Libraries have played a very important role in the preservation of numerous historical figures and scholars from all over the world. Leonardo Da Vinci’s works were a collection of over 5,000 works including drawings, sketchings, and paintings. Da Vinci’s works were preserved by being held and transferred between multiple libraries around the world. Libraries ultimately allowed Da Vinci’s manuscripts to be available to the world. The role of the library was meant to be a collection of lecterns with books chained to them. This was mostly because of the high costs of books at the time. This ultimately changed with the help of Johann Gutenberg and his invention of the printing press. Another major figure in the evolution if libraries was Andrew Carnegie. Andrew Carnegie gave the funding for 2,509 libraries around the world. Libraries are about to undergo another stage in their evolution. This is mainly caused by ten major trends. The first one is the evolving forms of communication and the fact that we have not yet found the ultimate form of communication. The second trend is the constant replacement of older technology with newer technology. The third trend is the fact that our society has not yet achieved the smallest form of particle storage. The fourth trend is that search technology while become increasingly more confusing with the advancement in the amount of information that we can access on the Internet. The fifth trend is that we have over time began to compress our time, which ultimately affects what time frame that we choose to access the media sources provided to us by the library. The sixth trend is that we are slowly moving towards a more verbal society in which we will begin to see technology with more of a human feel to them. The seventh and eighth trends both deal with the demand for global information as well as the advancement in global systems. The ninth trend involves the fact that we will transition into an experience-based economy because of our current economic situation. The final trend involves the transition for libraries to become a center of culture rather than a center of information.
I think that this is truly incredible because I think that libraries will eventually become a place that people will look forward to going to instead of dreading being there. I also believe that people will begin to spend time more frequently there because of their want to be there, not the necessity of them being there. I hope that his influx of newer technologies will change the current form of libraries into something truly spectacular. I also believe that this change needs to happen soon and that the government needs to create and incredible library that is almost futuristic in its design in order to start the trend towards newer and hopefully better libraries.
