Librarians do play a key role in providing assistance and services to students and professors, and much of that should not be lost. However, their roles can also benefit from a lessening of the chores required to maintain an expansive “physical plant” of books and shelf space. Hopefully, the digitization of our libraries would accomplish this, and make their interactive roles that much more meaningful and effective.

Obviously, the solution is somewhere between an unchanged library system, and a building razed to the ground and replaced with a few web kiosks in a franchised storefront space.