I’m thinking about Libraries - both literal, physical existing libraries AND conceptual future digital “libraries”.

Especially in the context of my library.json project how can we ensure that a project all about books can funnel value back to libraries?…..

The library of the future

You might be saying to yourself: but aren’t all the libraries already built? What’s the next frontier? This brings us to our final can of worms in this series: What would a public library look like on the internet? This question is so intriguing, yet so complex and nuanced, that many of you had a lot to say on the subject last week in our most engaged Open Thread in months. Some of you thought that anything attempting to replace libraries digitally was inexorably doomed to fail, and others were eager to bring their favorite features of their library — from shushing librarians to storytime — to some corner of their daily digital routine. 

We believe this conversation is just getting started. We did a Library Design Sprint with librarians, designers, and researchers in summer 2020, and we tracked how Brooklyn Public Library went online early in the pandemic in our Terra Incognita project. This is a topic we’re still extremely interested in, and I’m looking forward to revisiting it in future newsletters. If you have a vision for the intersection of technology and libraries, we’d love to hear more about it in the comments, even if you’re not a billionaire.