Profile: Library director in the family business

MARION — Doug Raber has been in the public eye a lot lately as one of the main proponents for Marion's downtown mixed-use library project.

The project would involve tearing down the existing library and building a larger one in its place with retail and residential components.

Raber has been the library director for about four years, following a stint as director at the Ferndale Public Library in Michigan. He received his Ph.D. in library and information science from Indiana University in 1990 and a master's in the same field from Northern Illinois University in 1977. On Thursday he announced his plans to retire in March.

What got you into this field?

My dad was a librarian. I kind of started out thinking I would be an academic and got a master's degree in political science.

It kind of got to the point where I wasn't really sure I wanted to be an academic anymore, and my dad's model was right in front of me. He had done the same thing — he started out and got a master's degree in history and then shifted to get a master's degree in library science so I thought I would do the same thing and I did ...

He was a good role model because my sister also became a librarian.

I had jobs working in libraries in high school and college, too. All the way from page to circulation desk assistance.

What is it about the library field that you like?

Mostly it's the sense of knowing what kind of impact libraries have on people's lives. First of all, the promotion of reading and making reading accessible to people. Other countries have public libraries but the American public library is more well developed and more wide spread in its services than any other country in the world.

You said the prospect of working on a new library project is exciting. Why is that?

It's mostly the way you have to take a look at things from the very beginning. Do a zero-base look at what you're doing and why you're doing it. And try to figure out what a building needs to be and what a building needs to do in order to provide the kind of library services that a community needs.

Where do you think libraries will be in the next 50 years?

A line I'm going to address at the moment goes way back to a guy named F. Wilford Lancaster who argued back in the late '60s and early '70s that we were becoming a paperless society because of the growth of information technology. He was really wrong. There is a lot of technology out there but none of that has actually replaced paper. Paper is everywhere. There's something about print as a medium for information that people still like.

Information and knowledge is a commodity: You have to buy a book, you have to buy a DVD, you have to buy rights for a streaming services. Libraries decomodify that information and knowledge. Libraries buy that and make it shareable and free.

I can't imagine an American society that doesn't have some means of decomodifying knowledge and information in order to make it accessible for people who can't afford to buy it.

I'd say for the next generation or so, libraries won't really change at all except they'll be more of a social and cultural center. More of a place where people come to actually do stuff at.