ABSTRACT
There are a hundred different scenarios for the future of libraries and more of them turn up every day. Suffice it to say that libraries are in turmoil, transition, and/or trouble. It is important to begin by speaking about predictions for the next millennium since there are now only four years until the second millennium is reached. Since it is difficult to be a seer, the quotations will come from others more farseeing:
It is no longer a surrealistic fancy to see hundreds of millions of students, readers, professionals, researchers sitting in their private rooms or offices with their equipment, linked up to an encompassing and sophisticated system which will feed and project onto a screen any book, any article, any document. It will take one button pressed, one code impressed. And whatever one wants to look at or read will appear in its full panoply, down to the minutest detail. Every home, every office, every individual will be an automatic extension of the next century’s “Library of World Congress” or “Bibliotheque Internationale.” (Talat S. Halman, NYU Professor of Near Eastern Laws and Literature) 1
The printing press, the radio, television. And now emerges a new mutant technology which will combine and surpass all of these. It will enable five billion very individual human beings to have a single congruent view of human nature and existence. Able to live in Seattle and work in Singapore. Able to spend three thousand dollars and have access to 90% of the accumulated knowledge of humanity. (Steven Barnes, writer) 2
