BOROUGH OF ROSELLE BOARD OF EDUCATION

The librarian would need to be multi-skilled, understanding the diverse needs of different age groups, ethnicities, community groups - engagement with the community would be primary. The library in this future would model what it meant to be civilized: deep and diverse democracy!

In a third scenario, the library and the librarian becomes a "Knowledge Navigator". Users would see and then create – use information to create new knowledge, new communities, learn and recreate. Libraries would be a hybrid of physical and virtual space with cutting edge technologies, cultural maps of the world, to help users develop their interests, find connection to each other and find their place in the changing digital world. The library would be an ‘experience’.

For those new to the digital world and for emerging technologies they would , it could train them, ensuring democratic and enabling access for all; for those adept, it would create games for them to learn, indeed, gaming may become a metaphor for the library. Users would find their knowledge treasures through clues left by the knowledge navigator or other users engaged in knowledge sharing and production – the division between the fun of electronic gaming and the seriousness of the library would breakdown. Public space would became an open and porous, local and global public space.

The last scenario, takes the knowledge navigator future but makes the tough observation - given the billions of dollars Google and other web engines have to play with, and given the skill sets of their employees and owners, what makes us think libraries can survive. Aren't they the "Dinosaurs of the Digital Knowledge Era". The globalization of the coffee shop eats up one market; digital search portals eat up another market, until through continuous dis-aggregation there is very little left. The future of the library is easy to predict – there won't be any. Funding will move to other core areas for cities – traffic, water, dealing with global warming, competing for young people in an aging society; post-oil energy problems. Libraries will slip down the priority radar as they will not be seen as a response to these issues.

Many librarians as well are unable to meet the challenge of the skills shift. They are unable to be relevant with the new world dis-order. As the library monopoly dies, other competitors enter the fray and foundationally change the nature of the library. A few survive as some still want to see and touch books, but with the virtual book about to include physical senses, the writing is already on the virtual wall.

• WHICH FUTURE?
• Will one future emerge triumphant? Or will there be a mix and match? Which ever future results, for the librarian, this can be both a trying time to be working, or the best of all possible times, where new futures are emerging, and where she and he can weave the strands of alternatives and create a new future for and of libraries.
• Will libraries becoming increasingly virtual, the librarian becoming a knowledge navigator? Or will libraries disappear as the world goes wifi – will Google become the future library? Or will place remain central, as libraries become anchor tenants in co-located in commercial and public transit-orientated developments? Or is social justice what libraries are really about – a place for empowering, for creating a better society, finding spaces for young and old, for books and digital media?

The library, while appearing to be stable has changed throughout history. It has moved from being elite based, for the few that could read, to being a public space, and funded by the public has well, instead of by wealthy benefactors. And while the advent of the printing press changed the nature of the library, moving it from the monastery and the painstaking efforts of monk scribes, the recent digitalization of the world is leading to even more dramatic transformations.

• The library has entered a contested domain – its definition, its bundle of services are up for grabs – who defines it, who pays for it, what are its basic purposes. And with the onset of edu-tainment and as the peer-to-peer knowledge revolution, might libraries become places not just for receiving knowledge but for directly creating knowledge.
• Other issues that challenge a stable future for libraries include: