I love Jaron Lanier’s take on the future of libraries:
The question of what should happen to libraries is a hard one…. Not all libraries are the same,” he said. “Some libraries have a particular culture of scholarship around them and that’s what they should be about—that culture. Some libraries have an urban culture around them or a community around them, and they should be about that…. I think the thing to do is to not think of the library as an abstract category, but to look at what [a specific library] is actually achieving and how it matters to people, and try to understand that. What in that should be preserved or should be a seed for what comes next?
(This is the last paragraph of the article Computer Science Pioneer Jaron Lanier Discusses Big Data, Privacy at NYPL by Matt Enis, posted on The Digital Shift on October 15, 2013.)
John the Librarian 