What should libraries do to become relevant in the digital age?

Seth Godin wonders What should libraries do to become relevant in the digital age? His proposal: train people to take intellectual initiative.

Once again, the net turns things upside down. The information is free now. No need to pool tax money to buy reference books. What we need to spend the money on are leaders, sherpas and teachers who will push everyone from kids to seniors to get very aggressive in finding and using information and in connecting with and leading others.

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I love this BS

Everytime I turn around someone is questioning the relevance of books or libraries in the "digital age". Come on folks the highest grossing movies in the past decade have been largely based on books.....books that by and large were sold not as kindleware but as good old fashioned paper and glue books. Videogames are another "digital age" invention that was supposed to doom books and reading but some of the most popular books out there have videogame tie ins that are in NO way as good as the books they were based on....my nephew played the Harry POtter games when they came out and low and behold he hated pretty much all of them as they didn't include enough of the "stuff from the books". The same comment came with the Lord of the Rings games and movies, the Narnia movies, the His Dark Materials movie(s) and the list goes on.

Enough with the BS about the death of libraries and reading....you all have been crying wolf on this for the past 20 years and instead I see kids reading more not less, library circulation up not down and and more kids and adults at programs year in and year out.......Digital Age be damned the question of relevance has been long ago been answered and debunked. Long live the book! Long live Public Libraries!

Casey

Future of libraries!

It's likely to take half a century for the digital age to threaten libraries here in Africa. It is only now that for most of the African countries the literacy rate is climbing above 50% mark. In some places even a book is hard to come by leave alone the internet, which if available is very slow , so how can we think of parting with the book? For now and and few decades to come the book will be the most available source of information

Stephen
Uganda- MEMD

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