Libraries and the Future

Paul Sawers thought what the future of libraries would be and made some interesting points. Before you switch off, no, Sawers isn’t a Luddite who hates technology.

He starts by pointing out though that most of us think of a library as a “bricks-and-mortar building filled with paper books”, yet “at a more abstract level, it’s really just a repository of information”. And yes, digital format counts as information. By this definition, Wikipedia and the entire Internet is a library and Google is the new Dewey Decimal system to find what you want!

Having acknowledged that the library of the future is indeed digital, Sawers comes to the biggest issue with the new format of information. While a digital library doesn’t run the risk of loss of data (like what happened to the Library of Alexandria), Vint Cerf, one of the founders of the Internet, said it does run the risk of “bit rot”:
“This means, you have a bag of bits that you saved for a thousand years, but you don’t know what they mean, because the software that was needed to interpret them is no longer available, or it’s no longer executable, or you just don’t have a platform that will run it. This is a serious, serious problem and we have to solve that.”
Unfortunately, that is a tough ask: keeping data in proprietary format is lucrative business (think MS Word or Amazon’s e-book formats).

In the meantime, lots of bricks-and-mortar libraries in the West are digitizing and providing their content via e-readers and tablets. Others have gone on to extent their client base by embracing technology. Like Kansas State Librarian, Joanne Budler, who took the concept of airport-read books to the digital form: thanks to her Books on the Fly campaign at Manhattan Regional Airport, flyers can borrow e-books at the airport onto their phone or tablet!

The future ain’t what it used to be.

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