Musing, often pessimistically, about the future of libraries seems to have a appeal for many thinkers in the profession. From time to time, such musings take a detailed and scholarly form, and aim to provide substantial food for thought. The books by Licklider (1965) and Shuman (1989, 1997) are classic examples, and others are reviewed by Bawden and Robinson (2012).
This new book, edited by Joseph Janes of the Washington iSchool, is an interesting addition to this corpus. Janes assembles 23 chapter authors, with an additional contribution from himself, and get them to describe their vision for the library, specific or general, in 2020. The authors were asked, among other things, to be provocative, inspirational and not boring, and by and large they have followed these instructions.
The contributors are largely practicing librarians and library educators, with a sprinkling of people from adjacent areas. Janes tells us that they are “mostly friends as well as people I admire”. While this approach has the benefit of bringing a coherent viewpoint, it can result in a rather limited perspective; virtually the contributors are based in North America, and this inevitably casts doubt on how representative their views are of the situation worldwide. There is also a, largely unspoken, assumption that we are focusing here on the public library.
With this caveat, the contributions do cover a wide spectrum of issues and views. Inevitably for a book of numerous short contributions, some will be more appealing than others to every reader, and it is likely that every reader will find something to interest them. The contributions are organized into five broad sections:
staff;
people;
community;
place; and
leadership and vision.
However, most of the contributors deal with more than one topic, so the book is to be dipped into fairly randomly.
If a single theme can be identified from such a variety of viewpoints, it is that touched on by many contributors, and expressed concisely by Kristin Fontichiaro: “libraries can no longer count on describing themselves as the repositories for stuff”. Many contributions reflect on what an alternative purpose may be. Fontichiaro suggests that libraries should be “places that host experiences”, and this is supported by others, with the currently very trendy makerspaces getting considerable mention. The Annoyed Librarian adds talks, workshops and exhibitions, sensibly – to my mind – reminding us that libraries will still be primarily cultural centres, rather than general community hubs. Some contributors, again sensibly in my view, remind us that libraries will still be about information and resources, focusing on providing, as Janes says, a high-quality personal service. Elisabeth Jones emphasizes the continuing role of libraries in safeguarding and augmenting information access, and making materials findable. In a splendidly succinct and insightful chapter, Peter Morville writes of the library as “the one place you can go for truth [...] an act of inspiration architecture [...] [a] wonderful and wacky intertwingularity [sic] of information and architecture”.
Although the perspectives of this book are not quite as diverse and representative as the blurb suggests, its contributions are genuinely thought provoking, and it has much to offer to students and practitioners.
