Envisioning alternative futures

Some of the trends influencing the future directions of library services seem so inexorable and so emphatic that it might be easy to assume that they affect all libraries around the world in much the same way. Google, as perhaps the most obvious of examples, is now the most recognizable of global brands and not surprisingly is assumed, in consequence, to be having a major impact on the future of library services everywhere.

In a broad sense, this assumption may well be correct. Global trends in the use of information are inevitably influencing both the type of services which libraries offer and the way in which they offer them, so that we have begun to see a redefinition of what a library actually is. One expression of this, for example, has been in the prominent development of the ‘learning commons’ in Western academic libraries, where traditional stack runs and study furniture have given way to spaces intended to promote and encourage a more interactive, collaborative and online learning environment (JISC, 2006). Elsewhere in this book, colleagues discuss the impact of this and other such forces and trends, be they the dominance of Google, the rise of content creation and knowledge management, or the changing role of the information professional.

However, is there a ‘one size fits all’ future for libraries around the world? The aim of this chapter is to adopt a slightly different stance on the future of the academic library, by suggesting that alternative futures exist, depending on where in the world you happen to be. While indeed Western libraries are contending with the impacts of ‘Googlization’ (Miller and Pellen, 2009) and the behaviours of new generations of information users (Oblinger and Oblinger, 2005), along with many other issues, libraries in less developed parts of the world are often dealing with a different set of challenges and are, in many respects, some distance behind their Western counterparts. To envisage library futures from an Asian perspective, for example, we need to conceptually accommodate issues such as Asia's vast and diverse geography, its immense variety of cultures, languages and rates of social and economic development, its levels of infrastructure and its political systems.