The bookless library – Is that the future of libraries?

Whether the advent of eBooks heralds the end of print books or not, it certainly seems that it will lead to the demise of libraries as we know them. The bookless library is increasing a reality, staring in places meant to be the repository of knowledge, university libraries, and gaining ground outside academic grounds.

The New York Public Library is implementing its plan to move many of its books away from its main branch into offsite storage with 24-hour advance request required. Yet it is not the first library to do so. Opening the move was Kansas State University’s engineering school, which went bookless 12 years ago. The University of Texas at San Antonio ditched print for e-books and e-journals in 2010. Stanford University’s engineering school pruned 85 percent of its books last year. Drexel University opened a new library just last month with hardly a single print book – just rows and rows of computers. And Cornell recently announced a similar initiative.

From academic libraries, the trend is now spreading to public libraries. Before New York,  in order to successfully abide a budget crunch, the Balboa Branch library in Newport Beach, California, is implementing a plan to strip its original library of most of if not all its 35,000 books and a few librarians as well. The 50-year-old library will become a de facto community center — a place where citizens can gather, chat without fear of being shushed by a stern librarian, and surf the web. Yet, patrons really wanting a book can still get one. All they have to do is march up to a voice-activated electronic kiosk; speak with a librarian at one of the city’s three other branches; order it and wait by the library’s traditional fireplace for it to be dropped off at a locker on site, though it might be wiser to go home  and come back the next day.

According to a Broward County (FL.) library employee, the future of library holding physical books seems gloomy. Commenting on a post about bookless libraries, he points at the main reasons virtual libraries will increasingly replace print books libraries

“1 – Our budgets are not enough to purchase both dead tree books and eBooks. We choose to increase the number of eBook titles available to customers (as well as other digital resources) and those dollars come from the physical book/item collection. This includes fewer CDs (Freegal replaces) and potentially DVDs soon.

2 – Staffing budgets are down everywhere. In Broward County Library our virtual reference and digital resources are staffed by two people. Just to process new physical materials it takes four people. It is not hard to see where the trend is heading.

Will there be physical books in libraries? Yes for the foreseeable future. But they will be more for older or poorer customers who do not have access any other way to old materials. New materials will not be available in the end.

Right now we do more than 60% of all circulation is Audio Visual materials (DVD, CD, etc) and customers using the physical building more for the computer access or bringing their own laptops in to access WiFi etc.

Less than 60% of all customers walking into the building actually check something out, and as above less than 40% of that is a physical book. “

And since money is still what rules the world, whether we like it of not, bookless libraries are what the future holds for the majority of us who are not scholars interested in checking watermarks and other specialized particularities of print books.

Read More News at:  http://www.epublishabook.com/2012/08/31/the-bookless-library-is-that-the-future-of-libraries/#axzz25OdEHGTq

Libraries Have a Key Role in Academic Accountability

By Jennifer Howard

The continuing drive for more accountability in academe presents “a unique opportunity” for libraries, which are well placed to connect students, faculty members, and administrators. That was the takeaway from two summits on the value of academic libraries organized by the Association of College & Research Libraries, or ACRL. The association today released a report, “Connect, Collaborate, and Communicate,” that recaps the summit conversations and offers a few recommendations.

The summits grew out of a major 2010 ACRL report on the value of academic libraries, part of the association’s effort to help its members document and demonstrate that value. Convened late last year in Chicago, the meetings brought librarians and administrators from 22 institutions together to talk about the broader landscape of assessment and where libraries fit into it. According to the new report, participants at the summits acknowledged the importance of faculty research but mainly focused on “student learning and success, an issue facing increasing public scrutiny.”

The report lists five “overarching recommendations for the library profession” that came out of the gatherings. Participants stressed the importance of helping librarians understand and measure how their libraries affect student success, and the need to develop “assessment competencies” to help put effective practices in place. They wanted to see more professional-development opportunities for librarians to learn about assessment practices. They saw a need to expand partnerships with other groups on campus who are also interested in assessment. And they wanted more integration of existing ACRL assessment tools into what librarians are doing at individual institutions.

The report suggests that libraries can make the most of the current accountability push and “spark communities of action” around the question of assessment. “Academic librarians can serve as connectors and integrators, promoting a unified approach to assessment,” it concludes. “As a neutral and well-regarded place on campus, the academic library can help break down traditional institutional silos and foster increased communication across the institutional community.”

Karen Brown, an associate professor of library and information science at Dominican University, and Kara J. Malenfant, the association’s senior strategist for special initiatives, wrote the report. Summit participants included teams of provosts and library directors from a variety of state universities and smaller colleges, including California State University, Drexel University, Grinnell College, Kansas State University, Linfield College, Moraine Valley Community College, Mount Holyoke College, Pennsylvania State University, Rio Salado College, San Diego State University, the University of West Florida, and Utah State University, among others.

Source: http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/libraries-have-a-key-role-in-academic-accountability/36497

The Future of Libraries and Library Careers by Lana Brand

A must see Video for Library Professionals !!

Please click below to view full video:

The Future of Libraries and Library Careers 

Future Libraries and 17 Forms of Information Replacing Books

Question: As physical books go away, and computers and smart devices take their place, at what point does a library stop being a library, and start becoming something else?
Somewhere in the middle of this question lies the nagging fear and anxiety that we see brimming to the top among library insiders.
People who think libraries are going away simply because books are going digital are missing the true tectonic shifts taking place in the world of information.
Libraries are not about books. In fact, they were never about books.
Libraries exist to give us access to information. Until recently, books were one of the more efficient forms of transferring information from one person to another. Today there are 17 basic forms of information that are taking the place of books, and in the future there will be many more…

Gas Station Maps
As a young child, I was enamored with the free maps I could pick up at gas stations. Over time I had collected maps for nearly every state and some of the Canadian Provinces.
Along with the early days of the automobile and a generally confusing road system came the need for maps. Oil companies quickly realized that people who knew where they were going often traveled more, and consequently bought more gasoline.
Over time, anyone driving a car soon came to expect free maps whenever they stopped for gas, and companies like Rand McNally, H.M. Gousha, and General Drafting turned out millions to meet demand.
In the early 1970s, when I was first learning the freedom of owning a car, I couldn’t imagine a time when these maps would not be an integral part of my life.
Today, as GPS and smartphones give us turn-by-turn instructions on where to go, printed road maps exist as little more than collectibles for people wishing to preserve their memories of a fading era.
Are printed books likely to go through a similar dwindling of popularity?

Our Relationship with Information is Changing
As the form and delivery system for accessing information changes, our relationship with information also begins to morph.
If we treat this like other types relationships, we can begin to see where we’ve come from and where we’re going.
Gone are the days when we were simply “flirting” with our data, occasionally glancing at it, hoping it would pay attention to us as well.
In school we had more of a “dating” relationship, lugging books around, hoping they would impart their knowledge even though the parts that got read were few and far between. Much like dating a popular person, we became known by the books under our arms.
Once we started working, we became “married” to a relatively small universe of information that surrounded our job, company, and industry. People who became immersed in their particular universe became recognized as experts and quickly rose to the top.
Today we are beginning to have “affairs” with other exotic forms of information such as social networks and video chatting. All of these new forms of information seem much more alive and vibrant than the book world we had been married to for the past century.
Alone, on some dusty shelf, lie the books we had once been married to. On some level, many of us feel like we were cheating by abandoning our past, never getting closure for a divorce that left us with mixed loyalties haunting us on both a conscious and subconscious level.
If you think this is a crazy analogy, many will argue that its not. If anything, information is the heart and soul of our emotional self. Even though we may not feel it touching us like a finger pressing on our arm, a great piece of literature has a way of caressing our mind, adding fire to our inner rage, sending chills down the length of our spine, and giving us a euphoric high as we join our hero to reach a climactic conclusion.
Books of the past remain the physical manifestation of this kind of experience, and without their presence, a part of us feels lost.

Replacing Books
The transition to other forms of information has been happening for decades. Once we are able to get past the emotion connection we have to physical books, we begin to see how the information world is splintering off into dozens of different categories.
Here is a list of 17 primary categories of information that people turn to on a daily basis. While they are not direct replacements for physical books, they all have a way of eroding our reliance on them. There may be more that I’ve missed, but as you think through the following media channels, you’ll begin to understand how libraries of the future will need to function:

1. Games – 135 million Americans play video games an hour or more each month. In the U.S. 190 million households will use a next-generation video game console in 2012, of which 148 million will be connected to the Internet. The average gamer is 35 years old and they have been playing games on average for 13 years.
2. Digital Books – In January, USA Today reported a post-holiday e-book “surge,” with 32 of the top 50 titles on its most recent list selling more copies in digital format than in print. Self-published e-books now represent 20-27% of digital book sales.
3. Audio Books - Audiobooks are the fastest growing sector of the publishing industry. There is currently a shortage of audiobooks worldwide as publishers race to meet demand. Only 0.75% (not even 1%!) of Amazon’s book catalog has so far been converted to audio. Last year more than $1 billion worth of audiobooks were sold in the U.S. alone. Over 5,000 public libraries now offer free downloadable audio books.
4. Newspapers – Online readership of newspapers continues to grow, attracting more than 113 million readers in January 2012. Industry advertising revenues, however, continue to drop and are now at the same level as they were in 1950, when adjusted for inflation.
5. Magazines – The U.S. magazine industry is comprised of 5,146 businesses publishing a total of 38,000 titles. Time spent reading newspapers or magazines combined is roughly 3.9 hours per week. Nearly half of all magazine consumption takes place with the TV on. The magazine industry is declined 3.5% last year.
6. Music – According to Billboard’s “2011 Music Industry Report,” consumers bought 1.27 billion digital tracks last year, which accounted for 50.3% of all music sales. Digital track sales increased 8.5% in 2011. Meanwhile, physical sales declined 5%. According to Apple, there are an estimated 38 million songs in the known music universe.
7. Photos – Over 250 million photos are uploaded to Facebook every day
8. Videos – Cisco estimates that over 90% of all Internet content will be video by 2015. Over 100,000 ‘years’ of Youtube video are viewed on Facebook every year. Over 350 million Youtube videos are shared on Twitter every year. Netflix streams 2 billion videos per quarter.
9. Television – According to the A.C. Nielsen Co., the average American watches more than 4 hours of TV each day, and owns 2.2 televisions. An estimated 41% of our information currently comes from television.
10. Movies – There are currently over 39,500 movie screens in the U.S. with over 4,500 of them converted to 3D screens. The average American goes to 6 movies per year. However, almost one-third of U.S. broadband Households use the Internet to watch movies on their TV sets, according to Park Associates. That number is growing, with 4% of U.S. households buying a video media receiver, such as Apple TV and Roku, over the 2011 holiday season
11. Radio – Satellite radio subscribers, currently at 20 million, is projected to reach 35 million by 2020. At the same time, Internet radio is projected to reach 196 million listeners by 2020. These combined equal the same number as terrestrial radio listeners.
12. Blogs – There are currently over 70 million WordPress blogs and 39 million Tumblr blogs worldwide.
13. Podcasts – According to Edison Research, an estimated 70 million Americans have listened to a podcast. The podcast audience has migrated from being predominantly “early adopters” to more closely resembling mainstream media consumers.
14. Apps – There are now over 1.2 million smartphone apps with over 35 billion downloads. Sometime this year the number of apps will exceed the number of books in print – 3.2 million.
15. Presentations – Leading the charge in this area, SlideShare is the world’s largest community for sharing presentations. With 60 million monthly visitors and 130 million pageviews, it is amongst the most visited 200 websites in the world.
16. Courseware – The OpenCourseware movement has been catching fire with Apple leading the charge. iTunesU currently has over 1,000 Universities participating from 26 countries. Their selection of classes, now exceeding the 500,000 mark, have had over 700 million downloads. They recently announced they were expanding into the K-12 market.
17. Personal Networks – Whether its LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or Pinterest, people are becoming increasingly reliant on their personal network for information. There are now over 2.8 billion social media profiles, representing around half of all Internet users worldwide. LinkedIn now has over 147 million members. Facebook has over 1.1 billion members and accounts for 20% of all pageviews on the Internet. Google+ currently has over 90 million users.

Each of these forms of information has a place in future libraries. Whether or not physical books decline or even disappear has little relevance in the overall scheme of future library operations.

Steve Jobs introducing iCloud

The Coming Era of the Library Cloud

In June 2011, Steve Jobs made his final public appearance at a software developer’s conference to unveil iCloud; a service that many believe will become his greatest legacy.

As Jobs envisioned it, the entire universe of songs, books, movies, and a variety of other information products would reside in iCloud and could be “pulled down” whenever someone needed to access it.

People would initially purchase the product through iTunes, and Apple would keep a copy of it in iCloud. So each subsequent purchase by other Apple users would be a quick download directly from iCloud.

Whether or not the information universe develops in the cloud like Jobs has envisioned, libraries will each need to develop their own cloud strategy for the future.

As an example, at a recent library event I was speaking at, one librarian mentioned she had just ordered 50 Kindles and 50 Nooks for their library. At the time, she was dealing with the restrictions from publishers that only allowed them to load each digital book on 10 devices. So which devices get the content in the end?

Over time, it’s easy to imagine a library with 350 Kindles, 400 iPads, 250 Nooks, 150 Xooms, and a variety of other devices. Keeping track of which content is loaded on each device will become a logistical nightmare. However, having each piece of digital content loaded in the cloud and restricting it to 10 simultaneous downloads will be far more manageable.

This snapshot in time could have been preserved by your local library.

The Value of the Community Archive

What was your community like in 1950, or for that matter in 1850 or even 1650? What role did your community play during the Civil War? How active was it during the Presidential elections of 1960? How did local people react to the bombing of Pearl Harbor?

We have access to plenty of history books that give us the “official story” of all the major events throughout history. But understanding the intersection of our city, our village, or our community with these earth-changing events has, for the most part, never been captured or preserved. In the future, this will become one of the most valuable functions provided by a community library.

Libraries have always had a mandate to archive the records of their service area, but it has rarely been pursued with more than passing enthusiasm. Archives of city council meetings and local history books made the cut, but few considered the library to be a good photo or video archive.

Over time, many of the newspapers, radio, and television stations will begin to disappear. As these businesses lose their viability, their storerooms of historical broadcast tapes and documents will need to be preserved. More specifically, every radio broadcast, newspaper, and television broadcast will need to be digitized and archived.

With the advent of iCloud and other similar services libraries will want to expand their hosting of original collections, and installing the equipment to digitize the information. The sale of this information to the outside world through an iTunes-like service could become a valuable income stream for libraries in the future.

Final Thoughts

Libraries, much like any living breathing organism, will have to adapt to the complex nature of the ever-changing world of information. As information becomes more sophisticated and complex, so will libraries.

Libraries are here to stay because they have a survival instinct. They have created a mutually dependent relationship with the communities they serve, and most importantly, they know how to adapt to the changing world around them.

I am always impressed with the creative things being done in libraries. As Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.” There are a lot of beautiful dreams taking place that will help form tomorrow’s libraries.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

Future Libraries: Nerve Center of the Community

Ever since the people of ancient Nineveh began storing and classifying their books nearly 3,000 years ago, libraries have been hallowed and largely unchanging bastions of learning. But in the information age, libraries have been caste with a new identity, and the future is evolving into a very different place.

 

Ten years ago, as the Internet began to take off, many in the tech elite were predicting the death of the public library. What the critics failed to predict, however, was libraries’ stirring ability to reinvent themselves. Much like plants that flourish with good soil, water and sunshine, libraries have actually begun to thrive in our information-rich environment.

 

Such is their resurgence that today, libraries are going through an age of rebirth. Intent on making them the crown jewels of the community, cities from Vancouver to Prague are investing heavily in public libraries, producing opulent, multi-story structures equipped with cutting-edge technology. From rather hidebound monuments to knowledge laboratories, libraries are now evolving into interactive research and leisure centers. Yet this change, impressive as it is, is only the beginning.

 

2029 SCENARIO

 

To see how, let’s step through the doorway of a city library in 2029. In the past, libraries housed seemingly endless miles of shelving stacked with finely printed books, but now only a few remain. In much the same way that living creatures adapt to their surrounding environments, libraries have grown into a bidirectional feeding tube connecting the life-giving digital data streams and the user populations that nourish them. People are no longer satisfied with information flowing one way. They want to participate in it, add their own contributions, and take ownership of it.

 

Traditional lending has been replaced with downloadable books, which are never out of stock, formatted for electronic tablets and readers. A bigger change, though, has come with the very concept of what a book is. Where once a customer would passively read and, hopefully, absorb a book, every volume now is more akin to an online forum, with authors, experts and other readers available to discuss and answer questions on almost every important book ever written.

 

In contrast to just a couple of decades before, almost the entire canon of book knowledge has been formatted for computers, making in-depth searches possible for even the most obscure tomes. But with many people now using this service in their homes, libraries have stayed ahead of the curve by installing high-tech spherical displays and holographic imaging that allow users to shift viewing angles and probe individual parts of complex data. Space imaging technologies have also made it possible to search the planets and stars, allowing the swarms of school kids who come here to embark on their own voyages into deep space.

 

With technology having improved so dramatically, a central feature of this library is the Search Command Center, where a team of experts, both real and virtual, assists with complex searches that now incorporate not just words, but sounds, textures and even smells. While many visitors come here to recapture a fond fragrance or a familiar noise, these searches have more practical applications too. Restaurateurs, for example, are frequent visitors here, using the search tools to rediscover certain smells and tastes without having to rake through endless ingredients and recipes.

 

And chefs are far from the only people doing business in the library. With the Internet having put increasingly powerful business tools into the hands of individuals, more people are working and operating businesses from home. To such people, the library offers not just a refuge from the isolation of their house, it also provides temporary office space complete with podcast recording studios, conference rooms and editing stations. At the same time, the library has developed into an entrepreneurial zone where business people from various backgrounds coalesce, work together and then disperse in much the same way that film production crews have always done.

 

Business colonies have become commonplace, forming around common business themes such as gamer colonies, video colonies, photonics colonies, and biotech colonies. In each situation the libraries evolve to meet the needs of the user populations, providing vital services for the colony as well as for the community at large.

 

Yet perhaps nowhere are libraries’ new found attitudes more manifest than in their surroundings. Long operating in a rather high-minded domain, where many of them viewed market demand as little short of vulgar, libraries today are often situated right in the heart of larger complexes with businesses that complement their services. Crèches offer somewhere to drop off the kids, stationary stores and restaurants tick over with student business, and patrons from fitness centers borrow magazines and audio books from the library to enliven their conditioning routines or stop in to do research on exercise and nutrition.

 

In our fast-changing world, progress is too often seen as a zero-sum game, where innovation inevitably comes at the expense of the old. Yet libraries are showing that innovation always brings opportunity, too. While retaining its traditional functions, the library of the future will be home to myriad informational experiences, where great ideas happen, and people have the tools and facilities to act on them.

 

Source: http://www.futuristspeaker.com/