Before you do anything else, go to Google Images and search on the phrase "invisible bike".

This is a tiny portion of an Internet phenomenon as inexplicable as it is amusing. It's also not what I came here to talk about: it may, however, serve as a metaphor for my own theme. So imagine, if you will, that cat on his invisible bicycle. He knows he's on a bicycle. We know, because the caption tells us so, that he's on a bicycle. But neither he nor anyone else can see it.

Consider that image, in the light of a few recent developments that might be considered the cresting waves of a longstanding and ongoing trend. The meteoric rise in electronic resource use has had some well-known consequences: fewer patrons coming to the library to access resources (though they often come to the library for other purposes) with a corresponding rise in access from points outside the library, such as from a dorm room, coffee shop, or office, and a proliferation of access-ownership models beyond the single-title, perpetual-ownership library subscription. Meanwhile, patrons' impressions of the library itself, particularly those of college students, seem to be increasingly remote from the reality: we're still a place for books, yes, but for so much more as well. Libraries have already done a pretty good job at reinventing ourselves, even if we've started calling ourselves information commons or research centers. As we've taken out the books, we've made more room: room to work, room to collaborate, room to set up a mobile workspace with wireless-enabled laptop and stacks of printed PDFs.

What faces us now, however, is an expanding virtual space where our patrons may well be using the library without knowing that they're using the library. People can usually tell when they're in a library building-though most of us can probably field amusing tales to the contrary-but proliferating access points to information, a physical space geared less toward housing collections and more toward working with them, and an ongoing identity crisis precipitated in part by these developments suggest that when it comes to massive shifts in the world of libraries and information, we ain't seen nothing yet.

Changing Channels

The library's loss of its information monopoly is well documented. Instead of holding a collection, the library increasingly provides access to materials that it does not itself own, connecting to outside resources rather than bringing them into its physical space.

The traditional venue for such access-if "traditional" can be used for something only around a decade old-is the library website. In the early years of the Web, creating a parallel virtual presence providing access to the library's electronic resources was an eminently sensible move; with little integration between print and electronic resources, and few to no other points of access for those electronic resources, without a library-provided gateway patrons would never discover those resources on their own.

Today, it is no longer possible to ignore the possibilities of the wider Web as a discovery tool; nor is it possible to ignore the proliferating access channels to good information online. Earlier this year, in a much-publicized move, JSTOR opened its holdings at the citation level to Web search engines, and almost immediately experienced a surge in attempted article access from non-subscribers. From JSTOR's perspective, this is clearly an untapped market, but it presents something of a challenge to librarians whose students may not know that their library has JSTOR, but who also may not be able to access it via Google, particularly from off campus.

However, libraries can turn this proliferation of access points to literature to our advantage, especially since escalating serials costs make it impossible for most libraries to be truly comprehensive. The access-ownership dichotomy appears to be a decreasing concern, at least to faculty; as discussed in a report published in Educause Review last summer, faculty are less concerned with whether their institution has a journal, than whether that journal exists somewhere. At my own institution, where faculty must regularly use Interlibrary Loan or take advantage of affiliations with larger universities to do their research, we see the beginnings of what an information environment where the line between access and ownership is blurred entirely might look like. Who's to say that the ILL process might not one day be as simple and fast from the end user's perspective as clicking on a link resolver is now?

As the open access movement gains traction, we see changes not only in where our patrons access research literature, but how: the single-paid subscription is just one option in an increasingly crowded field of pricing models, access levels, and bold, hacker-esque free information experiments. As high-profile open access portals such as the Public Library of Science have established beachheads of legitimacy in the field of scholarly communication, traditional publishers have chosen a variety of responses. Much in the news lately is PRISM, the Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine, which has suggested that integrity of scholarship (particularly as measured and determined by peer review), the dissemination of scholarly information, and the preservation of knowledge are threatened by open access initiatives, particularly those which are government-mandated. Proponents of open access counterargue that open access can and does advance science, by increasing the visibility of scholarly literature, accelerating the pace of scientific publication and thus the research cycle, improving searching and retrieval that need not negotiate complex authentication protocols and proprietary interfaces, and facilitating interdisciplinary research and collaboration.

Whether open access eventually triumphs in the field or simply becomes one of several options, it seems reasonably certain that it's not going away anytime soon. The recent Senate vote on NIH-funded research, which would ensure the public availability of such scholarship, might just be the vanguard in the field. Given this, the avenues of discovery to quality scholarship can be expected to proliferate further. In addition, online access to information that is not necessarily scholarly communication, but can be used for same, is on the increase, particularly government reports and data. Information useful to business students is also increasingly available online, often from the very corporations and organizations they are researching; annual reports and SEC 10-Ks are a notable example.

The effect of the Web's accessibility and relative ease of use on student research behavior is, of course, well documented, and a source of constant discussion and much frustration. Accessibility of information weights it heavily in the student's mind; though students generally recognize the importance of other evaluative criteria, ease of access has a seductive pull, particularly as deadlines loom. And while critical reflection, an understanding of and desire for good, thorough research material, and a willingness to look for information that may be harder to find but ultimately more valuable are all research habits to be cultivated, it's hard to argue against the idea that what librarians and the vendors who serve us really ought to be doing is making the good stuff easier to find. Students aren't the only ones who like accessible information. The rising impact factors of open-access journals are evidence of this.

A Library by Any Other Name

Two particular services that tend to come up in discussions of this nature are Google Scholar and Facebook. The applicability of Google Scholar to our scenario is obvious: the more research is discoverable on the Web (even if only at the citation level, as is currently the case with JSTOR, Project Muse, and some other services), the better Google Scholar serves as a discovery and research tool. If databases, archives, and other online repositories are channels of information, then Google, and particularly Google Scholar, might be the remote control, and it has the advantage over the library website of finding both that website, and some substantial proportion of what the website links to.

But what about Facebook? Many librarians have created Facebook accounts as another way of connecting with students, with varying levels of success. After a flurry of interest in Facebook's potential, things seem to have settled to a middle-of-the-road level where students' use of Facebook primarily as a tool for socializing is acknowledged to not mesh terribly well with the idea of contacting the librarian for research assistance. However, Facebook is interesting for a couple of other reasons.

To begin with, it's terribly popular. And while quality research isn't a popularity contest, a website that attracts that much traffic is worth taking seriously. It's important for librarians not so much to establish a presence on Facebook, as to understand why it works. Secondly, Facebook, Myspace, and other social network sites are increasingly leveraging their enormous user base-a user base that largely initially gathered where it did in order to socialize with friends-by allowing and creating applications that work on these sites, effectively turning them into application delivery platforms. If libraries are to create presences on Facebook, it may well be through library tools, not librarians ourselves: additional discovery channels for knowledge. Facebook isn't the only game in town, either; Google's OpenSocial project will provide another venue for research tools that don't live on the library website, but that the library might provide.

One obvious result of the phenomena described above is that patrons who never enter the building nor touch the library website may still be said to be using the library. If a student in her dorm room does a keyword search on Google Scholar that leads her to an article on JSTOR, her access to that article is covered by the library's JSTOR subscription. It's hardly radical to observe that managing these kinds of connections in an environment of proliferating pricing and access models is and will continue to be an increasing proportion of many librarians' jobs. It's a different form of going where our users are; this means not just making ourselves present online, but also making our principal resources not only online but accessible. At my own library, journal usage tends to rise when a print subscription is replaced by an electronic one. Studies of resource usage at other libraries show a rise in electronic usage generally. Whether these data reflect a similar tendency remains to be seen, but such a trend on a universal scale would hardly be surprising.

Yet despite skyrocketing electronic resource use, the physical library doesn't seem to be going away, even as its appearance changes: reference collections replaced by computer workstations, reading rooms by coffee shops, campus phones by wireless access points and "no cell phones" signs. As libraries have reinvented themselves as learning commons or other consolidated service and study centers, many have actually seen their gate counts rise, even as circulation and print collection usage drops.

Of course, an advantage of electronic resources, whether they are databases of scholarly articles or online reference services, is that they can be used inside or outside the library building, effectively expanding its reach. But this decoupling of the library as a physical space from the library as a repository of information elicits some unease from those of us who, perhaps, find our professional attentions divided, and ourselves wary of the fate of the in-person, in-place aspect of librarianship. If the stacks were replaced entirely with workstations, would it still be a library? Would it still be a library if there were no reference desks or check-out stations, if the primary interactions were students with one another rather than students with a librarian?

The answer is certainly yes, but predicting what that will look like and what our roles will be is more difficult. Certainly the definition and embodiment of the collection becomes more diffuse.

(Re)claiming Identity

Another definition that becomes more diffuse, or perhaps simply more subjective, is that of the library itself. A post on the Academic Librarian blog discussing the Educause Review article on changing information services needs of faculty makes the point that the decoupling of the library's physical and virtual presences has already lead to some confusion about what our patrons mean when they say "library": when faculty say that they expect the library to become less relevant in the future, we might well be moved to ask if they realize how much of their scholarly reading is available to them because the library purchases the necessary resources and makes them available. In this context, the library is already invisible.

On the other hand, the same blogger points out that the library as a place still has…well, a place; namely, "We have an obligation to integrate today's students into a culture of research and learning." Whether reference and instruction can, will, or should become as invisible as library-provided access to resources is a larger question than I can address here, but this obligation is an excellent argument in itself for the continued existence of the library, whether it be an entirely virtual presence supplemented by roving librarians or a place where students come to draw from deeper wells of knowledge and expertise.

Additionally, whether print is, in fact or eventually, dead or not, it's pretty clear that along with proliferation of access points to information, we also have proliferation of formats: not just print or digital, but many varieties of both, along with the requisite audio recordings, video recordings, software, and so on. Students still come to the library to access information, even if they're coming to the library to check out the latest changes on their Facebook accounts using the library computers. The usefulness of both Google Scholar and the library website as discovery tools both inside and outside the library building suggests an entity larger than the building itself can contain, with many more doors. An aptly-titled post on the Library Web Chic blog ("The Future of Library Services Isn't the Library Website") points out that there is no way for our Web sites to keep up with everything that our patrons want to do, and radically suggests that we shouldn't try: rather, leverage existing tools to give students and faculty access to the information they want through a variety of channels, since access to that information is, after all, the principal point.

Where does all this lead us? Our progress will continue to be slow and somewhat awkward; if we were building libraries from scratch today we might be more efficient. But that would require tossing out our existing organizations, collections, buildings, and technology services and starting over, which is not advisable. A need for additional technological savvy and a willingness to experiment are important, of course; but more than that, it's time to really expand the notion of what a library is, and what it means to provide library services in an environment where the library, or rather some of its most traditional and sacred elements, become invisible.

References

Bivens-Tatum, Wayne. (2007, July 16). Changing information needs of faculty. Blog entry posted to http://blogs.princeton.edu/librarian/2007/07/changing_information_needs_of.html

Bivens-Tatum, Wayne. (2007, October 25). To Facebook or not to Facebook. Blog entry posted to http://blogs.princeton.edu/librarian/2007/10/to_facebook_or_not_to_facebook.html

Bivens-Tatum, Wayne. (2007, July 5). Thoughts on the Millennials. Blog entry posted to http://blogs.princeton.edu/librarian/2007/07/millennials_and_hype.html

Coombs, Karen. (2007, September 16). The future of Web services isn't the library website. Blog entry posted to http://www.librarywebchic.net/wordpress/2007/09/16/the-future-of-web-services-isnt-the-library-website/

Davis, Philip M. (2003). Effect of the Web on undergraduate citation behavior: Guiding student scholarship in a networked age. portal: Libraries and the Academy, 3, 1, 41-51.

Golderman, Gail M. and Connolly, Bruce. (2004/2005). Between the book covers: Going beyond OPAC keyword searching with the deep linking capabilities of Google Scholar and Google Book Search. Journal of Internet Cataloging, 7, 3/4, 17-24.

Leonard, Andrew. (2007). Why James Inhofe tried to sabotage open access. Salon, retrieved November 6, 2007 from http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/2007/10/26/inhofe_open_access_2/index.html

MacManus, Richard. (2007, November 1). Confirmed: Myspace joins Google's OpenSocial. Blog entry posted to http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/confirmed_myspace_join_opensocial.php

Martell, Charles. (2007). The elusive user: Changing use patterns in academic libraries 1995 to 2004. College & Research Libraries, 68, 5, 435-444.

O'Hara, Lisa Hanson. (2007). Providing access to electronic journals in academic libraries: A general survey. The Serials Librarian, 51, 3/4, 119-128.

Schonfeld, Roger, and Guthrie, Kevin M. (2007). The changing information services needs of faculty. Educause Review, 42, 4, 8-9.

Swan, Alma. (2007). Open access and the progress of science. American Scientist, 95, 3. Retrieved November 6, 2007 from http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/13860/