Michael Lascarides is the manager of the National Library Online team at the National Library of New Zealand in Wellington. Prior to joining the NLNZ, he managed the web team at the New York Public Library, arriving in library-land after a decade in the for-profit world. He is the author of Next-Gen Library Redesign (2011, ALA Press) and a contributor to Crowdsourcing Our Cultural Heritage (2014, Ashgate Press, edited by Mia Ridge). 

 

Presentation: AND, not OR: Shaping the library experience for the Everything Future.  

 

"It is an axiom in cultural evolution that technologies once invented are never uninvented." -- Kevin Kelly.

 

Within a generation, digital technologies have turned information from something relatively scarce into something so abundant that some of the biggest companies in the world are the ones who purport to help us sift through it. This shift from scarcity to abundance has made libraries more important to the communities they serve than ever, while redefining where those communities begin and end. This talk will explore what happens when we have it all: Patrons in our reading rooms and on the other side of the globe; books and e-books; deep research on paper and the internet—and how our collections and services must be designed for this world, and how we can do so without leaving anyone behind.