“Librarians who think straight are actively engaged in creating the future. They are not trying to protect the past,” declared Stephen Abram, Canada’s 2011 Librarian of the Year and creator of the Stephen’s Lighthouse blog.
The Digital Bridge to Somewhere panel on Sunday, June 26, was made up of men who planned for, created, and built access to digital technologies in libraries and they were full of opinions on where libraries are headed. Abram was perhaps the most outspoken of the group and posited that librarians have never been more relevant, but that just as essential as we were in creating the digital world we live in today—think librarians who work at Google, Yahoo, etc.—we can make ourselves totally irrelevant by ignoring human behavior. For Abram, the answer seems simple: Pay attention to what your patrons are doing and give them more.
Other panelists agreed. Jeff Hoover, an architect who focuses his work on library buildings, explained that although technology changes quickly and planning physical space around technologies that do not yet exist is nearly impossible, it is possible to plan around the one constant that has always existed in libraries—the people. “We need to build libraries for people, not technology. Technology is always changing, so that will never be the constant, but patrons always will.”
Walking into this panel discussion, I was pretty sure that I was going to hear about new and exciting digital initiatives happening in libraries, which would have been great, but I was pleasantly surprised when the focus was on patrons and what the panelists felt we needed to do to stay relevant in their lives.
Craig Buthod, director of the Louisville (Ky.) Free Public Library and 2010 Library Journal Librarian of the Year, spoke about e-books and how he thought they would affect his library: “E-books are not a zero sum gain. Our readership can go up in both print and digital formats. We need to pay attention to our patrons and learn everything we can from them, and then we need to feed our readers everything we can feed them.”
Overall, the panelists agreed that it would be impossible to predict where digital technologies would take us in the next 5, 10, or 20 years, but that if the focus stayed on patrons, libraries and the librarians who run them would stay in good shape.
