Friday, March 15, 2013

If you build it they will come

Here's a great article from the New Republic about the future of libraries and library architecture that reflects the changing relationship between people and libraries.

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Libraries, Makerspaces, and Cory Doctorow

Follow this link to a great post at the Raincoast Books Blog by author Cory Doctorow defending libraries and offering some really exciting suggestions for the future of libraries as makerspaces.  I especially liked this:

"That is to say that society has never needed its librarians, and its libraries, more. The major life-skill of the information age is information literacy, and no one's better at that than librarians. It's what they train for. It's what they live for."

and this:

"Damn right libraries shouldn't be book-lined Internet cafes. They should be book-lined, computer-filled information-dojos where communities come together to teach each other black-belt information literacy, where initiates work alongside noviates to show them how to master the tools of the networked age from the bare metal up."

Doctorow makes a great argument for libraries to create makerspaces and help people bridge the digital divide.