Last week, along with a remarkable group of partners, I submitted a Beta Sprint proposal for an architectural interface for a Digital Public Library of America.  I’m really proud of this work and I believe it could have a substantial impact on public libraries and other memory institutions like museums and archives.  The design concept was realized by the team at Noll & Tam Architects and Planners, including Chris Noll, Jason Barish, and Abraham Jayson as well as Matthew Williams Design, myself, and considerable conceptual development from Sam Klein and Katie Filbert of the Wikimedia Foundation and the DC Wiki Society.

The Library Lab, or ‘LibLab’, is a system of 11 modules, each of which is a scalable interface for creating and contributing a particular type of knowledge, and all of which are interoperable with one another.  Libraries do a great job of making books and other media available and accessible for their users, but they don’t do as good or consistent a job focusing their users on creating and contributing content.  Probably the best example of consistent content creation in public libraries is children’s craft programs, and even with these the results and products of the programs are rarely published to the web or shared widely.  Quite a few libraries have found corners in which to build public media labs, while others have more robust efforts underway to build information commons that include content creation in their program, and certainly the excellent YouMedia curriculum serves as a guide for the creation of teen and youth content creation spaces across the country.  Still, the big design problem that public libraries face remains in play: our audience is *everyone*, so we must design for *everyone*.  Focusing solely on content creation as a youth activity in libraries, museums, and archives is insufficient.  Our intention with the modular Library Lab system is to create a flexible framework that can be adapted, extended, and configured to support content creation in any public space for any audience.

The modules you see are built with a flexible system of components that can be designed digitally, transmitted to any location, and fabricated using simple tools and methodologies.  The size of the forms allows them to be fabricated from readily available standard materials such as plywood, MDF, plastics, metal, or composite materials as well as different colors or finishes.  All of the design and fabrication techniques are easily adaptable to individual needs, and the processes are also open source and part of the creative commons.  You don’t like something about the existing Library Lab plans, or want to tweak something for your use case?  No problem, this system invites versioning, customization and experimentation.

The Wiki Society of Washington DC is running the very first demonstration Library Lab at the Martin Luther King Jr. DC Public Library from September until the end of December.  This lab calls itself a “hackspace for knowledge”, inviting people to the space to collaborate on projects, run workshops, and involve students.  In the DC LibLab, you won’t yet find fully realized versions of the module designs described here, but you will find implementations of the activities the modules support.  Over the course of the months that the DC LibLab is operating, we’ll be doing hands-on work gathering data and testing the principles as described in the design concept.  This data will provide a feedback loop that informs the design iterations and provides hooks for individuals and institutions to extend and customize the modules and their components for their own use cases.  Please, visit the DC LibLab, volunteer, and participate in these formative moments!  We also invite your commentary on the Library Lab concept in general; librarylab.org will feature forums and opportunities for user feedback very soon.

“There are two economies: the economy of scarcity, which is the physical world, and the economy of abundance, which is the digital world. Everything in the physical world gets more expensive and scarcer, while everything in the digital world gets more abundant and cheaper. So there’s a huge imperative, both in terms of economies and choice, to shift things to digital, and then once they become digital – once they’re in that deflationary world – they inevitably become free. Physical world things are going to get more expensive over time – I don’t just mean monetary cost, I mean also their externalities: carbon costs, ecological costs, everything else is going to become more expensive. Therefore, there is going to be a strong drive to shift from the inflationary to the deflationary economy, to make things digital if at all possible….

…I was recently in Seattle and had the chance to walk through OMA’s Seattle Public Library again. That’s a pretty good example of getting the balance right between abundance and scarcity. I think its profound that on the first floor, in the largest communal space, there are no books. The library is simply a place with portals into the world of abundance.”

For me, this speaks not only to architectural innovations but it also justifies the digital initiatives ‘labs’ trend that is appearing in some public libraries, like NYPL or DCPL. It also speaks to the fact that evaluating success by collecting materials circulation statistics is insufficient in this changing landscape. A more accurate means of evaluating success would be a combination of circulations stats, door count, wireless usage stats, web traffic stats, and presence in the social graph.

An example of an ideal library program used to be “do an arts and crafts project, and set up a book display of books related to that craft for the patrons to check out”.

Now an ideal library program becomes “do an arts and crafts project, and set up a book display of books related to that craft for the patrons to check out, and then create a gallery of the crafts people made on Flickr”.

That’s right folks, now we’ve got MORE work to do!