Re:What Libraries Can (Still) Do (2015)
by toyg on Tuesday October 25, 2016 @06:52AM
(#12786785)
The future of libraries is one of the topics I'm pretty obsessed with, probably because I loved them growing up and I've always found they had a huge unexploited potential.
First of all, I don't think it's fair to lump the "big boys" (Library of Congress, British Library etc) with smaller city libraries, because they are huge brands that will forever survive as nexus of scholarly research, no matter what fancy media we move on to.
It's much more interesting to look at small city libraries. Their main roles, traditionally, were:
- free access to information
- safe space for reading and studying
- preservation effort for local culture / warehouse for commercial culture
- community point-of-interest for aggregation.
In many places, the preservation element had often got too prevalent for its own good. Now that effort is not necessary at all - that's better left to the big boys, who can leverage a large pool of skills in big cities and archive all tweets for the rest of us, so to speak, with individuals submitting pointers of local relevance ("please archive this and that").
The free access to information is split into two: access to the internet, and access to commercially-available resources. The first is solved with the "starbucks wannabe" model, the second is being discussed with commercial players and we'll have to wait for that - but it's easy to imagine something like patrons getting a locked-down kindle from libraries to borrow ebooks, once the hardware is cheap enough.
What is really interesting is how you can perform the other two roles (reading space, community aggregation) in new ways, now that we're free of warehousing duties. Libraries are now free to experiment with spaces that want to draw people together regardless of the media they consume. I'd love for some local authority to be bold and try out "bookless libraries" concepts that can work through the decades - there is no point, for example, building a library around iPads, because they'll soon be obsolete; but you still have to provide something or people won't come. When you figure that out, you have what is effectively an "engine for meeting minds" which could potentially be much more significant than universities, shaping the relationship between citizens and state/community as well as generating culture.
First of all, I don't think it's fair to lump the "big boys" (Library of Congress, British Library etc) with smaller city libraries, because they are huge brands that will forever survive as nexus of scholarly research, no matter what fancy media we move on to.
It's much more interesting to look at small city libraries. Their main roles, traditionally, were:
- free access to information
- safe space for reading and studying
- preservation effort for local culture / warehouse for commercial culture
- community point-of-interest for aggregation.
In many places, the preservation element had often got too prevalent for its own good. Now that effort is not necessary at all - that's better left to the big boys, who can leverage a large pool of skills in big cities and archive all tweets for the rest of us, so to speak, with individuals submitting pointers of local relevance ("please archive this and that").
The free access to information is split into two: access to the internet, and access to commercially-available resources. The first is solved with the "starbucks wannabe" model, the second is being discussed with commercial players and we'll have to wait for that - but it's easy to imagine something like patrons getting a locked-down kindle from libraries to borrow ebooks, once the hardware is cheap enough.
What is really interesting is how you can perform the other two roles (reading space, community aggregation) in new ways, now that we're free of warehousing duties. Libraries are now free to experiment with spaces that want to draw people together regardless of the media they consume. I'd love for some local authority to be bold and try out "bookless libraries" concepts that can work through the decades - there is no point, for example, building a library around iPads, because they'll soon be obsolete; but you still have to provide something or people won't come. When you figure that out, you have what is effectively an "engine for meeting minds" which could potentially be much more significant than universities, shaping the relationship between citizens and state/community as well as generating culture.
That's where the fun is.