I haven't come across John Farrier previously in my information-gathering; here, in this piece in Neatorama (of all places), he writes about five quite actual possibilities in libraries' futures --
- Patron-driven acquistion
- Discovery portals
- 3-D printing and makerspaces. This is not as great a stretch as it might seem; libraries have always been places for enabling user innovation.
- Embedded librarianship
- More of what we're doing now. This is so true; as Farrier writes,
We librarians are used to an established genre of journalism that may be called “the end of libraries.” It’s an article (example) usually written by a wealthy, technologically sophisticated person who proclaims that the end of libraries (public, school, academic) is nigh.
Here’s what the futurists are missing: they possess the latest mobile devices and sophisticated computer skills. But most people don’t. The futurists project themselves as typical library patrons. But there are a vast number of people with very limited computer skills or computer access. And don’t assume that it’s confined to older people. College students usually prefer print books to e-books. I routinely encounter 18-year olds who don’t know how to access the internet or use email. The digital divide remains huge and will continue to provide a market for libraries.
What’s worse is that these futurists and skeptics often overestimate their own information access capabilities. They think that because they can connect to the World Wide Web, they have access to most of the information in the world—a belief that is not only wrong, but spectacularly wrong. As Will Rogers (allegedly) said, “It isn't what we don't know that gives us trouble, it's what we know that ain't so.”
Both of these problems point to a need for libraries—or, more to the point—librarians. There’s a gap between information that is available and the skills of people who want to access that information. Thus there is a need for people who can teach others how to cross that gap. And because technology changes, there will always be such a gap and thus always a future of libraries.
This is what libraries have done in the past, are doing now, and will continue to do in the future.
Full article here:
John Farrier • Wednesday, January 1, 2014 at 5:00 AM
We’ve seen e-readers and libraries without print books. But beyond the obvious proliferation of e-books and fully online information sources, what might we see in the future of libraries? Here are five possibilities.