What *is* our information footprint?
The topic of green librarianship is developing cognitive traction for me, and other people are starting to talk about it - see William Denton's post on the topic. One approach is the question "what are libraries doing about climate change?" One great answer to that question is this excellent climate change resource guide by Fred Stoss at University of Buffalo.
The rabbit hole must be deeper, though.
Collecting resources and creating guides is what we do, and doing so as well as this guide does is an incredibly useful response. Going one step further to employ conservation techniques (recycle waste thoughtfully, replace bulbs thoroughly, choose eco-friendly cleaning supplies and energy-star computing devices, etc.) is another good choice. There's a clear path for that category of activity as well - maybe you could raise money for your local library building to install a solar array, or to cut over to sustainable electricity sources, or to upgrade HVAC and water-heating mechanicals.
But what of the *library* as conservation organization? I'm no scholar on the history of libraries nor on urban development but it seems likely that the fundamental notion of conservation of resources inherent in a lending library has some as-yet-under-utilized contemporary memetic value in this space. What would it take to go a step beyond a research initiative studying library patron demographics to prepare a distributed energy usage analysis of the whole ecosystem of a library? All the people driving to it and from it, the shipping of physical materials in and out, the energy cost of a circulated book.
I was discussing this the other day with a friend not of our profession but with a strong background in environmental impact issues. I related the story I keep hearing more and more about how "it's easier, faster, and cheaper to just buy a book from amazon.com and ship it to the patron, who will then return it to us, than to ILL it from another library here and then to get the patron to come get it, then to ship it back." This friend, being a scholar, related directly to this library usage example of energy footprint-unaware cost comparisons, so it's an apt starting point.
So let's analyze it a little bit more closely: to ILL a book from one library to another, you have to ship it in both directions somehow, and the patron has to visit the library twice. Efficiencies can be gained whenever libraries already have sharing programs with local transport solutions (like connected local branches) or other systemic efficiencies (like if frequent sharing partners ship multiple items together in boxes rather than one at a time, or a bookmobile service that follows a steady route, eliminating the need for patron travel).
To send a book from amazon.com, you need to locate the item from amazon.com. If an item is new, amazon.com will source it from a warehouse as transportationally close to you as possible - which might be in or near your state, or far away but with a faster plane route (and, of course, amazon.com has long built out - and constantly adjusts - a geographically dispersed resource chain which optimizes for some of these factors). If you find it used, you might choose to select a copy that's closer to you or not, depending on condition, cost, and seller rating. Either way, that item will then travel over whatever means to your patron's home, in a discrete container probably not holding any other items, and then the patron will still have to make a trip with it back to your library when you're done.
If you're an ILL librarian and you've costed this out in terms of (a) purchase cost, (b) shipping cost, and (c) staff cost, have you also priced energy usage in any way?
Sure, maybe that wouldn't be easy to do. But there are surely plenty of models out there to follow, and engineers and economists and others already expert in just these kinds of analyses.
Taking this same sort of approach and returning to the notion of a lending library and its role in a community viz. minimizing energy footprint is what I'm trying to get at by talking about an "information footprint". This doesn't even necessarily start to get into anything having to do with computing, but there's obviously a whole realm to tap into there, too (see this intro to cache hierarchies for a good example of comparing library resource sharing to memory caches to get a feel for just part of it).
This is really starting to feel like fertile ground for serious study. I'd love to find other people who are thinking along these same lines, with the goals of trying both (a) to reduce our energy footprint, and (b) to make libraries more useful.
art (not verified) on February 05th 2007
Excellent topic, Dan, I would love to see libraries get seriously engaged in this challenge. I was recently at the Internet Archive and was able to see the work they have done on producing print on demand titles. What if libraries did more with print on demand and also became a hub for people ordering titles from online book sellers? Instead of warehouses and freight, maybe a title could be printed at the local library, and picked up or at least shipped under a different model? This would be a radical reworking of existing flows but there has never been a time where more "out of the box" thinking has been required.
dchud on February 06th 2007
Do you know much about how well print on demand is doing? I heard a lot about it 5-7 years ago but haven't really seen too many reports updating whether and where it might be taking off.
I'd imagine those machines use a good amount of local energy, but would that offset differential transport costs for the better? Ach, this is the kind of thing we need to develop ways to answer.
art (not verified) on February 06th 2007
For sure, it would be great to have accurate measures for this kind of thing. I know that printing is considered to have a smaller environmental footprint than paper production, and I have heard at least one claim that the cost of ILL in North America for a monograph is not that removed from scanning it with high speed equipment. Volume printers seem to be mainstream now but the only library I can remember looking seriously at print on demand was the British Library years ago. Sending bytes rather than paper for the delivery of book materials would seem to have potential but it would definitely need some serious homework to sort out the true environmental savings. There has been some work to harness the heat coming from computer processors, I wonder how much of it applies to printers, which also produce a tremendous amount of heat that currently gets expelled into the air.
Jonathan (not verified) on February 07th 2007
I know I remember reading someone suggest rather recently that Amazon start doing exactly this: tracking (and reporting to consumers) the energy impacts/costs of distribution. I think it was someone writing about the Internet of Things---someone like Bruce Sterling or Julian Bleecker---but now I can't find the reference.
In any case, I think your idea is a really interesting one. I haven't really heard anyone thinking along the lines of lifecycle cost for information flowing through libraries. As you say, it seems like lending libraries should have some unique perspective on conservation.
Teri (not verified) on February 23rd 2007
How great to read your post. I'm currently writing my MLS master's paper on this issue, though surely I'm not doing it justice. I'm using an online Footprint calculator and aggregate public library data to generate an average library (building) Ecological Footprint. I'm also trying to address some of the supply chain issues in our field. But it doesn't even get into ILL issues, which were also what brought me to these ideas in the first place. I've had trouble finding related work in our "rabbit hole," so I appreciate the references in your post. More often, I've migrated ideas and research from other fields, such as Life Cycle Assessment. It all makes me wonder why we haven't been on board with this sooner...we are the social responsibility people!
One of my guiding questions these days is how far will librarians and information professionals go to serve their immediate communities when communities farther removed in time and space pay the price. Will it take consumer demand for sustainability issues in libraries to come to the fore?
Miss Yi (not verified) on February 15th 2008
I am an MLIS student who is interested in the issue of green libraries and repositories. I am writing a paper on this topic and I thought it would be a good idea if we contacted each other as regards a library's ecological footprint.
Please write to: tothesummit@gmail.com
Ryan (not verified) on May 14th 2007
It's an interesting thought, but it seems to me the market and best practices approximates good, "green" librarianship here.
If an item is not apt to be used in future, ILLO is the better option. No sense in storing and shipping a brand new book if no one is going to use it.
If an item has local interest, doing the Amazon thing would probably be better. Obviously, multiple uses of the same item, even with efficiencies would make the ILLO option quite wasteful (the item goes back and forth multiple times). Also, if no one locally has the item already, you can make the item available to the local library community so *they* don't have to choose the Amazon option.
The packaging is a drag, but because Amazon probably uses mail there are some efficiencies there as well -- it's not as if someone is using a plane just to send the package on.
I guess it turns out that good collection policy is green collection policy. In general, if shipping is wasteful, it will cost more.
I feel it is quite easy to pick and pull at little detail-ey kind of things without addressing the real problem with ecological footprints -- namely where we choose to live, how we get to work, and how we get services to and from both of those places. It's a little crazy sometimes how we are asked to focus in on things like the ecological footprint of meat versus veggies when we still commute individually in cars for an hour plus to work. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the whole ecological footprint idea was a red herring sent on by the oil/automotive industry to make us think we were thinking green, when really we were just chasing after windmills.
A more effective approach in my view is a broader urban design approach. If libraries are in walkable/bikeable/busable areas, those trips to and fro will be alot less costly in the long run.
Monika (not verified) on July 12th 2007
Great discussion. I agree it is important for libraries to start addressing their environmental footprint. For information about the libraries that are going green visit my website: www.greenlibraries.org.
Post new comment