Interesting read but this has happened before and is another case of technological innovation and lack of adaptability. I am a library enthusiast. I advocate for personal/private library of your own and public libraries of your community. I also like the larger private libraries of individuals/organizations who open up to the public and wish more people took advantage of these.
I think libraries are and will always be an integral part of daily life. Right now, the issues seem to be stemmed from the failure of maintenance. And I mean the whole system itself and all related systems. Libraries themselves continue to lower their threshold for what maintenance is upheld- book maintenance, infrastructure maintenance (the handling, filing, recordkeeping, etc.), technological maintenance (many libraries have digitization efforts that have spanned decades but most I've encountered seem to disregard redigitization which is important to gain better quality, OCR capability, and future proofing for better systemization), organizational maintenance (libraries' administrative, legal, etc.)-- since there are a lot of layers and abstractions to these libraries. They are their own ecosystems. Some have become very complicated and hence their organizations have grown. A part of this failure of maintenance is the lack in advocation of stewardship. Libraries should have long-term outlooks and goals and a lot of controversies and issues of recent years seem to really highlight this lack of long-term ability of maintenance with stewardship.
I may be rambling and have shared concerns with my local librarians and IT individuals involved with libraries. I'm curious if anyone else has had similar conclusions.
I think libraries are and will always be an integral part of daily life. Right now, the issues seem to be stemmed from the failure of maintenance. And I mean the whole system itself and all related systems. Libraries themselves continue to lower their threshold for what maintenance is upheld- book maintenance, infrastructure maintenance (the handling, filing, recordkeeping, etc.), technological maintenance (many libraries have digitization efforts that have spanned decades but most I've encountered seem to disregard redigitization which is important to gain better quality, OCR capability, and future proofing for better systemization), organizational maintenance (libraries' administrative, legal, etc.)-- since there are a lot of layers and abstractions to these libraries. They are their own ecosystems. Some have become very complicated and hence their organizations have grown. A part of this failure of maintenance is the lack in advocation of stewardship. Libraries should have long-term outlooks and goals and a lot of controversies and issues of recent years seem to really highlight this lack of long-term ability of maintenance with stewardship.
I may be rambling and have shared concerns with my local librarians and IT individuals involved with libraries. I'm curious if anyone else has had similar conclusions.