Borrowed Time

Slate is running a brief montage about rebuilding public libraries, asking “What sort of public library does the “digital world” of Google, Wikipedia, and Kindle require?” This is right along track with a dialogue some of my colleagues have been having with the UW-Madison libraries as we also consider what the “library of the future” might look like. Rather than a warehouse of books, many see libraries as a re-emerging community space. I’m sympathetic to this view, but at the same time, there are elements of the library of the past that are worth keeping around:

Library at Copenhagen University