The future of the public library

On Saturday night, lauren and I walked passed the Boston Public Library. For those of you that haven’t been to the BPL, it’s simply beautiful.

We got into talking about the future of libraries in a world of iphones, kindles, blackberries, netbooks, wifi, mifi, etc.

And I’m not sure I’ve come a conclusion yet. Last night I thought about it again outloud on twitter.

I got back a bunch of responses:

I’m not ready to write off our public libraries just yet. They are an important part of the community. But their future needs to be defined. Or they will become museums.

And that would be a shame.