What is a public library for?
First, how we got here:
Before Gutenberg, a book cost about as much as a small house. As a result, only kings and bishops could afford to own a book of their own. This naturally led to the creation of shared books, of libraries where scholars (everyone else was too busy not starving) could come to read books that they didn't have to own. The library as warehouse for books worth sharing.
[...]
After Gutenberg, books got a lot cheaper. More individuals built their own collections. [...] We definitely needed a warehouse to store all this bounty, and more than ever we needed a librarian to help us find what we needed. The library is a house for the librarian.
Industrialists (particularly Andrew Carnegie) funded the modern American library. The idea was that in a pre-electronic media age, the working man needed to be both entertained and slightly educated. Work all day and become a more civilized member of society by reading at night.
And your kids? Your kids need a place with shared encyclopedias and plenty of fun books, hopefully inculcating a lifelong love of reading, because reading makes all of us more thoughtful, better informed and more productive members of a civil society.
Which was all great, until now.
[...]
They need a librarian more than ever (to figure out creative ways to find and use data). They need a library not at all.
When kids go to the mall instead of the library, it's not that the mall won, it's that the library lost.
[...]
Five years from now, readers will be as expensive as Gillette razors, and ebooks will cost less than the blades.
Librarians that are arguing and lobbying for clever ebook lending solutions are completely missing the point. They are defending library as warehouse as opposed to fighting for the future, which is librarian as producer, concierge, connector, teacher and impresario.
[...]
The next library is a place, still.[...] The next library is a house for the librarian with the guts to invite kids in to teach them how to get better grades while doing less grunt work.
[...]
The next library is filled with so many web terminals there's always at least one empty. And the people who run this library don't view the combination of access to data and connections to peers as a sidelight--it's the entire point.
[...]
We need librarians more than we ever did. What we don't need are mere clerks who guard dead paper. Librarians are too important to be a dwindling voice in our culture. For the right librarian, this is the chance of a lifetime.
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário