“There are two economies: the economy of scarcity, which is the physical world, and the economy of abundance, which is the digital world. Everything in the physical world gets more expensive and scarcer, while everything in the digital world gets more abundant and cheaper. So there’s a huge imperative, both in terms of economies and choice, to shift things to digital, and then once they become digital – once they’re in that deflationary world – they inevitably become free. Physical world things are going to get more expensive over time – I don’t just mean monetary cost, I mean also their externalities: carbon costs, ecological costs, everything else is going to become more expensive. Therefore, there is going to be a strong drive to shift from the inflationary to the deflationary economy, to make things digital if at all possible….

…I was recently in Seattle and had the chance to walk through OMA’s Seattle Public Library again. That’s a pretty good example of getting the balance right between abundance and scarcity. I think its profound that on the first floor, in the largest communal space, there are no books. The library is simply a place with portals into the world of abundance.”

For me, this speaks not only to architectural innovations but it also justifies the digital initiatives ‘labs’ trend that is appearing in some public libraries, like NYPL or DCPL. It also speaks to the fact that evaluating success by collecting materials circulation statistics is insufficient in this changing landscape. A more accurate means of evaluating success would be a combination of circulations stats, door count, wireless usage stats, web traffic stats, and presence in the social graph.

An example of an ideal library program used to be “do an arts and crafts project, and set up a book display of books related to that craft for the patrons to check out”.

Now an ideal library program becomes “do an arts and crafts project, and set up a book display of books related to that craft for the patrons to check out, and then create a gallery of the crafts people made on Flickr”.

That’s right folks, now we’ve got MORE work to do!