The Modern Library

For most of their history libraries existed because copies were scarce. Keeping the copy safe and lending it out was the whole job. Copies are no longer scarce, and yet libraries are busier than the storage argument can explain. This section is about what they actually do now.

A single building may hold a quiet floor for study, a room booked by a language class, desks used as an office by people with no office, a lending collection of tools or instruments, a makerspace with a laser cutter, and a set of computers that are somebody’s only reliable way online. Behind the shelves sit subscriptions to ebooks, audiobooks, newspapers and databases that a reader borrows without ever coming in.

Start with The Modern Library: More Than Books, which sets out the shift in one piece. From there, Digital Library covers the collections that have no physical address, How Libraries Work explains the machinery that makes any of it findable, and Future of Knowledge asks what changes next.

We describe services in general terms rather than quoting figures we cannot verify. What a library offers depends on its country, its funding and its neighbourhood, and the useful question is not which library is best but what a library can reasonably be.