Reading notes
Books, billiards and bowling, Goldberg.
…one librarian described [misbehaving children] as “ignorant and untrained, needing sympathetic
guidance and firm discipline, both for their own good and for the sake of the older people whom they
are frequently disturbing.”
“A library trustee wrote in 1994, “the Carnegie Library Complex was a very important part of our lives as
it is in the lives of new residents. It not only is used as a research and education center, it is a place
where people can go to meet, exercise, and enjoy cultural events. It fits as well into our lives as it has for
five generations.”
Chaotic Transitions: How Today’s Trends Will Affect Tomorrow’s Libraries, Keys.
(2005) speculating what 2015 will look like.
Changes in users: Blogging. 90% are under 30. Value community over privacy. Community,
personalization, portable, ubiquitous tech.
Changes in tech: Messages depicting the library as a place with computers as well as books are behind
the curve.
Intellectual property: RIAA lawsuits. Earth Station 5, anonymity in Vanuatu.
Changes in content providers: Google digitizing books. Outsourcing.
Changes in information seeking: Amazon user reviews. Not in libraries due to privacy concerns.
Conclusion: We’re building large central libraries instead of putting branches on each corner like
Starbucks. We need to really think hard about our future.
We need to be user-focused, not library-focused. We need to rely on user technology, not library
technology. What they have, not what we have.
Our challenge for the next twenty years will be shifting from what we know to creating library services
for a digital way of life.
The information age certainly seems to be the most pivotal moment in the history of libraries. It is fundamentally changing the way libraries look
and operate, more than any other moment in history. Marshall Keys remarks on this drastic change by noting how the library is becoming less of
a destination and less of a physical place. He explains a dramatic shift in user behavior –behavior defined by new technology- and speculates
about the future of libraries1.
Today, almost anyone can get almost any information, from almost anywhere in the world, and exceptions to this are decreasing on a daily basis.
Just a few short years ago if you wanted to do research with library materials you had to physically travel there, whether you were across the state
or across the pond. This is not necessarily the case now. Now you can access New York library resources on your phone while drinking coffee on
your deck in Estonia. As an example, the New York Public Library recently announced that they fully (and freely) digitized 180,000 images
previously only available at the library itself, locked behind a paywall, or downloadable in low resolution2.
The public library largely remains a physical space with physical materials. Current trends in technology and user behavior suggest that after
thousands of years, the traditional library format (throughout its various forms) may not be a lasting phenomenon.
It even seems to challenge the idea of the “Library as Place” that Prentice suggests. 3 If everything’s online, would the library continue to act as a
gathering place and community center, or would that role shift to the local VFW Hall, a competing community center, or a coffee shop?
Undoubtedly there are other pivotal moments such as the Carnegie libraries, for example, but this is arguably limited to a local scale. The digital
age is global in scope. Other pivotal moments changed who could access the space (public vs elites vs scholars vs subscribers) and the physical
makeup of material (clay, papyrus, paper), among other historical moments. One could argue that the digital age is just another iteration of this
and that this is just another change in access and form. Maintaining a healthy historical perspective, it would seem that the digital age upsets the
library in an unprecedented way.
It’s always fun to speculate and try predict the future.
1
Keys, M., & Pennington, B. (2006). Chaotic transitions: How today's trends will affect tomorrow's libraries. The Serials Librarian, 50(1), 2936. doi:10.1300/J123v50n01_05
2
NPR. (2016). New York Public Library Makes 180,000 High-Res Images Available Online. Retrieved from
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/01/06/462128514/new-york-public-library-makes-180-000-high-res-images-available-online
3
Prentice, A. (2010). Public libraries in the 21st century. Santa Barbara: Libraries Unlimited.