When civilization decays, books and the preservation of knowledge are the first abandoned as neighbor turns against neighbor to survive. The future of the library has entered the discussion as the digitization of knowledge makes greater inroads worldwide. Arguments against the continuance of the library suggest that physical knowledge can be lost forever if measures are not taken for its actual preservation. Once something is digitized and stored somewhere in cyberspace, it acquires a form of eternality provided if future generations are capable of accessing the same resources. No matter how much modernity is had, humans develop a natural desire to feel grounded in something. This is where libraries enter the sociocultural spectrum. One writer experiences the capacity to derive inspiration from the physical compilation of books from his or her authorship.
An inner compulsion to write culminates at the onset of an intellectual inspiration. It therefore becomes crucial to revisit the reality that people are not made by places but places are made by the people that shape them. There are however environmental imperatives that affect the development of human character. A library is a repository of knowledge that ideally should be utilized as a center of communal enrichment. Digitization has desensitized us to the scarcity of knowledge. Vanity has taken precedence by insinuating that knowledge, by virtue of its sheer abundance, will always be there ready for the taking. Such a demeanor has inspired a cultural reticence from learning which transcends cultures and the borders that define them. A great deal of imaginative conjecture surrounds notions supporting the library of the future, but how can society save the establishment of the library from institutional abandonment?
As technology beckons modernization, books will be traded for tablet devices as digitization acquires greater means and methods of normalization. This should not imply that a balance cannot be struck between the best of both worlds. A free society is defined by its ability to exchange ideas and the library is a direct attestation to that. The physical reduction of books should never alter the existential purpose of the library as a community’s local repository of knowledge.
The physical world revisits the irreplaceability of ideas which makes a cultured appreciation of the former possible and not irreducible to anything less.
The heartbreaking tale of the Detroit Public Library’s Mark Twain branch
-Image is Courtesy of Melville House-