2025: The Future of Library
Thinking of ten years from now, how the role of library will change in our daily life? As a college student, library to me is a place to get resources for academic uses as well as a place for studying. With my working experience in the library, I have a lot more encounters with community members, which is quite different from I imagined. Half of the time when I am working at the reference desk in Z. Smith Library, patrons are asking for locating a book in the library. Different libraries have different coding systems, which always confuse patrons for finding the book they are looking for. I think this will be one big thing to be improve in the near future. In ten years, there will be more libraries emerging as James B. Hunt, Jr. Library in NC State University. Earlier this year, I was lucky to be selected to present my research at an undergraduate research conference held in NC State University, specifically in the Hunt Library. This is a robotic library, where you will not see traditional stacks, shelves, billions of physical books. If you want a book, you will request it through a computer system, then this robotic library will retrieve the book for you automatically, and deliver it to a pickup location for you to pick it up. If you are unable to picture this awesome and efficient process, here is a video for you to get a taste of it.
Moreover, I echoed one of the trends that Thomas Trey mentioned in his article The Future Of Libraries: Beginning The Great Transformation, “libraries will transition from a center of information to a center of culture.” With the increase of various technological products that things are becoming digitalized. People can easily access a lot more information through the Internet now. People are concerned if libraries, the storage of all kinds of information may die after years. However, I think it is more like a transformation of libraries. People who are standing behind the library will modify the mission and vision of their libraries based on the status quo and current trends. In the next ten years, libraries may shift to the core values of the culture, which carries the legacy of the community. In 2025, when you enter a library, you may immediately feel the cultural elements. For example, the culture of Wake Forest University in the Z. Smith Library or the history of Moravian churches in a library in Winston-Salem, NC.
In terms of the responses from the community, the changes are usually happening subtly that we may not notice. Libraries undergo these changes in response to the trends of culture, technologies and other relevant elements. The imagination of changes of libraries in ten years could be very crazy or very realistic. No matter what will change, libraries will always exist, as I think it is our “third place”, for the purpose of learning.
