In his interview, in American Libraries magazine, Thomas Frey talks about the often unseen role that libraries can and do play in documenting their communities. The past meets the future in our library as photos from our Local History Room have being digitalized and shared with the world through CDLC’s Digital Collections Project.
When I started library school, I used Pine for my email, and Gopher to do searches. The World Wide Web was just starting to be available (and not widely, either). Remember Mosaic?Looking at Gopher or Pine who could imagine that we could see streaming video and the "telephone" of George and Judy Jetson. Today, it's not only a reality, but it's Skype or Facetime. (I wait to see what will happen now that Skype has been bought by Microsoft.)
At our library, we have patrons who regularly use our wifi signal, before and after we open. They could be surfing the web looking for work, finding articles from magazines and newspapers, updating their Facebook or Twitter account or a multitude of other things. It isn't the libraries role to decide what is "appropriate" use of our wireless signal (within the law), but to offer our resources to our patrons, whichever format these resources are found.
Going back in time, fiction was not considered to be a worthwhile use of library funds. Imagine telling readers of James Patterson or Jodi Picoult that we wouldn't be carrying fiction any longer. It won't be pretty!
Likewise, what we offer to the public today may differ in content or format from 10 years from now, but widening access to our resources to our customers is an inherent part of what we do. We may see fewer people coming through the doors of the "bricks and mortar" library, but many more coming to us through our online community. What we do for patrons, helping them to navigate the resources to find what they want and/or need will not change, but how we do it will and that's ok.
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