Reading 3

**Sorry, I posted the wrong thing yesterday!

Mallory Phillips
October 9, 2009
Reading #3
The Future of Libraries
http://www.futuristspeaker.com/2006/11/the-future-of-libraries/

Libraries played a huge role in helping preserve Leonardo da Vinci’s collections of art. Without libraries, this collection would have been ruined. The role of libraries in the past was pretty much just to house books, manuscripts, art and important documents. These books and other things used to be scarce and hard to find, but now they are readily available. This article puts together ten trends that are affecting libraries generations to come. The first trend takes a look at the continually changing communication systems. This article states that there is no way to know the ultimate form of communication, but they bet that it will not be reading and writing books. The second trend predicts that all technology that we have today will end and be replaces by something else. Trend three talks about reaching the ultimate storage particle. The fourth trend predicts that search engines will become much more difficult. They say that searches will become much more specific, and therefore can cause complications. Trend five talks about time changing the lifestyle of people who use libraries, and basically we have more needs. The sixth trend predicts that overtime we will be transitioning to a verbal society and that there will be no more keyboards. Trend number seven states that the demand for global information is growing exponentially and that we need to learn and understand other cultures to prepare ourselves for these global societies. The eighth trend says that a stage is being set for future global systems. Trend nine believes that we are changing from a product-based economy to an experienced based economy. Last but not least, the tenth trend predicts that libraries will change from a center of information to a center of culture.
I can see some of these trends actually happening in the future. The main trends that I can fully agree with are one, two, and six. Communication is continually changing and getting more and more advanced. I do not think that books will ever be completely removed, but I feel that they will not be as popular with more advanced things being invented. Some technology, such as cell phones, will never be extinct. Cell phone appearance and what they can do are constantly changing, but no matter how much they change, they still do pretty much the same things. I agree with the sixth trend because when I was in high school, in my digital communications class, we “talked” into our computers, not typed. Everything that we spoke was “keyed” into the computer.