The Impact of the Internet on Public Library Use

Most Obvious Question: "'In this age of the Internet, will we still need libraries?'" (Various authors, 1).

Though I think that most educated librarians would probably answer "yes" to this question (perhaps while pulling at their collars), it is certainly still a valid (if ubiquitous) question within the field. At the beginning of the study, the authors suggest three possible scenarios for future librarianship--it will either 1) stay the same, 2) evolve with the Internet, 3) be rended obsolete.

While graphs, surveys, and statistics contained within the survey are all well and good, some basic facts should be remembered. 1) Not everybody used the public library before the age of the Internet. 2) People who frequented the library most frequently in the first place used it for a variety of reasons. a) For example, the library could be a public meeting space. b) The library of the future will likely have texts that can't simply be found on JSTOR, Google, and the like.

It seems to me that once librarians fully comprehend the role of the library in this new information paradigm, they will see how important it is to preserve honest-to-goodness books. When an information revolution occurs, it tends to focus the most effective uses of a given medium. Radio, for example, became most widely used in the car...you certainly can't watch television while driving. In the future, I think the strengths of the library will be more clear to librarians, and the profession will become more focused on its role in society (likely leading to fewer microfilm-esque delusions and mistakes).