Los Angeles closes libraries 2 days a week

I just read this long but well-written article: "City of Airheads: Villaraigosa Dismantles L.A.'s Vaunted Library System." Some of its points ...

• The citizens most impacted by reduction of library services are the poor and middle class, many of whom can't afford their own computers and/or Internet access;
  
• Libraries are 'safe places to be' in areas where the streets--anyplace but inside your own home (and, sadly, even there for some)--are dangerous;
• Libraries are important 'levelers,' providing equal educational opportunity for students who need safe places to work on homework and access to 'Net-equipped computers to do the same.

It's interesting to note that the article doesn't mention the benefit of citizens who can't afford to buy their own books to read being able to borrow them from and use them in the public library. Although this is surely the case--and a significant benefit for a number of library users--evidently this writer doesn't think it's worth pointing out here. Why? Because it's just too obvious to be worth the effort?

Perhaps. But I believe it's because the value of public libraries as institutions that give free access to up-to-date, diverse, well-organized collections of books and other printed materials (and personal, one-to-one assistance in finding same) is much less important than it used to be. That importance is continuing to wane, even while libraries' importance for the other reasons the article points out increases--especially during recession. Yes, the retail print industry is still doing well, but increasingly its sales are for ebooks. (In July '10, Wired reported that Amazon is now selling more ebooks for its Kindle than it is hardcovers, though we must remember booksellers' customers are those who can afford to buy their own books (and/or ereaders).

What do people use books for? Basically, research (education or personal-need) and pleasure reading. Having worked as a high school Teacher Librarian for the last twenty years (and as recently as 2010), I can tell you that--with the exception of some academics at universities--virtually no one uses print collections for research anymore; today's high school students (tomorrow's college and or workers) certainly don't. While I suspect the poorer segment of our society tends to read for pleasure less than the wealthier, the former is far more dependent on public library access for pleasure reading. Why doesn't the article point this out? My guess is because it's just not that important: free access to pleasure reading--especially for the poorer segments of our society--is not a priority.

All of which points to what I see as the future of public libraries--and school libraries, if they survive. Libraries will evolve to supervised spaces which house ('Net-connected, of course) large numbers of no-pay-to-use computers (and/or portable devices) and provide access to not only the "free Web" but library-subscribed databases of pay-access-only periodicals, etc. (That access--paid for by the library but free to authenticated patrons--will continue to be extended to patrons using their own computers anyplace in the world.) Libraries will no longer house collections of physical books; instead they will purchase and manage access to ebooks, available to all patrons on a limited-time-use ("checkout") basis through download to not only a computer but also portable ereaders of all stripes (both those focused primarily on reading text, like today's Kindle, or more multipurpose like today's iPad... though the distinction may disappear). The only circulation of physical objects I imagine to be the checkout and checkin of portable ereaders--or perhaps full-on portable computers--with library-paid 'Net access, maybe for in-library use only or possibly to take home for a few weeks.

What happens to the current prodigious book collections of our public libraries? Some--especially popular fiction of low historical research value and nonfiction rapidly aging to irrelevance--will be sold off to private collectors. Others may go to academic libraries. The rest will be either be housed in "archives"--essentially organized warehouses with small reading areas, still perhaps available by special arrangement to the occasional scholarly public individual who wishes to go there to use them (no checkout allowed) or discarded: covers stripped and paper recycled (currently the fate of most public-school outdated textbooks).

Inevitably, this prediction of the future will turn out to be anywhere from slightly to completely wrong. But, as is becoming a sort of tag-line for me it seems, no matter what happens, "It's gonna be interesting."