The Ideas Store, London

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fa6ERdxyYdo

Libraries which have become a place for bringing together community, this has been done through community gardening, a place for expressing individual creativity and where people can get to know themselves and others.


Library buildings can transform into other types of locations: in universities they can become meeting places and study facilities, including free wifi and Starbucks coffee. Public libraries can shift focus to becoming centres of discovery and (educational) gaming. Anything is possible.

To begin with, what is a library anyway?

For ages, since the beginning of history, up until some 15 years ago, a library was an institution characterised by:

• a physical location, a building, to store the collection

• a physical printed or handwritten on site catalog

• on location searching and finding of information sources using the catalog

• on site requesting, delivery, reading, lending and returning of material

• a staff of trained librarians to catalog the collection and assist patrons

Searching for items in a library’s collection is already taking place remotely through OPACs and other online tools almost everywhere. A large part of these collections can be accessed digitally. Only in case a patron wants to read or borrow a printed book or journal, he or she has to go the library building to fetch it.

The central concept here is of course the collection. That is the “raison d’être” of a library. The purpose of library building, catalog and librarians is to give people access to the collection, and provide them with the information they need.a physical collection of printed and handwritten material

Clearly, because of the physical nature of the collection and the information transmission process the library needed to be a building with collection and catalog inside it. People had to go there to find and get the publications they needed.

If collections and the transmission of information were completely digital, then the reason for a physical location to go to for finding and getting publications would not exist anymore. Currently one of these conditions has been met fully and the other one partly. The transmission of information can take place in a completely digital way. Most new scientific publications are born digital (e-Journals, e-Books), and a large number of digitisation projects are taking care of making digital copies of existing print material.

All this seems to lead to the conclusion that the library may be slowly moving away from a physical presence to a digital one.