At home we are more or less obsessed by The Sopranos right now. Any spare hour means a Sopranos episode, and we’re currently about halfway through Series 3. My fairly late return from Internet Librarian International last night provided us with the opportunity to watch two more episodes, including one entitled “University” that focused on Meadow Soprano’s experiences at Columbia University. So we’re very early into the new millennium, and I’m struck by how much time Meadow is spending at the university library, sitting at some table in front of a pile of books.

My point is that until I heard Tony Hirst speak at Internet Librarian International, I might have thought of the invisible library in that now-familiar “library without walls” kind of way. Undergraduates at Columbia may no longer be magnetised by the library building, and instead will be consuming more information on the go – in their room, at Starbucks, back at the parental home, and so forth, as the e-resource revolution continues to transform the learning experience everywhere.

But Tony Hirst didn’t even use this as his starting point. I’ve learnt, from following his blog, that you can rely on Tony to move a familiar concept way beyond its former position. So instead of taking us through tired old scenarios of ubiquitous information resources, Tony made us think more deeply about the idea of invisibility. He conjured up a familiar fairy story, The elves and the shoemaker, to represent the library as a shop fronting the wares of other people.

He also introduced us to the Invisible Theatre, in which a troupe will set up in a non-theatrical environment such as a shopping centre, and will perform a scenario which the “audience” i.e. passers-by won’t even perceive to be a performance as such. They may draw those people in to some discussion, and then quietly tip-toe away, having acted as an unacknowledged catalyst of a social situation. I used to perform street theatre myself, back in the early 1990s in Manchester, but it was very much a performance. Tony’s description of the invisible theatre reveals how much more participative street theatre has become in the intervening period, and my take is that libraries are making the same shift, breaking down the barriers between the library and its users.

Along more technological lines than elves, shoemakers and street performers, Tony spoke about tools that are rendered invisible through their seamless integration into other services. Google Scholar is a great example of this. Anyone can search for articles, but Google Scholar is able to determine, without the user realising, access entitlements, and if the user is from, say, a university with a subscription to the e-journal in question, then the user will simply experience seamless access to the full-text. That’s precisely the kind of invisibility that we’re all working towards. It can be problematic because in the National Student Survey, for example, you might not be converting a complaint to a compliment. Instead, a library service or tool will be something that the library user is unknowingly dependent on, but the point is that they are dependent on it, and they are actually dependent on it being invisible, and that’s the business case.

He also urged internet librarians everywhere to go with the flow. On Twitter it’s possible to do a search on the tweets of specified users for keywords such as “how” and “libraries”, and thereby tap into a rich source of useful tips. Today’s information environment is all about flows of information and we should all be engaging in it.

Finally, he warned us about being invisible “in the wrong way”, for example by setting up a repository that isn’t exposed to Google.