Books may be on life-support, but with a little rehabilitation, the library will continue to deliver knowledge.
Many of those who heard him declare it looked to their seatmates for confirmation they had heard him correctly. There, at a Lethbridge College staff refresher earlier this year, stood futurist Thomas Frey predicting a day was swiftly arriving on which libraries would contain no books. Some in the audience required immediate medical care.
OK, he also predicted driverless cars would one day replace the hemi. But with electronic book readers proliferating almost monthly, does anyone doubt that bookless libraries deserve at least a modicum of consideration as a future possibility?
Lethbridge College is positioning its Buchanan Library to be a learning centre of the future, the campus’s heart of information. Fiona Dyer, manager of Library Services, wants to change the image of the librarian as information gatekeeper to information facilitator. Along the way, a planned facility renovation will bring that, and other positive changes to fruition.
At the same event where Frey predicted the death of print, Dyer and her colleagues outlined trends that are forcing change in North American libraries. Part of their job is to assist the Buchanan’s staff plan for the library of the future.
Many of the changes which lie ahead are being driven by young future library users and their rapid acceptance of, adaptability to, and dependence on, new technology. As they become conversant with (and, some might suggest, addicted to) each new communications gadget, they quite naturally expect the infrastructure to adapt to accommodate their needs.
Here’s what Dyer and crew see on the horizon:
- “Open 24/7” - the new generation of learners demands greater flexibility in accessing information. For this cohort, the World Wide Web never sleeps, so they want technology-rich environments with access to information around the clock.
- “20 minutes or it’s free” – new methods of delivering education are afoot. Collaborative, social network-style learning is increasingly supplanting traditional classroom instruction. E-learning is also making things much more flexible and individualized for students and giving them more responsibility for their education.
- “The place to be” – the library is being increasingly used as a locale to access student services, resources and supports, making it increasingly necessary to look at alternatives.
- “I saw it on TV” – technological literacy is vital to give students, inundated with information, knowledge on how to separate the product from the packaging.
- “We have it in your size” – as the number of paper books is cut in half, and more magazines and publications are available online, e-books will become the norm. This will change the way books are borrowed. The Buchanan Library is already loaning e-book readers. Dyer says iPads will likely do for books what iPods did for music 10 years ago.
- “Fries with that?” – most libraries allow students to eat and drink on site, much like Chapters. Competing with mainstream bookstores has become a necessity as libraries look for ways to retain clientele.
- “Rooms by the hour” – Students want more open spaces with greater access to small breakout rooms for group work. Multimedia production rooms allow for student-generated content. This flexibility will give the library additional cachet among students
Dyer sees these and other changes forcing librarians to do some soul-searching.
“The librarian has become the facilitator in the education process,” she says. “Information literacy is critical in dealing with the data smog.”
That “smog” is the giga- and terabytes of data flowing through the web. As most content is added in real-time, being able to help students filter all that information is a role of the modern librarian.
“It’s all about focusing on evaluation rather than finding and retrieving,” says Dyer. “Retrieving is as easy as searching on Google. Whether that information is helpful is another matter.”
The changes Dyer sees in store for the Lethbridge College library are not radical. Most libraries are coming to grips with them. In the future it may be difficult to say whether the library is part of the college or the college is part of the library.
“Thinking that the library is somehow distinct and different from the rest of the college is another of the changes we need to make,” she says.
