly through talks. While important, both for engagement and collections advocacy, others saw this as relegating libraries to that of a facilitator. Instead, in-line with critical library studies, I stated that the most meaningful thing during my time as at the Kluge was hearing from librarians articulate their own practices - technical, social, environmental, financial. This forms an awareness of the overheads, resourcing and too often hidden archival labour needed to support research. This process also leads to authentic library advocacy, alongside librarians and archivists working closest with collections. Lastly, understanding internal library processes enables more ethical research, with researchers understanding their own impact on libraries.

   
   

2. The role of public history

   
   

   If we follow those in the room who thought that libraries' primary role in the 21st century is supporting and underpinning research, the emphasis for tackling geopolitical challenges in the humanities space is thereby placed heavily on the quality of that research. It becomes the flag that libraries sail under. As suggested, however, libraries are more than neutral event spaces, with librarians forming technical staff with agency formulating their own or supporting research questions.

   
   

   One attendee compared STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) research to easily digestible fast food, while humanities research was a hard-to-market healthy superfood. Others suggested less theory and more tangible outputs - praxis, a suggestion that made a friend standing close to me squirm - 'good theory is good practice.' It appears then that the long-standing question of what makes good research still needs resolving.

   
   

3. The unique position of the Library of Congress

   
   

   In having former colleagues and mentors working so close to the federal government, especially with current US presidential politics and the active dismantling of the LoC's work on equality, diversity and inclusion, not to mention the dismal of the Librarian of Congress last week - we all wanted to check on the Kluge Center. A lot of recent anxieties come from their close relationship to government, which led attendees to remark that the LoC is a bit 'odd', like Cambridge - which is a legal deposit but not a national library. The LoC is a great national library, with responsibilities to hold cultural memory in posterity, while also a potential component of the legal frameworks actively thwarting that role. This brings clear tension to the LoC and, as those in the room suggested, sometimes added stature. Such a dual purpose therefore risks normalising an administration hellbent on destroying any sense of intellectual research - or general sense for that matter.

   
   

4. The role of digital and dare I say, AI

   
   

   AI is so ubiquitous a topic that any conversation holds the possibility of mentioning it, but for a discussion of 21st century libraries it has clear relevance. ChatGPT was mentioned almost instantaneously, which led me to think on a comment from a DHI colleague. They believed that there is an increasing need to dismantle the notion of AI as 'chat', born from most researchers interacting with AI only through chat-based interfaces. 'Not all AI is chat', they said. The need to acknowledge AI in its various forms, both as affordance and risk, is therefore necessary and was missing from the Cambridge gathering. Otherwise, the work on cautious and ethical AI deployment is also lost - eXplainable processes, climate coalition work, detecting inherent biases, producing reliable training sets, matching FAIR principles (findability, accessibility, interoperability, reusability) to AI workflows, all while ensuring library institutions take the helm.

   
   

This hour discussion demonstrated therefore where research priorities currently sit, as well as how Kluge alumni view their relationship to the LoC, library collections and staff: who were thanked for their reading room support but largely abstracted. I was left with a sense that we (researchers) continue to miss librarians in passing - with a lack of joined-up approaches to suggest new roles and approaches. There remains a need to resolve this polite divergence, perhaps after we surface it more thoroughly from worthwhile events like the Kluge catch-up, before we can truly begin to ascertain the role of libraries in the 21st century.