In Rick Anderson's article "Away from the “icebergs”" he said that his library has had a 55% drop in circulation over the last 12 years, because of easy access to information because of the Internet. I don't know about ACL libraries over the same period but it seems that circulation has been up over the last few years (2008 in particular)and that there were vast numbers of patrons entering our libraries and taking out books.
Most people coming into our library still expect to want to take out books and read them at home. They also want to and need to speak to humans and many particularly the baby boomers and the silent generation demand this and don't have any interest in the Internet or other media for example: audio books. This is just my experience of my community library. We also have many patrons using the library just for the free Internet.
It would seem that if children are taken to libraries regularly they will pick up a love of books and also the physicality of books. I attended a customer service course through Auckland City Libraries last year and the teacher explained that the biggest users of libraries today is generation X, as they are raising families and introducing their kids to libraries at the moment. At my library this is definitely the case. Perhaps when generation Y grow up and have children they wont be coming into libraries as often as they will all have their own portable devices such as the ibook that will be able to download books and they will be so acclimatised to these new technologies that they will not crave the physical nature of books. There probably will not be physical libraries at all in the future and everything will be online, we will only exist as a virtual library where the public will download any book for free. Actually once libraries close and go online, books will cease to exist and there will only be blogs. People will still be required to pay for a new fiction "book" by either signing up to the authors or publishers blogs and paying for subscriptions. However I can see writers losing out financially in the same way the music and movie industry are losing out financially today with the rise of illegal downloading.
Overall there are many benefits to Web 2.0 (instant access to information) but of course there are many downsides especially to people like myself who love holding and reading real books and visiting libraries. In Dr. Wendy Schultz's article "Infinite Futures" she states that "Libraries are not merely in communities, they are communities: they preserve and promote community memories" this is why many of our patrons come into our library and they would lose their community if libraries were online.
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Hi Blackcat
ReplyDeleteWell done you have had an excellent look at Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 :-0