Just as the prognosticators’ in my employer’s trade magazines 40 years ago predicted the death of the movie theater industry, prognosticators are currently predicting the death of the library. Until recently, the same voices were predicting the death of the book, but the reversal of fortune of the eBook industry has quieted those calls. The book and the library will survive into the foreseeable future, but both will experience continued and rapid changes. The historical interplay between the book and the library will continue and will be subjected to change at an increasingly rapid rate in their coexistence. This shouldn’t be news to anyone. The same interplay between technology and human institutions is occurring throughout the industrial and information-based society.
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