Reading Report #3

"The Future of Libraries"by Thomas Frey, Executive Director of the DaVinci Institute

In the article, "The Future of Libraries Beginning the Great Transformation,” it starts by talking about the historical roles of libraries. Libraries were used in the beginning to preserve artwork and important documents. Books in the past were very expensive and only the wealthy could afford to buy them. That is when Gutenberg invented the printing press. This made for a lot of future trends in libraries and the article discusses ten of these trends. The article talks about how ways of creating information are changing. People used to use phonographs and are now using podcasts. Technologies come and go for a reason. An example used in the article was talking about how the 8 track was replaced by the tape and the tape was replaced with a CD and now we have iPod’s and MP3 players. They discussed how even search technology is becoming more complex and human needs are growing. This causes libraries to have to adapt to new changes. The article talks about how consumers are changing their demands and new technology and waves of communications are surfacing. The article ends by giving libraries advice on how to adjust to these changes.

I personally think this is a really interesting and true article. There are so many changes going on in our society right now and people are changing their demands. The things people want are different from what they wanted years ago. Changes are happening often and libraries need to be ready to make these changes as well. I think that libraries really need reevaluate how they can and will make these changes. It is crazy the evolution of libraries. It is amazing to me how a library can go from something that solely achieves materials and is for the wealthy, to being freely available to anyone and everyone.