Future of the library and libraries of the future

The JISC and the Bodleian are today holding an event on the ‘Library of the Future’ so this seems like an auspicious time to begin laying out my own thoughts on the what the library of the future may (and perhaps should) look like. Over the next few months, I will begin sharing my work in this area as a way to start testing out these ideas which play such a central role in my research activities.

The first thing I might explain is how this fits into my dissertation and how my dissertation work fits into the future of libraries. The simple answer to this is that it provides the answer to the ‘so what?’ question. While my thesis project is about looking at the impact of digitisation on the practice and output of scholarship (particularly with regard to materials from the Himalayan region (more on that later)), I am doing it all with an eye toward understanding the intersection and libraries and the Internet. Figuring this out will be crucial to the future of the library.

So, over the next few months I hope to write on the following and more:

- The current mis-understanding of what an academic library is and does
- What libraries used to be and what can we learn from them
- What should be at the centre of the library of the future
- The role of the library in education

Here’s an attempt to abstract my thoughts on this now:
At some point in the last 100 (maybe 150) years, libraries became erroneously focused on information retrieval. Information retrieval is one service provided by libraries, but it should not be all that they do. Google does information retrieval better than libraries and we will never beat them at that game. If we try, libraries will be gone in the next 50 years. Libraries will survive, though, if the they re-invent themselves as a collection of services that support the creation of new knowledge (of which information retrieval is only 1 service). This is what libraries used to look like and the direction they should move (back) toward now.