Pauley

This article provided a good, brief overview of library history, and while I appreciated getting so much history in so few pages, I was a little disappointed that it started so... now. Even libraries from the 1800s sounded familiar enough in their broad outlines that it made me wonder how Renaissance, Medieval, and ancient libraries differed. I suppose I should go see what Wikipedia has to say about "Alexandria".

Something that hadn't occurred to me, and I'm a little embarrassed that it hadn't, is that introducing technology into a library doesn't come without a cost -- the cost being time and money. Budgets for both of those resources are finite, and "supplementing" a library's reference service with email, chat, or web-based options risks "reducing services to those without computers". It seems as though there would be ways to get the best of both.