Libraries in the Information Society

This book is an attempt to bring together works related to the changing role of the library as a social institution in the emerging Information Society, which were prepared by IFLA participants during 1998-2000. The present collection offers articles written by library and information specialists in different parts of the globe- Africa (Namibia), both Americas (Canada, Mexico, USA), ASIA (China,India,Korea), Australia, Europe (Russia, United Kingdom). Its thematic scope ranges from conceptual considerations on Knowledge Economy/ Society to purely practical issues of library management and sustainability in a transforming socio-cultural environment. This approach allows to present both wide geographic and broad problematic scope, which hopefully will be of interest to many library workers and decision makers all over the world. In this book libraries are looked at from different perspectives: - Institutions, which mobilize information and knowledge for social and economic development; - New windows of what electronic advances offer to people, including those with physical disabilities; - Knowledge servers providing knowledge interface to people, consolidating information and networking global knowledge; - Parts of information networks and new partnerships to be established to better serve the modern user's needs. - Gateways for information, tools to bridge digital divide - both within countries and between countries. - Treasure-houses of human knowledge, which participate in knowledge innovation, and become an important link in the knowledge innovation chain; - Brokers that will help make local and indigenous content available on the global information infrastructure; - Institutions, which can successfully deal with diversity-cultural, linguistic, and growing diversity of information resources. These are many, but not all roles the libraries can play in the changing society to ensure that they are not superseded by other players. To ensure this, libraries have to evolve from institutions to conservate and to provide access to a patrimony towards an inalienable part of a distributed global knowledge warehouse, to become service oriented rather than collection building oriented, to analyzed and use ICT and marketing techniques that can be harmoniously combined to make the library an institution heavily demanded by the Information Society. This is what all works presented in this collection deal with in their authors' hope to be of real use to the library community.