Climate for the World We Want

By Barbara Fister. Librarians love to talk about technology when they talk about the future. One narrative is that the future will be fabulously liberating because everyone will be connected and creative and we won’t be beholden to stodgy old gatekeepers; we’ll all be creative entrepreneurs. Another is a fear narrative about how the future will be without libraries unless we take immediate steps to change radically in some preferred way. And there’s a third position, more common among non-librarians, that the library was a glorious thing until barbarians threw out the books to make room for computers. Read more...