“Where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives:” What a future library really looks like.

Abstract

In the notably bad 1959 film, Plan 9 from Outer Space, filmmaker Ed Wood, Jr. opened with Criswell making the prophetic statement: “We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future.” For many of us, including Criswell, the future is far off towards the distant horizon. We’ve talked in library circles about things such as Google glass, drones, self-driving cars, 3D printers, etc, but our core work has not really changed in libraries. And while we have looked at the future in regards to new things that we will be dealing with, the real reality is that the future will be driven not by what we gain, but by what we lose. What we lose might be space, collections, people, and services.

For us at Kresge Library, the future was a good deal closer than we wanted, and arrived with gale-force winds. As part of a major construction project, the library lost both its collection space and student space. During the summer of 2014, the print collection went from around 70K items to around 200. That is 200….two hundred...a two and two zeros…. What we have been able to retain are our services, but they have been altered with the change in resources. In this presentation, Corey will share the news from Kresge and how they adapted from a full service library to a service unit. He will share the concept of the “ethereal library” and the service mantra that allowed the unit to move forward when the books and student space were removed.