I just returned from a panel with several media collections librarians and would like to reflect.

When I think of libraries, I think of vast stores of knowledge that can only be had at a library. When I think of library media (audio or video) collections, I think of a place I can easily obtain copyrightable material to copy for my own uses without worrying about being caught. As bad as that may be, that’s how I perceive library media collections. While both provide the same type of resource and are both just as valid of mediums to collect, they are generally used for very different purposes by the majority of the population.

Books will always have their place. You can’t really replace the utility of a book. Products like the kindle try to be books, but they aren’t and never — knock on wood — replace books. Assuming it’s not possible (at least in the foreseeable future) to inject knowledge into the brain, books will always be the most efficient medium for reading text.

Music and video, on the other hand, is a much more flexible type of information/property that has continued to evolve by leaps and bounds in the ways that people consume, own, and distribute it. There may be evolutions in paper or archival materials for books, but music has evolution of physical mediums far more evolutionary — from sheet music to wax records to tape to compact disc to now digital files that can be created, transfered, and consumed in more ways than we can accurately predict today. Advances in listening/viewing technology, storage technology, distribution technology, and licensing technology are changing so rapidly that it’s hard for even the most successful of players in the business to keep a sustained hold on a piece of the market. Things just move too fast.

Libraries don’t have the financial and human capital required to keep up with the evolution of media. While I realize that libraries are doing great things and are working really hard to adopt a lot of these new “web 2.0″ technologies (cough. I think that’s the first time I’ve resorted to using that term in writing. I can’t avoid it any longer, i succumb to the power of the buzzword.) in their systems and vision, corporations are popping up like wildflowers with new, innovative, and extremely accessible ways for people to gain access to media of all kinds. Libraries are trying to keep up with what has already been done, but without a surge of innovation in industries providing public access to materials (including libraries) companies will soon easily far surpass what libraries can provide as a unique and valuable resource for the majority of users. I say the majority of users because physical archives of multimedia content will still hold some value forever for niche users, researchers, and historians, access to what most regular people (which seems to be the largest audience and reason for the existence of public libraries) need and want is for many people (and increasing exponentially) already far more than any library can provide as well as they already have through commercial and non-library resources.

Being a student in the Information School where the largest percentage of students in the school are studying library and information sciences, this hurts a little but is the fact of the state of the world and our society.