The future of libraries

What shape does the future of libraries assume in our digital age, particularly in light of the profound rupture already inaugurated by artificial intelligence? If people continue to read, yet do so on a screen from their homes, and if they seek answers to their questions by turning to AI, do libraries—those temples of knowledge and memory—not inevitably risk being reduced to mere repositories of books, whether printed or digital, and to institutions devoted primarily to the provision of digital services? In the collective imagination, libraries are inseparable from the reading room, the space in which the solitary act of reading and study is performed in the presence of others. What meaning, then, can a library retain when its reading rooms stand empty? Might libraries today, as spaces of free inquiry, also be confronted with another threat—this time a political one—manifested in the expulsion and exile of certain books from their shelves, as we see occurring in a number of libraries across the United States?