By ANTHONY GRAFTON [Daily Princetonian] – Instead of offering books, in the first instance, NYPL will offer banks of computers, fast Wi-Fi and lots of places designed for individuals and groups to work together: a big, and probably beautiful, digital commons, with a cafe and circulating collection. The starchitect Norman Foster will design the new spaces. If he does his job well — and he usually does — the new space will attract students and writers and ordinary citizens from all over the city and become a hub of literary,intellectual and social life for a new generation.

Will the new Firestone, with its massive ranks of dead-tree media, attract student readers who have always read on screens? Will the new NYPL keep up its world-class collections of books in dozens of languages — Slavic, Semitic, and African — and the staff of specialists needed to keep finding and cataloguing them — books, most of them, that won’t be available in digital form in the foreseeable future? Will the new Firestone work as social space? Will the new NYPL still support scholars — especially the independent scholars who need it most — and give students a chance to know and love real books as well as their digital shadows? Can public library budgets support the constant upgrading needed to keep a digital workspace usable?

The world’s full of confident experts who have answers to these questions. I’ve got nothing. My heart’s with what we’re doing in Firestone. My stomach hurts when I think about NYPL, the first great library I ever worked in, turned into a vast internet cafe where people can read the same Google Books, body parts and all, that they could access at home or Starbucks. And my head tells me that I can’t predict a thing because we’re living through a great revolution, and we don’t yet know what lies on the other side.

Continued at the Daily Princetonian | More Chronicle & Notices.