more on the future of libraries

Thomas Gokey, known to many of you already for his design work for Speculations, writes as follows:

“I just saw your two posts about the future of libraries.

I actually taught my first grad seminar this last semester (well co-taught it at least) and of all things it happened to be a class in the library science program. We focused more on public libraries but some of our students are going to be academic librarians. We tried to tease out what the essential purpose of a library is and then re-imagine it given the recent monumental changes in information technology. In doing so we drew on artistic practices from the last 60 years. We tried to run the class as a studio where each of our students had to design and implement a real world project. One of these projects is fairly ambitious, to create a fully functional FabLab with a 3D printer in a public library. We’re still working on lining up all of the funding for this project, but so far things seem to be coming together. We’ve made a video that explains the idea which you can view here.

As for academic libraries we think the important thing is not so much the library itself but the role of the librarian and that this role will likely shift. We see academic librarians working more closely with researchers to help them manage their information needs. This will mean very different things depending on the field of research. It might mean designing a database structure for a specific project, or helping a researcher create a custom system to organize their own materials (something few of us do very well).

In a way the whole world is becoming translatable into information and the whole world is becoming one giant library. In some ways academic libraries will become less necessary, but the role of the librarian will become more important.”