2/28/2008
Slate: How Do You Build A Public Library in the Age of Google?
Slate has one of their ubiquitous articles/slideshows about the future of public libraries this week. I haven’t seen any posts about this one yet, but I’m sure they’re out there - the liblogs I read represent a tiny percentage of the ones out there, and I tend to stay away from the public library ones as a general rule.
The premise of this particular article/slideshow is that architects may be the savior of libraries, and includes as per the usual photographs of some of the impressive multi million dollar central libraries that have been built over the past twenty years. Frankly, in my opinion, the article doesn’t really say much that we don’t already know - libraries are becoming gathering places, you’ll find most patrons at the computers or reading newspapers, most of these new central libraries have some kind of impressive architectural space - but I did find an indirect quote from Ross Dawson towards the end of the article interesting in a rather disbelieving way.
Mr. Dawson is some kind of consultant who seems to specialize in extinction - yeah, there’s a consultant for everything - and he claims that public libraries will be extinct by 2019. I can’t buy this. 2019 is a mere 11 years into the future, and while public libraries do struggle to remain relevant to their consumer base, I can’t see a complete extinction in barely over a decade.
The article’s author is more likely to be correct: libraries won’t necessarily be repositories of books first and foremost. They’ll be gathering places, urban spaces, “arbiters of information.” But then, from what I know and what I learned in school, that’s what they already are.
Filed under: Librarianship
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