The history of lighthouses

Abstract

From ‘the university for the common man’ to today's connected libraries, public libraries provide a wealth of information in a variety of forms. But the concept of the free public library offers much more than a conduit for the delivery of books and ebooks, journals and databases. It represents a bold statement in favour of opportunity for all, a statement famously taken up by Andrew Carnegie whose influence was worldwide. That boldness, not a hesitant ambivalence, must direct our planning for libraries. The 2014 celebration of the 75th anniversary of the passing of the New South Wales Library Act in 1939 reminded the sector of the importance of that landmark library legislation for Australia and of the strong network of public libraries enjoyed today. Those libraries are rapidly adapting to both the challenges and the opportunities of the digital age as they create new public libraries for their communities. The new libraries embrace digital technologies and differ considerably in collections, services and use of space from earlier models, but they maintain the tradition of the free public library as a resource open to all.

Keywords::

• lighthouses
• public libraries
• future
• challenges
• digital age
• e-technologies

One of the wonders of the ancient world, the great lighthouse of Alexandria stood on the island of Pharos for some 1600 years from about 280 BCE to the early fourteenth century (Reid, 1988). Believed to have shone some 50 km into the Mediterranean, it was not only a beacon for sailors approaching the port of Alexandria at the mouth of the Nile but also a dramatic illustration of the application of knowledge. The much shorter-lived great library of Alexandria, also established in the third century BCE, was likewise a beacon of knowledge and mark of civilization.

Beacons were mentioned in Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, the earliest Western literature. From fires and oil lamps to today's completely unmanned, automated lights, lighthouses have a history of innovation as new technologies are applied. Through that long history and because of their assurance of safety against the perils of the sea, lighthouses have assumed great symbolic value, strongly associated with guidance in the hazardous dark.

In similar vein, libraries fulfil practical purposes of the utmost importance but also have great symbolic value as carriers of knowledge and monuments to its value. More than metaphorically, the library provides a light in the darkness of ignorance as the lighthouse provides safe passage for mariners. But, despite those continuing purposes, neither is static; both have continued to evolve and change as new techniques and technologies are adopted, adapted and discarded.

In Australia, Cook and other early navigators observed Aboriginal fires and the first colonists established a signal station on Sydney Harbour's South Head. Construction of lighthouses became a priority in the nineteenth century as the shipping trade expanded, and their construction was encouraged by disasters such as the wreck of the Dunbar on South Head with the loss of all 122 on board except one (Reid, 1988). So important were lighthouses that Section 51 of the Australian Constitution gave the new national government in 1901 the ‘power to make laws for the peace, order, and good government of the Commonwealth with respect to … lighthouses, lightships, beacons and buoys’ and transferred those that existed at the time from each state to the Commonwealth (Section 69).

Libraries have not been similarly celebrated in the Australian Constitution but have an equally long and important history. Although far from the earliest library or archive, the ancient Great Library of Alexandria has become an icon for libraries and their roles in collecting knowledge and enabling scholarship. Its destruction by fire has also become a symbol of the threats to knowledge from the barbarity that lurks outside our civilised world (El-Abbadi, 1990). Its influence continues to shape popular perceptions of libraries as being primarily valued as accumulations of books, aspiring to universality and decrying discarding, an influence that extends from academic and research libraries to ‘the university for the common man’, as public libraries were dubbed in the nineteenth century.

The history of libraries, especially public libraries, was to the fore in New South Wales in 2014 with the celebration of the 75th anniversary of the NSW Library Act. That landmark legislation, passed as the Second World War intensified in 1939, enabled the establishment of the strong network of nearly 370 public libraries across the state which we enjoy today, and set the pattern for other jurisdictions. Those libraries have evolved into powerhouses for their communities, and continue to evolve to serve and sometimes lead their communities and to take advantage of technological possibilities. But throughout those 75 years, the public libraries have held fast to the fundamental principles on which they were established and which are enshrined in the Act: free public libraries for all.

Technological innovation opens possibilities, leading to change which is often unpredictable and challenging. The shift to fully automated lighthouses around the Australian coastline, following a report of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Expenditure, Lighthouses: Do We Keep the Keepers? (1984), was completed when Australia's most southerly light on Maatsuyker Island was replaced with a solar powered light in 1995 (Wells, 2008). The shift from manned lighthouses was challenged as a threat to maritime safety. Opponents could not imagine a future without manned lighthouses. The threat to safety has not eventuated but the shift to automation was the end of a particular way of life for the lighthouse keepers and their families (see for example ABC Australian Story, 2002; Douglas, 1998). Almost always isolated, often dangerous, the way of life had its history and traditions and many assumed it would continue. It came to an end but the purpose of lighthouses remains: some 350 lights continue to inform small and large vessels of coastal dangers and safe passages.

These reflections remind us of a truism of human nature: we find it very difficult to imagine a changed future. We imagine ‘time's arrow’ shooting out on the trajectory we know and, looking back, we perceive an inevitability in the trajectory that has brought us to this moment in time (Coveney & Highfield, 1990). Yet history reminds us that trajectories change, discontinuities occur, new trajectories emerge.

The history of librarianship is not immune from the tendency to project forward from the preoccupations of the present. The rapid adoption of microfilm for preservation and dissemination purposes after the Second World War (Southern Regional Library Facility, n.d.) led to predictions in the 1950s that the novel technology would deliver ‘the Library of Congress in a briefcase’ (Crawford & Gorman, 1995). This did not eventuate, of course, because it was found that microfilm was a good medium for relatively cheap replication of rare materials, as in the Australian Joint Copying Project, and for dense storage and preservation of bulky materials such as newspapers, but uncomfortable and tedious for prolonged usage. Similarly, the use of microfiche for library catalogues two decades later predicted nothing about the future of catalogues. It was short lived, as the cheapness of replication failed to balance the clumsiness of usage versus the emerging online public access catalogues.

One of the initiatives for the commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the NSW Library Act was a re-examination of the Bookends Scenarios (State Library of NSW, 2009), an influential attempt to scope the future of public libraries by 2030 carried out by the State Library of NSW in 2008. The Building on the Bookends Scenarios Report, exploring possible future scenarios for the NSW public library network, will be published in 2015. The re-examination demonstrated that change has been telescoped: it has come much more quickly than was expected. We are not only likely to misperceive trends but also have difficulty in predicting the pace of change.

In considering the future of libraries and of the technologies they adopt, all should hesitate to confidently predict trajectories and the timeframes of change. Librarians should rather apply the deep understanding of our clients to the analysis of the potential of the technologies to meet their current and emerging needs and preferences, and to the improvement of the operation of our libraries. Gorman (2004) referred again to the absurdity of the ‘library in a briefcase’ claim when he dismissed the creation of ‘massive databases of digitized whole books’ as expensive exercises in futility. He called the idea that ‘one form of communication (electronic) will supplant and obliterate all previous forms'a ‘staggering notion’.

While not accepting the dismissal of the mass digitisation of books, it is a ‘staggering notion’ that one form of communication – one form of technology – will replace all previous forms. Just as the history of microforms demonstrated that libraries found the best uses for that technology, purposes which remain relevant, libraries are finding the best uses for digital technologies. Sources for volatile and repeatedly updated information were clumsily delivered in print so it is no surprise that directories, loose leaf tools, indexes, abstracts and the like have rapidly moved online and the print forms have disappeared or are close to disappearing. High cost of production tools which rapidly date, such as encyclopaedias, have gone; dictionaries linger for convenience but will go with the proliferation of mobile devices. Scholarly journals have not only gone online wholesale – except for a very few of limited specialist circulation – but in many cases have been extended back to their beginnings through retrospective digitisation.

Ebooks, however, have had a faltering start. Many find the convenience of carrying one device holding many books attractive and enjoy the additional features offered by the reading devices, yet the majority of readers continue to prefer printed books, a very satisfactory technology. It appears likely that both forms will continue to coexist for a long time as 50:50 by 2020, the Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA) statement released in November 2013, contends. This has been reinforced by the revision to the statement, 80:20 by 2020, issued in March 2015, but that statement nevertheless continues the error of trying to be definitive.

Digitisation of manuscript collections, photographs and other original materials not only enables unique or rare items to be accessed online by many, but also enables them to be seen and used in new ways. The State Library of NSW has, for example, digitised all of its unique collection of 1200 diaries by the Australians who went to the First World War. The 180,000 pages are being made available online for all to view but are also being transcribed, firstly through the dedication of volunteers and now through crowd sourcing via a transcription tool developed and launched by the Library in December 2014 (http://transcripts.sl.nsw.gov.au). Also available for transcription are some of the first written records of Aboriginal languages, with more manuscripts to follow.

Transcription not only makes the often faint and cramped handwriting easier to read, but also renders it searchable so that researchers and family members can look for people, places, events, equipment to an extent that was not possible previously without painstakingly going through all of the fragile pages. This creates a new experience which presents the original words of those in that terrible war to the public a century later (Daley, 2014). The mass digitisation of books, decried by Gorman, shows similar potential for research in the digital humanities and also for the common enquirer, as users of Google BookSearch know.

As these examples demonstrate, it is not merely a matter of opposing one technology to another, but rather of finding the best application for particular technologies and recognising that technologies have their place and their day. Card catalogues and typewriters were excellent technologies in their time but have been fully supplanted by computers. Writers might nostalgically put Tom Hanks’ old fashioned typewriter app on a tablet but wouldn't seriously use it to write articles (Newman, 2014).

Returning to 50:50 by 2020, can we accept its seemingly confident claim ‘We predict that library print and ebook collections will establish a 50:50 equilibrium by 2020 and that this balance will be maintained for the foreseeable future’? Or should we hold to the 80:20 by 2020 claim in the revised statement? Are we like the Australian lighthouse keepers of the 1980s, just trying to preserve a known present against an uncertain future? Or are we in the thrall of technolust (Crawford & Gorman, 1995) foreseeing the rapid domination of yet another technology for good or ill, foretelling a glorious future or apocalyptic doom?

The extensive research on ebooks compiled by ALIA and other library associations (Australian Library and Information Association, 2014a; Australian Public Library Alliance, 2014), demonstrates an uncertain marketplace in which publishers and distributors are imposing restrictive contractual conditions with which libraries are grappling. Diversity of platforms and formats is causing confusion and there are indications of budgetary pressures imposed on libraries by the need to meet annual subscriptions in place of once only purchase. Local publications are being squeezed out as major distributors have little interest in delivering unprofitable content.

In many ways this repeats the experience of academic libraries with the shift of scholarly journals from print to digital. That process, which is now effectively complete, has delivered to the members of academic and research institutions a previously unimaginable range of content – including a proportion of little or peripheral interest – which can be accessed anywhere at any time, searched, downloaded and manipulated. Additional features have emerged which link the literature and expose research data to the benefit of researchers. These extensive resources have benefited scholarship through facilitating study and research.

But the cost has been high. Annual blockbuster subscription charges have applied pressure to library budgets, largely squeezing out scholarly monographs, and restrictive licences have isolated the academic libraries from their surrounding communities. Where in the past academic libraries could be proud of the ways in which they supported local professionals, independent researchers and those pursuing personal interests beyond the academy through free access to extensive collections of journals – unobtainable elsewhere especially in regional areas – now licence conditions place firm barriers against access by people who are not members of the library or its parent institution, sometimes with limited provision for onsite usage. Local publications have largely been excluded, partly through the orientation of the aggregators, and partly through increased emphasis on the reputation of publications in the assessment of scholarly worth.

Through mergers and takeovers, competition among aggregators and publishers has significantly diminished. Because each journal title is unique, demand is inelastic and the only restraint on pricing is the libraries' capacity to pay. An international system of scholarly communication is increasingly dominated by a few corporations to the exclusion of smaller research communities, less dominant languages and marginal interests. Thus, despite the immediate benefits, the changes to the scholarly publishing industry have been deleterious to scholarly communication.

Identification of those trends and their undesirable consequences led to the initiation of the open access movement a decade ago. The movement aims to ensure the free, immediate, online availability of research articles, coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment (SPARC, 2014). It has had remarkable success in providing an alternative mode of publication and has ensured that more than 50% of the scientific papers published in the years 2007 to 2012 could be downloaded for free on the Internet by April 2014 (Archambault et al., 2014). It has also demonstrated that scholars benefit from making their findings freely available, as open access articles enjoy a citation advantage of 40.3%.The influence has been worldwide, benefiting those outside the research powerhouses of the USA, Europe and Japan as well as those within. For example in Australia, UTSePress was established in 2004 and now publishes 11 highly regarded ‘platinum’ open access journals (http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals).

With ebooks in public libraries we are seeing similar patterns to the deleterious industry developments experienced in scholarly publishing. The libraries are facing budgetary pressures, as the ALIA Statement acknowledges, stating that ‘Collection budgets will need to increase’. Access is restricted to members of the libraries, as borrowing has been with print collections, but is generally further restricted to one borrower at a time or similar constraints. Even the State Library of NSW heard grumbles from some vendors when it moved to promote usage of the ebooks and other eresources to which it subscribes for the people of New South Wales. Access is also restricted to those with suitable devices for the formats available: an inconvenience for many, an absolute barrier for the poor. Local content – local history, family histories, Indigenous publications, literature in community languages, environmental reports, school projects, and so on – has no place on these platforms. And we are seeing consolidation in providers with the anticompetitive consequences seen in scholarly publishing and commonplace in other industries.

The ALIA Statement is correct in pointing to the rapid adoption of mobile technologies and use of the internet. ‘We are all connected’ is hardly an exaggerated description of today's world. Who doesn't go online to check a movie time, a product, an address … or to share an image, a thought, a sentiment …? Online is here to stay and is benefiting communities in many ways, although we, especially we in the library profession, must remember those who are excluded by poverty, health, age, illiteracy, location and hold fast to our commitment to inclusiveness.

But 50:50 by 2020 and 80:20 by 2020 are the wrong answers to the wrong question. It is not a question of ebook versus printed books or of what proportion of each. Setting such a measure would be of as little value as stating the proportion of fiction versus nonfiction, or romance versus crime. Each of these proportions evolves in each library as it responds to the interests and needs of its clientele. Still less is it a question of whether our investments in RFID, return chutes, book carts and so on will still be of value, as the statement contends. The fundamental question is about the core purpose and ethos of the public library in the online age and the correlative issue is what we must do to protect and foster that purpose and ethos.

The purpose of our public libraries continues to be a place of community to which all are welcome, in which all can learn and seek fulfilment. Public libraries were book centred when books offered the principal way to serve their communities; today they use the technologies of today where books have been joined by ebooks and other eresources, WiFi, audiobooks, community based programming, outreach to communities, and the many other services and programmes from which our communities benefit. They continue to be places where readers borrow books, read newspapers, seek information, as when the NSW Library Act was passed 75 years ago. The public library continues to be the heart of the community, as it has been since its inception in the industrialising towns of England. It is a place where people come together with a sense of community, develop networks, learn skills, develop their careers, stimulate their children, educate their minds, replenish their souls.

So, what must we do to protect and foster that purpose and ethos? How can we similarly protect the interests of our clients and ensure that they will be able to continue to read what and how they like?

We need to learn from the success of the open access movement in the scholarly world, holding fast to the fundamental principles of the public library, open to all and free access for all, and to continue to apply them to the technologies of today and those just around the corner. This means that we need to contest unfair licences and restrictive trade practices by applying a ruler of fair principles to the agreements we sign. We need to enter into dialogue with our suppliers so that they understand that we wish them to prosper but must serve the interests of our readers. To assist such dialogue and negotiation, the State Library of NSW has developed an elending portal for ideas and discussion by registered NSW public library staff about elending and ebooks in public libraries (http://www.nswnet.net/elending-portal). We need to continue to guide our readers in the selection of devices and to find ways to assist those without access to necessary technology. We need to maintain the valuable services we have developed to optimise access to physical publications such as interlending, adapted appropriately to the new environment (ALIA, 2014b). And we need to ensure that we can maintain the diversity of our collections to support the varied interests of our readers, especially in regard to local and specialist material. To that end, the State Library of NSW is trialling a local content platform in collaboration with pilot public libraries.

We will continue to provide printed books because they are a tried and true technology for extensive narratives, but we will also provide many titles as ebooks and many of our clients will prefer to read them in that form, just as many prefer to read them as audiobooks. And the ebooks as we know them today will evolve as the technologies find their place and as new technological possibilities emerge. We will adopt strategies to ensure the widest possible diversity of reading, always applying our principles of open to all and free to all.

Libraries and librarians will continue to respond to their communities, subtly, continually and sometimes dramatically re-imagining their services. We continue to be beacons of knowledge but, unlike the lighthouses, we will not become silent outposts of technology blinking hopefully out to sea.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alex Byrne

Dr Alex Byrne is the State Librarian and Chief Executive of the State Library of New South Wales, following posts in library and university management at several Australian universities. He is also the Deputy Chair of National and State Libraries Australasia, a partnership of the National Library of New Zealand and Australian national and state libraries. Alex served for a decade in leadership positions with the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, including President from 2005 to 2007.

Notes

^1. This paper has been double-blind peer-reviewed to meet the Department of Education's HERDC requirements.