The breakup of the old library, Part 3

(Previous posts: #1, #2, #3)

After 20 years of steady but containable erosion of the library's customary position as an institution that controlled everything within itself, the final (and ultimately fatal) blow came in the mid-1990's: The World Wide Web.

As the Web grew from a promising novelty into an ubiquitous part of American life, the traditional structure of the American library made less and less sense:

• Libraries no longer selected all of the content that patrons came to the library to use, and the content they did select was steadily becoming a smaller part of what patrons were coming there to use.
• The content that patrons used within the library could change or disappear without librarians knowing or being able to bring it back.
• The main finding aid for this information was no longer provided by librarians, but by search engines. Attempts to stretch the library catalog to include Internet content had only minor successes.
• Patrons could use library-provided content without ever setting foot in the library.
• The case for intellectual freedom became more complicated as libraries had to move from defending the rights of patrons to access materials selected by trained librarians to defending the right of patrons to access any legal material on the Internet.

In short, patrons were more and more going

the library rather than going

the library. The days of the self-contained and self-controlled library are over. What can replace it? And who can make that replacement succeed?