Revolution in the Stacks is the title of an article in the June 2008 issue of Governing magazine. An exerpt:
“When library experts talk about the future, it’s remarkable how little the topic of books comes up. To be sure, libraries will carry books for as long as a critical mass of people wants to read them. The same is true of newspapers, magazines, CDs, DVDs and every other form of media that libraries have adopted over the years while following consumer tastes. Increasingly, however, libraries are talking about flipping the content equation around. That is, rather than thinking of themselves merely as a place to find content created by somebody else, the library will create content — and give patrons the tools to create content of their own.”
I don’t think that it is as cut-and-dry as the quote suggests, but we need to recognize that information is not only becoming easier to find, copy, and make available, but that we are going to discover that the next upheaval will be the combining of different resources to add depth and context to all of the information contained within them.
Our job will be making resources such as literary reviews, patron reviews, reading trends, additional sources, and whatever else is relevant to the topic available to users (and to us!). Are we up to this? We’d better be!
thanks to Jo Budler, Ohio State Librarian for sending the link!
