After reading this week's article on the future of libraries, I certainly feel more excited about the way in which they're evolving. Being a lifelong library-goer, I have often feared for the fate of libraries, especially in smaller towns. I had always envisioned them as becoming one and the same with community centers, but hadn't considered them as a wealth of solely (or primarily) electronic knowledge. I have noticed that in times of unemployment or unstable economic times they become a haven for many job hunters who lack basic resources at home.

As someone who finds things like the Kindle kind of scary, though, I'm hoping to expand my notions of what a "library" means. I'm also wondering if there's a way for the "shushing ladies, dank smell and endless shelves" to coexist with the land of books that many people still love? And would such a transition happen smoothly, or does there have to be a conscious and continued effort to revolutionize these institutions? I am thinking some of the best precedents or examples of such a movement are definitely college and university prototypes (which happens to be my entire group), many of which have started to include multimedia centers and all sorts of different library combinations.