[pembrook]

I'm involved with my local library, and if you could see the trend line on how many people are checking out books...you'd realize that every library will eventually become a community center.

It's important to not let our personal nostalgia for the past hold back the next generation from getting the resources they need from local government.

This is clearly a well-thought evolution of what a library of the future should be.

[snazz]

And even though I’m a pretty heavy user of my local library system for reading paper books, I rarely walk in there; usually I find a book online and place a hold on it and then pick it up when they email me that it’s ready.

[distances]

Exactly! There's rarely need for actually wandering between bookshelves any more. It's as nice as ever, but the books can be reserved online where you probably are anyway doing the research about what to read next.

[ghaff]

I remember back in school, for some purposes, there was definitely a serendipitous aspect to finding related books in open stacks that were near the one you went to find. However, this was back when you were mostly limited to a physical card catalog as a search tool.

I don't do a lot of research (that a library is useful for) these days and what there is is mostly in journals and the like. But, in general, I find that with electronic searches of library catalogs it's probably less important to discover things accidentally by physical proximity. (And a lot of big libraries aren't/weren't open stacks anyway.)

[WillPostForFood]

I agree, but there is something lost in being able to walk the shelves. Serendipitous discoveries, but more importantly, when doing research, just looking at books in a section leads to interesting discoveries of related materials that you don't get when doing searches online.

[distances]

True enough, and I'm not particularly worried of that going away anytime soon. At some point maybe, but most of the libraries are still filled with shelves and will be for at least some time.

Maybe that changes in the future, which just means that the world has changed. Institutions need to adapt to the needs of each generation.

[peterhil]

My local library and Oodi has equally small space reserved for scifi books, and it seems the shelf-space is shrinking each year also.

Luckily Finnish public libraries have relatively good sites for reserving books online — maybe I should get into the habit of using the online reservations.