In this post, Lorcan Dempsey points to an author who complains about the demise of the influence of the humanities, and he suggests that the new literacy should be based on understanding mathematics, music and architecture: Lorcan Dempsey's weblog: QOTD: A new literacy?. As seems to be typical for me, this doesn't really pique my interest in learning about the demise of the influence of the humanities, even though by definition I am a humanist, studying a field in the humanities; rather, it occurs to me that the idea of architecting the future of libraries could be a stronger focus of my research. I have been including this angle for a long time (well, what is a long time when you just started school 5 months ago...), but really, maybe it's more important than just an angle. Maybe buildings will speak louder than words in answering the question of what we expect of libraries in 30 years. No doubt, I'll probably discover that too much has already been written on this subject, so I'll go on to something else, but it would make a much more interesting study than other things I've thought about.
Maybe I would find that people are spending millions of dollars of public money on a fantasy, without any clear idea about what kind of physical space will be needed to fulfill the social policy of providing a shared resource for the community served by the building. It's not at all unlikely that we could get away with that kind of thing. On the other hand, maybe I'll find, well, that's just the point. What will I find?
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