The tireless and wondrous Salem historian Virginia Green brings us another great piece of Salem history today with this article on the traveling library in Oregon -- something that's going to have to come back into vogue in years to come (bringing books to the readers instead of expecting readers to travel to the building where the books live).
In years to come, as fuel prices make easy transport more and more a thing of the past --- and the costs of heating, cooling, lighting, and securing libraries continues to skyrocket --- we're going to have to re-think the whole idea of libraries as places where people find books. We're going to need to develop more of a community-based system, where the books don't live in conditions suitable for people in between readings. Instead, the books are housed in an environment good for books and people call for them and then the books travel, rather than the people.
There's still an essential role for librarians in this future -- less so for massive, expensive buildings though.
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Librarians are already rethinking and reinventing their services Walker. Give them some credit. The future will be largely consist of downloadable ebooks and audiobooks. We have already had that in Oregon libraries for several years. Check it out:
http://library2go.lib.overdrive.com/77EC7F71-5FC8-45B4-86A6-B7EB6390ABF6/10/397/en/Default.htm
I'm not nearly as sure as you seem to be -- I think the future has a lot less connectivity and wealth than "downloadable ebooks and audiobooks" presumes. I'm not agin 'em -- I love me some audiobooks -- but I think libraries must first serve the need that the market is increasingly failing to serve: universal access to books, which last. We're already having problems accessing digital content from a few years ago -- books are stable and can be accessed by anyone with eyes, no spendy digital player required, and no upgrades down the road to maintain access.
When the knife meets the budget -- as is already happening in Salem and will happen much more in years to come -- we need to make sure that we're not sacrificing any of the printed collection for the digital ebooks and audiobooks. As an add-on, lagniappe if you will, these things are fine, but as a mainstay of the service, no.
The role of the public library is not to follow the bouncing technology ball--it's to provide universal access to the sum of human knowledge as recorded in books and to our written cultures.
"Strategic planning" is such an overused term that it's become essentially content free, but in its original form, the idea was to assess one's goals and identify the plausible threats to the attainment of those goals. A strategic planning exercise that the library better be conducting seriously is "How do we provide access to books to everyone in Salem when the economy and tax revenues persistently shrink, year upon year?" I don't think ebooks and whatnot have a big role in such a future.
P.S. ebooks and audiobooks don't need a big building either. Imagine what we could do if we stopped paying to heat/cool/light/clean/secure/recarpet two big buildings called "libraries" and we instead used all the school libraries and one or two other public spaces in each neighborhood as community book transfer points (to collect returns and to allow people to pick up new loaned books).
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