3pm in the Library: Thoughts of a Media & Technology Specialist

Some days I’m really into the library shelves. I think it comes from my hobby of music collection: exploring history, investigating ideas. However, my tech-enabled futurist mindset sees a not-so-distant future when our school library will go the way of Blockbuster (startups like Oysterbooks.com are already sealing this fate). At that time, my best hope is that I get to keep my real estate in this building and it begins to take the shape of Slugline (shout out to all the House of Cards fans)Minimalist furniture designs, bean bag chairs, book “space” overtakes book shelves. I’m pretty sure this is exactly what The Third Teacher was referencing about interior design in the 21st century.
 When the publishers (and their calvary of educational sales reps) come with their eBook library subscriptions, and as more schools embrace 1:1 programs that allow not only personal reading collections, but teachers copious amounts of data and sexy pie and bar charts about students reading levels and consumption data, the pro/con chart on whether we need to have ALL these books shall be horrendously overloaded. I mean, maybe the picture books will stay, and we could argue for the bestsellers, but when that day comes…it’s peace to this Dewey Decimal system and welcome to the new, improved Amazon book recommendation engine. 
And this becomes my conflict because I really love the Slugline Library but I’m not sure if I’ll have a desk there.