An interesting response to Seth Godin

Having mentioned previously article The future of the library, lisnews has an interesting response here to his views. Worth a look if you have time.

Seth Godin and the future of libraries

(Found via here). Seth Godin has an interesting post The future of the library. He asks:-

What should libraries do to become relevant in the digital age?.

I suggest you read the rest to see what his idea's on the subject are.

Library video and the hive

(Found via here), Jisc has released a video entitled Libraries of the future on youtube.
Librarians Matters blog says of it:-

Libraries as bee-hives? Google as a partner? Librarians as network administrators as much as information specialists? Librarians “entrepreneurial, engaged and outward looking”? Investing thousands of pounds in change management programs?

The video is well worth a look.

The demise of public libraries.....is it happening?

Having worked in public libraries, I have been reconsidering staying within this area. This was underlined via a story by MaintainIT, which pointed to a Boing ,boing story about internet access being filtered and unfiltered in California. In the article RandomReader makes the following comment:-
As a former public library librarian, I can say that unfiltered Internet is simultaneously 1)important for intellectual freedom reasons and 2) a giant pain in the rear end. More broadly speaking, computers are transforming the texture of libraries and attracting new demographic slices that previously had no use for the library. Add to that what Amazon and Half.com have done for allowing book lovers to access books, and the impact of Google on giving people access to basic reference information, and you have even more more upheaval in public library land. Just today I predicted to a colleague that by 2025, the stereotype of public libraries as being about books and a quiet environment will be replaced by something having to do with computers, community programming, and probably the taint of Internet addiction/e-stalking/etc.

I'm in agreement. The days of looking for books are dead. Being an expert on e-mail is soo the vogue. No wonder i'm looking at legal libraries.

Tim Spalding and libraries

Tim Spalding over on librarything has an interesting (and short) article entitled Will libraries die. To summarise he says:-
Let's all stop imagining a library without books, and imagine a library without CDs and DVDs. Let's imagine a library with books, and hope for one with more of them. Maybe it's just me, but I'm jazzed by that prospect.