Director’s Blog: Who needs libraries?

The link below will take you to a 28-minute radio program on Soundprint titled “Who Needs Libraries?”  It’s a good question, especially now that eBooks have become popular, accessible, and affordable (free in the case of the classics.)  Are books going to go away?  Will we stop having community libraries?  Book publishers and libraries have weathered this particular storm before; and librarians are always very adaptable to new technologies: librarians have been around a long time, and even the book was a new technology to us once.

Link to the program here from SoundPrint.  The format is in RealAudio media.  If you don’t have this program (or your computer can’t read .ram files) you can download it on the Soundprint site.  The MP3 file format is here.

Program description:

“As more and more information is available on-line, as Amazon rolls out new software that allows anyone to find any passage in any book, an important question becomes: Who needs libraries anymore? Why does anyone need four walls filled with paper between covers? Surprisingly, they still do and in this program Producer Richard Paul explores why; looking at how university libraries, school libraries and public libraries have adapted to the new information world. The  program [linked to below is] part of an ongoing [NPR] series on education and technology, and is funded in part by the U.S. Department of Education.”

Print PDF