If you are looking for a positive Monday morning pick-me-up, I advise against reading the article by Steve Coffman that appears in InformationToday.com. It is entitled "The Decline and Fall of the Library Empire". Basically, Coffman argues that all of the things libraries thought they could do to re-position themselves in the digital age have been a bust - including web directories, Library 2.0 (never caught on), virtual reference, intermediated searching, public access to computers (actually showing signs of decline due to rise of smartphones and ipad devices), and even e-books (too many publisher restrictions/not a good investment for libraries). He says "The Electric Library is here - it just isn't us. It is Amazon, Google, Apple and Barnes and Noble". Interestingly, he says our fallback is to embrace the tangible property we started with - our physical books, the thousands of buildings,and the millions of people who still walk through our doors. He offers hope that in a world where physical bookstores may become uneconomical, we'll need places where people can get together to listen to stories or discuss books and ideas.
So is he right? It does seem that ALD is doing a good job both of responding to the public's technological needs and repositioning itself in accordance with Coffman's vision that libraries should hang on to their physical presence in the community . Are there any other options?
http://www.infotoday.com/searcher/apr12/Coffman--The-Decline-and-Fall-of-the-Library-Empire.shtml
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I think he's right, for the most part. The patron in me thinks of libraries primarily as a place to go to borrow physical books, with all other things such as internet access, story-times, and ebooks as perks. I know here at Sheridan we have many patrons who rely on us for internet access, and there will always be people who would use whatever we would offer, but for the masses who no longer rely on the library for email access or research help, I think many of them, like me, still want to come borrow books.
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