This article is part of Future Tense, a collaboration among Arizona State University, New America, and Slate. On Thursday, Nov. 12, Future Tense will host an event in Washington, D.C., on the future of the library. For more information and to RSVP, visit the New America website.
The future of libraries now has a very long history. Like all futures, it’s a moving target, changing as new experiences, expectations, and technologies change our sense of what’s possible. When the main branch of the New York Public Library opened on Fifth Avenue in 1911, it was a state-of-the-art futurist landmark, with pneumatic tubes zipping call slips to librarians who retrieved bound titles from enormous steel stacks and placed them on Ferris-wheel conveyor belts. Today, the building has been a historical landmark for 50 years, the tubes retired, the stacks empty. Yesterday’s futures become today’s nostalgic baseline.
Even in this century, you can track visions of the future of libraries year by year, like archeological layers that tell you as much or more about the circumstances in which they were created as they do the years to come. Let’s stay with the New York Public Library as an example. In 2004, the NYPL was one of the initial partners in the massive book-scanning project that became Google Books. In 2005, the library launched a site called Digital Gallery, with 275,000 images from its archives.
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