Library of the future

Almost all science fiction books about the future, written before the widespread use of computers, now look unreliable. Even the story “Waves Quench the Wind,” published in 1988, evokes this feeling. Spaceships roam the expanses of the Universe, and COMCON-2, meanwhile, continues to print the results of its calculations on paper tapes. There are almost no paper documents left; who will remember them at the end of the 22nd century?

Now, when discussing the future, everyone talks only about computers, the Internet and virtual reality. Basically, the debate is about which elements of our life today will disappear as unnecessary. Some futurists even say that remote work and remote entertainment will lead to the loss of the need to live in cities. Architects, however, are not worried - the city has too many functions, and the Internet cannot yet reduce the need for all of them. But, for example, it’s very easy to believe in the disappearance of paper books: even today’s electronic readers have a lot of advantages that generally compensate for the lost pleasure of turning pages. And if bookstores will still survive for some time (although people will come there not for the text, but for its design), then libraries are already dying out.

At least that's what I thought. In fact, already now we have to use libraries at most a couple of times a year - when it is impossible to do without some book or article, and at the same time for some reason it is not possible to buy or download it. The most popular library in my life was in the village of Borisovka, Belgorod region: summer practice does not involve reading from a screen or stocking up on books for a whole month. Modern students, I think, are already solving this problem with the help of e-books.

But recently it became clear that libraries will not disappear after all. They will simply change. Whereas previously they provided information that was not available anywhere else, they now provide a comfortable place to work and live. And in this the modern library has no equal.

Of course, they will immediately tell me that it has always been this way. This is true, but not for all people - rather, for a small part of them. Many people are prone to social anxiety and feel uncomfortable asking a librarian for a book. To work, you often need books and a computer at the same time, and ideally your own laptop. After all, not everyone is comfortable reading while sitting at a desk.

All these (and many other) problems of the spoiled reader are solved in the Russian State Library for Youth. After renovation, it turned into the best place in Moscow: you really want to hang around there all day long.

It's convenient to work there. Local books are tagged with electronic beacons, so no one worries about them getting mixed up with the visitor's books. There are not only local computers, but also Wi-Fi. If it turns out that you need to take another book, you can just go to the shelf, you don’t need to ask anyone.

It's great to have fun there. Books can be read not only while sitting at the table, but also curled up in a chair. You can also listen to music (with headphones) and play board games.

The library, naturally, is aimed more at schoolchildren (and contains enough textbooks to prepare for the university exam). The selection of adult scientific literature there is still strange, there are no popular science books in the “Elements” series at all, and serious medical textbooks are adjacent to the “blood type diet.” But these are all trifles: a modern library, by and large, is needed not so much for searching for information, but for its comfortable development. And here the RGBM is still out of competition - unfortunately. It would be better, of course, if there were many such libraries.