How the New York Public Library Is Reinventing Itself

[Commentary] The future of libraries now has a very long history. Like all futures, it’s a moving target, changing as new experiences, expectations, and technologies change our sense of what’s possible. When the main branch of the New York Public Library opened on Fifth Avenue in 1911, it was a state-of-the-art futurist landmark, with pneumatic tubes zipping call slips to librarians who retrieved bound titles from enormous steel stacks and placed them on Ferris-wheel conveyor belts. Today, the building has been a historical landmark for 50 years, the tubes retired, the stacks empty. Yesterday’s futures become today’s nostalgic baseline.

In its own way, the mission is all very traditional. Collect and preserve original materials; make them available to researchers and the public; both serve and draw on your membership and community. And just as the Web has become increasingly not just mainstream but central to many of our lives, the projects by teams like NYPL Labs may still be experimental but less R&D than central to the basic proposition of what a library is in the 21st century. Every day, the future becomes the present, just before it disappears altogether.

[Tim Carmody is a reporter and recovering academic who writes about technology and media]