One of the challenges we in the library business face in serving our institutions is the new competition from other sectors that – often only incidentally – actually provide library-like services to much of the information-seeking public. Google is perhaps the obvious (and most self-conscious) example. As director John Palfrey noted to the Harvard Law Bulletin’s reporter, regarding the restructuring of Harvard’s law library, “outside” businesses have begun to take on library-like roles for for-profit, rather than scholarly, reasons. Often these library-like roles are mere spin-offs or support offerings for the other businesses. For instance, in the big picture, academic research is only a pretty small part of why most people use Google’s search engine, but when you are using a tool for all the other built-in, day-to-day, information seeking in your life you are going to be pretty likely to turn to it first for your more targeted academic research too.
But, on a (perhaps) lighter note there’s a brand new intruder into the library space. Starbucks has just made Internet access, via its in-store Wi-Fi, free. But there’s more. As a sweetener in the offering, some paid online content will be made available for free to Starbucks-connected Web users – most notably, this will include “pay wall” content from the Wall Street Journal. Hmmmm…. Isn’t collective pooling and mediation of the costs of acquiring and finding information a pretty fundamental definition of what libraries do? Granted, Starbucks will cover the costs in a very different way than any traditional library – either via advertising or through selling coffee and food to those drawn by the free online content. But much bigger intrusions into the traditional market space of libraries — e.g. novel delivery structures for ebooks — will also be funded in very different ways (and, the danger, accountable to very different masters).
(For what it is worth,the WSJ is obviously offering Starbucks something different than they offer us — paywall content on the WSJ web sites is presently only available through an individual subscription with login/password authentication. Proxied group access through, e.g., campus libraries has only been available through intermediaries that aggregate the Journal’s articles.)