(Esc. Naval - 2015)The Future of Libraries Has Lit

(Esc. Naval - 2015)

The Future of Libraries Has Little to Do with Books

On a Monday morning between Christmas and New Year’s Eve in Paris, the line for modern art museum Centre Georges Pompidou winds around the block. But the patrons waiting in cold aren’t there to catch a glimpse of a Magritte – they’re young locals queueing for access through the museum’s back door to another attraction: the public library.

In a digital age that has left book publishers reeling, libraries in the world’s major cities seem poised for a comeback, though it’s one that has very little to do with books. The Independent Library Report – published December by the U.K.’s Department for Culture, Media, and Sport – found that libraries across the nation are reinventing themselves by increasingly becoming “vibrant and attractive community hubs”, focusing on the “need to create digital literacy, and in an ideal world, digital fluency.”

Taking into account the proliferation of freelancing, the gig economy, and remote working (also known as ‘technomadism’), the rise of library as community hub begins make sense. Cities are increasingly attracting location independent workers, and those workers need space and amenities that expensive and unreliable coffee shops simply cannot provide enough of.

Furthermore, when one considers that the most vulnerable and underserved city dwellers are also those who generally do not have access to the Internet, the need for a free and publicly connected space becomes even clearer.

According to a 2013 Pew poll, 90 percent in the US. said their community would be negatively impacted if their local library closed. But if libraries are going to survive the digital age, they need to be more about helping patrons filter vast quantities of digital information rather than access to analog materials. Good news came for U.S. libraries in November, when Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler announced a 62 percent increase in spending on high-speed Internet for schools and public libraries.

When it comes to this need for connectivity, Britain’s library report stated a ‘Wi-Fi connection should be delivered in a comfortable, retail standard environment with the usual amenities of coffee, sofas and etc.”  The report suggested that libraries focus less on loaning physical books and more on widening access via loaning of e-books, which the report noted was up by 80 percent in Britain from  2013.

Also in 2013, the first bookless public library in the United States opened in San Antonio, Texas. The city’s BiblioTech offers an all-digital, cloud-based collection of more than 10,000 e-books, plus e-readers available for checkout. Located in San Antonio’s underserved South Side, the BiblioTech provides an important digital hub in a city with a population that still struggles to connect to wireless Internet. Last month saw the opening of Canada’s Halifax Central Library, designed by a world-leading Danish design firm. With its auditorium, meeting space for entrepreneurs, multiple cafes, adult literacy classes and gaming facilities, actual books seemed like an afterthought.

(Abridged from http://magazine.good.is/articles/public-libraries-reimagined)

In the excerpt “But if libraries are going to survive the digital age, they need to be more about helping patrons filter vast quantities of digital information rather than access to analog materials.” The pronoun “they” refers to