There are many new horizons for libraries that come in a wide variety of formats. I find it interesting that libraries are becoming creative spaces. I find it interesting that they can adapt to suit the needs of their community as a free space to become more inventive, but obviously these ideas haven’t been universally adopted. It is the right direction to take libraries, my old home town hasn’t totally adopted the maker model yet.

Realistically I believe spaces such as the creative playful zones described in many of the articles are the right direction to take the space as a community center since all others have been slowly whipped away from our communities. If they focus on creativity they can justify their own existence since people will always need to create or invent something new. If they are making something with value you can show the value inherent in these spaces since people wouldn’t be able to otherwise create these devices with free devices such as the 3d printers some libraries are providing to their patrons. This prevents more conservatively minded people from taking away funding if it merely focuses on fun, which some people wouldn’t want to fund.

Beyond that though if I were to speculate on the future possibilities in a library there are many directions they can take, besides maker spaces. I would love it if anyone could just go into a library to join a community, create something, or just to find a place of comfort, but from a learning perspective one developing technology is the AI that has come into focus recently. As Allison Papini suggested these can be used to, “find keywords on a topic to help improve your searching” however she does point out Google can do that too (2023) . I believe it goes beyond that though as this is just a starting point, as an AI can be hooked up to the resources in a library data base to suggest articles, find specific quotes and reveal the source. This can drastically speed up how research is done, because for me the hardest part of writing an article was always finding a source. I of course believe this shouldn’t be the end of research since it can create a bias as someone can neglect alternatives, but using an AI as a companion can help find counterpoints as well.

Someone must use these technologies responsibly though, especially the artificial intelligence as overly relying on a source such as that without fact checking it can create large gaps in knowledge leading to the destruction of proper understanding. Hopefully this becomes less of a problem in the future, but that just requires training instead of an over reliance on a technology as someone must know how to utilize a deceive to use it effectively which is true for any field.

References-

Geralt. (2018) Artifical Intelligence Network Programming [Photograph]. Pixabay. https://pixabay.com/illustrations/artificial-intelligence-network-3706562/

Papini, A. (2023, January 27). Chatgpt: A library perspective. Bryant University. https://library.bryant.edu/chatgpt-library-perspective