Libraries and Learning

Libraries are social agencies. They exist to serve certain specific needs in our society. Changes in the environment in which libraries operate—in the technological infrastructure through which we deliver services, in the economic substrate that finances operations, in the social landscape that defines the communities that libraries serve—dictate corresponding changes in the way libraries structure and deliver services. One additional change in our environment—our emerging understanding of the nature of learning and the way learning interacts with other aspects of our environment—is likely to result in an even more rapid change in the coming decade.