The Cultural Legacy of the "Modern Library" for the Future

Abstract

This discussion focuses on the institutional cultures in which library and information science education finds itself. It concentrates on the general idea of the library and its relation to LIS education. It proposes looking at the library in society as an era-specific phenomenon and discusses the library that people know. The article also looks at three principal aspects of modern library that are being challenged by present circumstances. It dwells on factors that LIS education must consider in order to accommodate the new impression of the library. It reveals the change of modern libraries in three different aspects: its view that its chief cultural legacy lies in the social organization it created, its adoption of heterogeneous normative target populations as a basis for its work, and its dependence on government funding.