An interesting photo essay in the online magazine Slate explores the question of how to build a public library in the age of Google, Wikipedia, and Kindle. The grand old reading rooms and stacks of past civic monuments are giving way to a new library-as-urban-hangout concept, as evidenced by Seattle's Starbucks-meets-mega-bookstore central library and Salt Lake City's shop-lined education mall.
What will future libraries look like? The Extinction Timeline at http://www.rossdawsonblog.com/weblog/archives/2007/10/extinction_time.html already predicts the death of traditional libraries as we know them by 2019 A.D.
You can read the "How to Build a Library" article at http://www.slate.com/id/2184927/slideshow/2184934/.
