Will Libraries Outlast the Internet?

Hannah Furness, Arts Correspondent at the Telegraph, reports that the Director of the British Library Roly Keating thinks this could be the case. In a nice piece on the future of libraries Keating says the following:

“I was surprised, and continue to be, how many smart people ask me in all seriousness ‘do we really still need these library things in this age of smart phones, search engines’ and so on? … Our commercial partners in the information delivery space do wonderful things and we couldn’t live our lives without them. But the time frame we think on, centuries back and centuries into the future, allows us to think about trust in its highest sense, and authentication and provenance of information, and digital information in particular. Those are hard-won privileges and values and they’re worth defending. With all our fascination of and love for the internet in the age of data, these values and the values and idea of the library pre-dated the internet and if we get it right may yet outlast it.”

What about law libraries? There’s an interesting collection of articles in the recent issue of Law Library Journal that consider the state and future of law libraries.

• Legal Education in Crisis, and Why Law Libraries Are Doomed / James G. Milles
• Like Mark Twain: The Death of Academic Law Libraries Is an Exaggeration / Kenneth J. Hirsh
• Valé Bunny Watson?: Law Librarians, Law Libraries, and Legal Research in the Post-Internet Era /
  Terry Hutchinson

I’ll leave it to you to form your own conclusions …