Libraries are our e-watershed
An interesting article in Government Technology Magazine spoke of a growing dependence on libraries by those with few resources for public access to government services that increasingly require high speed computer connections. This is a counterintuitive reality check that defies those who say that libraries are dying because no one will read paper books in the brave new e-world.
To be sure, several large government initiatives of late were highly dependent upon computer access. The new Medicare drug program (Plan D), for instance, pushed potential subscribers to the Internet instead of having to field a lot of telephone calls or serve clients at the front counter.
I found this odd at the time because I was unsure whether seniors as a demographic group had as high a computer literacy rate compared to the population as a whole. Moreover, too many seniors live paycheck-to-paycheck on Social Security and pensions, and would not be likely candidates to buy computers or high speed connection subscriptions. To be sure, seniors are migrating to the 'net at a high rate, and use email a lot to communicate with family (especially grandkids), and in so doing are in some way reviving the lost art of letter writing. Still, we are talking about a segment of the population that includes 60 year olds and 90+ year olds.
The next example was the FEMA outreach to victims of Hurricane Katrina in which public inquiries and applications for relief were offered via the Internet as the first choice of customer contact. Since the New Orleans area devastation included severe damage to the telecommunications infrastructure, this did not look like a wise policy decision.
But the bottom line is that more government services are migrating to the Internet in the form of E-government, and those customer without computers or high speed connections are increasingly told to go to their local public library. Yet libraries are facing fierce budget battles and barely survive, mostly reacting with reduced hours of operation. With this new burden of safety net to an increasingly isolated tech-have-not public, libraries also must invest in computer upgrades and tech staff support. Out of necessity, library staff must also be conversant in the subject matter of public E-government access, answering questions ranging from student loan applications to traffic school.
I worked on a project with the Seattle courts and came across an innovative program in which the justice community worked to get email addresses for the local homeless population so that it would be easier to contact them for social services and to reduce missed court dates. While the libraries bore a large part of this burden, the Seattle area is also rich in alternative email access through public Internet kiosks and low and no-cost commercial outlets.
Unless communities invest in alternative Internet access, the need is very real to adequately fund public libraries. Luckily, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and others are conducting studies into the phenomenon and hope to make recommendations that could include a shared funding of libraries by those government agencies and initiatives that cause the burden.
This is a small but compelling example of the "Digital Divide," in which an increasingly digital world creates a chasm of digital haves and have-nots. Locally, we are struggling to obtain a fiber optic connection to the area in order to improve competition (affordability) and provide redundancy for back-up in case of cut-off of the one current line. In my view, this dialogue should also consider the impact on our local libraries that serve as our first line of digital defense.
Chris Crawford
www.justiceserved.com