Discussions about the future of libraries are abundant. Alex Soojung-Kim Pang has started an intriguing discussion about the end of cyberspace. Alex is Research Director at the Institute for the Future and former managing
editor at the Encyclopedia Britannica.

In an article for the Berkshire Savant, (PDF) published by the Berkshire Publishing Group, he writes about the future of libraries when cyberspace itself no longer exists. He finds that even as the library becomes more digital, the “social aspects of learning, knowledge work, and scholarship will remain; and we’ll continue to need places that support them.” I agree that there’s plenty of work to keep librarians busy for decades.

This follows the thinking behind learning spaces and “library as place” or the perspective of “place as library“.

Even in a digital environment that is largely wireless, populated with small, flexible, portable devices for reading and manipulating information, Alex sees that “the primary business of libraries will be creating and supporting collaboration and knowledge creation.”

“In a world with such technologies,
the notion of cyberspace as a different,
superior dimension will seem quaint, and
either/or arguments about digital versus
physical media will seem misguided. The
great challenge of this new age will be to
design objects, services, and institutions
that combine the flexibility and freshness of
bits with the affordances and permanence
of atoms.

What will that mean for books and libraries?
First, books won’t die; they’ll come alive.
Some information devices will copy the
look and feel of books, just as the graphical
user interface copied the metaphor of
desks and documents. Electronic paper will
let publishers add animations and video to
books, à la Prospero’s Books or Harry Potter.
Another interesting possibility is that books
that spark scholarly discussions, or are the
focus of particularly close reading, could integrate
reviews, notes by readers, marginal
annotations, or visualizations showing their
place in citation networks.”

Despite the professions’s emphasis on learning spaces, many users - particularly younger generations - are developing competely different perceptions of the library. Indeed, they may even have no perception at all of the library. For some, the library may simply become not a place but simply part of the world that exists around them, resources and services available digitally that they take for granted, that they simply expect to exist and access as needed. For these users it’s not even about going to a library’s web site or accessing a database; the library experience becomes an unconscious act, part of the normal routine of life. It reminds me of the title of a 1989 article in EDUCOM Review: “The network is the library.”