Assistant Professor Joe Janes asked 30 experts and practitioners of library science to describe their vision of what the library will be in the future. The resulting book, Library 2020, was published this month by Rowman & Littlefield to coincide with the annual American Library Association (ALA) conference. It is available as an e-book or hardcopy from the publisher and other book sellers.
According to the publisher's webpage, "contributors including Stephen Abram, Susan Hildreth, Marie Radford, Clifford Lynch, and Library Journal’s The Annoyed Librarian were asked to describe the 'library of 2020,' in whatever terms they wanted, either a specific library or situation or libraries in general. They were told: “be bold, be inspirational, be hopeful, be true, be provocative, be realistic, be depressing, be light-hearted, be thoughtful, be fun…be yourself, and for heaven’s sake, don’t be boring.”
Janes was interviewed by Publishers Weekly (PW) as part of their coverage of the ALA conference. When asked about the current state of libraries he said, "You know, it’s a very interesting time. I think in many ways you can look at the library landscape today and see a lot of strengths. Public libraries tell us that usage is up, circulation is up, their buildings are full. Academic libraries continue to roll out innovations like research commons and are moving into areas like data and repositories for research data and scholarship. But it’s also not hard to find examples of libraries that are struggling. I think we’ve largely gotten past the layoffs and the shutting-down period. But we are still not always clear where we’re going or where to look to figure out where we’re going. It’s a fraught time in many ways, but I think our communities have really come to understand the role libraries play. And if you see the kind of support that lots of libraries have received over the past several years from their communities and clienteles, it’s very encouraging."
As the editor, Janes wrote both the introduction and the concluding piece in the book, where he, too, answered the question he posed to the contributors, "The library of 2020 will be ________?"
In the PW interview, Janes described the future of libraries by saying, "My perspective on this is that the institution of the library is so enduring, so deeply ingrained in how we interact with information and how we interact with each other, that the idea, the concept of the library will survive even as the technological environment shifts, the market shifts, the demography shifts, the social milieu shifts. But it’s got to change. And the ways in which we change and the ways in which we adapt and to some extent create the change in the environment around us are very, very important.
"I can’t get beyond this notion that we have to move beyond access, that for so long we were the place you went. That’s no longer as necessary, or necessary at all in many cases. And it is never going to be the case again. So that means we have to engage people on more than access: on service, specialty, place, community, engagement, innovation, creativity—those kinds of things that we’re good at and we need to get better at. Also, we have to engage who we are and what we stand for: intellectual freedom, equality of access, privacy. We’re not going to follow you around. We’re not going to share your private information. We’re not going to out you. We’re going to help you. We can save you. We can still be a place of sanctuary and refuge. We’re worth it."