Library meeting offers opportunity

On Wednesday night this week, Oct. 3, Lewes Public Library is hosting Roger Levien, one of the nation's foremost authorities on libraries and evolving technologies. At the library starting at 7 p.m., Levien will provide an overview of the challenges faced by library planners.

In our rapidly evolving electronic culture, when it comes to technology, few areas are impacted as greatly as education and libraries. When people walk around with smartphones in their pockets that hold dozens of books, online classes and access to tons of information, how do school and library professionals plan their facilities for the future? What should they look like and what role should they play in our communities?

That question is very much on the mind of Lewes Public Library officials as they go about deciding what their community library facilities should look like as they plan for serving one of the state's fastest-growing areas over the next 30 years.

The library of the 20th century, with its rows of stacks loaded with books, is giving way to a more mixed-use facility where stacks are interspersed with computer alcoves busy with people emailing family and friends, applying for jobs, accessing government forms and tracking answers to health-related questions.

Classrooms surround the stacks and computers where people learn how to use new technologies and share information and ideas with one another in a community-center setting. In some of those rooms, users are finding access to the kind of videoconferencing hardware and software unaffordable in home settings.

To that extent, libraries are changing rapidly. In a more fundamental sense, however, libraries continue to play the same role they have played since Alexander the Great set up one of the first publicly accessible libraries centuries ago. Libraries then, now and in the future are places of equity and access. Everyone is equal and welcome in them, and all have access to reliable information and information services. That kind of access and information leads to good decisions.

Wednesday night's public meeting reflects that thinking and offers a good opportunity for people to be involved with the future of their library.