Libraries in the digital world: On the status renewal

Abstract

The author analyzes the problem of foreign libraries’ changing status in the digital world. During the recent decade of rocketing digitalization of various aspects of social life, the libraries have been demonstrating their ability to solve many complicated sociotechnological problems related to information structure reorganization, introduction of access management models, and improvement of user services. The author focuses on antagonistic interaction of digitalization and democratization processes in the circumstances of global information capitalism: along with commercialization of access to digital content secured by monopolistic providers of scientific databases and substantial digital colonization of the countries with underdeveloped technological infrastructure, the initiatives of open access licensing and “copyleft” system, etc., take place. The experience of libraries MIT (USA) is analyzed where the technological priorities are balanced with the public access to controlled data arrays to secure the high status of libraries in the global digital future. The author examines the emerging digital library paradigm in the process of progressive adaptation to the e-civilizational infrastructure within the concepts “libraries 1.0” (comprising websites, servers, HTML-format, integrated information systems), “libraries 2.0” (social media, blogs, service-oriented platforms, XML, RSS), and “libraries 3.0” (Linked Open Data, personal area networks, cloud storage, sematic web).