I’ve been thinking a lot about leaky libraries lately. From chains on books to user authentication, we do everything we can to make sure that when people get some information from us, they have to come and get it themselves.

This is no good. It’s not how the world works anymore. To be found on the internet, you have to be indexed on search engines, and our stuff is not. To be found at all, you have to be on the internet.

So we need to learn to leak. Drip. Seep. Ooze. We need to show up where people don’t expect us. People need to walk around like, “oh shit, I just stepped in some library”. Pretty soon, people will start to look for us everywhere, digging through other peoples recycling - one woman’s trash is another one’s vertical file. They’ll be walking on the beach, scanning for seashells, sand dollars and citation indexes.

This is well and good, and the how-to is well-covered elsewhere. It’s not what I’m thinking about now. I’m thinking, great, it’s easy to leak information, or data, or bits, or whatever comes in the next order of magnitude down from that.

But I’m also a firm believer in human-mediated information services, so what I want to know is, how do we leak people?

Jamie LaRue talks some about sending reference librarians to meet the information needs of community groups and city councils. He’s done it himself, also, and won the hearts of book-banning renegades in the heart of his own community.

That’s a start, but it’s a bit like walking around the garden all summer, aiming the hose at everything in its turn. Making things grow is satisfying, for sure, so why not install an irrigation system? What you lose in personal touches you more than make up for with a vigorous, healthy community that is the envy of all of your neighbors.

I was talking to a colleague on the phone today and we were discussing this very subject. Who is at the forefront of the people-leaking business? Bloggers, mostly, and political machines - they are great at putting things out there and having the rest of us find them (or their candidates).

So libraries can write blogs, and I don’t mean just blogs like this one where the audience is other librarians and sundry professional intellectuals, I mean we can really blog, for the people. We can put good information together, make good mixtapes and let everyone else just find our stuff, and by way of our stuff, they’ll find us. It’s a little convoluted and time consuming, but it just might work.

And yet the problem with people is that they are so darn inefficient, so actually where I’d like to start is not with leaking people but leaking artificial people. Bear with me here (you have so far), but I really and truly think the future of library services just might be in spam.

Consider:

Spam is efficient. E-mail and comment spam is efficient because the cost to send it is next to nil. Even the one in a million chance that a spam message sells some poor sap a pack of penis pills is more than made up for by the fact that it cost only pennies to send a kajillion of those messages.

Spammers are at the forefront of artificial intelligence. More and more, the spam I see is engineered to get past both filters and my brain.

It started out innocently enough, with more and more mail getting through that contained the name of someone I knew, and a few years ago I started getting mail from other people named Caleb.

And then at some point they started sneaking me bits of literature:

they have begun to arrive already, he said when he caught sight of Dwalins green hood hanging up. He hung his red one next to it, and Balin at your service! he said with his hand on his breast.

Ok, so it isn’t rocket surgery, but clearly the spammers are on to something.

Spammers blog. The most insidious kind of spam I’ve seen in the last year or so is trackback spam, where the spammers pose as a fake person with a fake blog who is interested in a certain topic (fakely), including whatever it was you just posted about.

The beauty of it all is that the mechanisms for finding targets and attracting their attention are built into blogging conventions. The spammers subscribe to an RSS feed of search results from a blog search engine for a keyword or two. Your post shows up in a tidy XML format, no screen scraping required, and the trackback spammer posts an excerpt on their fake blog, adding “this was really interesting” or something to that effect and links to your blog, which shows up as a trackback in your comments section.

Now, the problem with spam is that people don’t like it. But what if, instead of getting spam about mortgage rates, we got spam about something we were actually interested in, such as the relative energy efficiency and costs of different models of standalone freezers? An article like that might be interesting to a few people at a certain time, and the trick to finding them just might be sending it to everyone, over and over.

In Library School, the Reference Professor told us about “Selective Dissemination of Information” (SDI), where librarians would provide regular literature searches as a service for their favorite faculty and important community members.

Howzabout instead, we start up some Indiscriminate Dissemination of Everything (IDE)? Flood the internet with library resources. If we use OpenURL-resolving links, we’ll be sure to reach someone, and if we send millions a day, by e-mail or by comment, most of it will get trapped in spam filters - some links to materials about knitting are going to end up looking like off-topic trackbacks on classical music blogs, but when millions upon millions of messages go out randomly, at least one or two citizens is going to like what they see, or at least be intrigued, and click.

What will they get? They’ll get that leaked data, and more than that, they’ll start to meet and wonder at the people letting it all out of the bag: librarians.

The cost is next to nothing and the potential return on investment is so great; we’ll have a better informed and a better educated citizenship that values truth and learning. What price won’t we pay?