Dan on the Future of Libraries at Internet Librarian Connect
A library can meet every goal in its strategic plan and still be unprepared for the future. Changes in AI, political power, digital licensing, and public trust can shift who controls knowledge and how communities access it. A plan built around one expected future leaves libraries exposed when those expectations fail.
In The Future of Libraries: From Uncertainty to Navigation, Serious Insights founder Daniel W. Rasmus explores four plausible futures for libraries in 2036, from metered access and algorithmic gatekeepers to community participation and shared control. This Internet Librarian Connect presentation shows how scenario planning can challenge assumptions, reveal emerging risks, and expand the choices available to library leaders. Watch to test your own thinking about what libraries could become—and how to prepare for more than one possibility.
Key Takeaways
- Test your strategy against multiple futures. Scenarios help library leaders surface fragile assumptions, explore alternatives, and prepare for conditions a single forecast misses.
- Look beyond the technology. AI’s impact on libraries depends on who controls it, how access is governed, and whether people retain privacy, agency, and a meaningful voice in decisions.
- Keep watching after the workshop. Track early indicators, revisit contingencies, and update scenarios as the world changes. Scenario planning becomes useful through ongoing attention and action.
Watch the entire presentation on YouTube:
Summary of the presentation
In The Future of Libraries: From Uncertainty to Navigation, Daniel W. Rasmus challenges library leaders to examine the assumptions beneath their strategies. A plan built around one expected future can become fragile when technology, politics, economics, or community needs move in another direction. His Internet Librarian Connect presentation introduces scenario planning as a practical way to explore those uncertainties, develop options, and prepare people to recognize change. The goal is to improve the decisions libraries can make as conditions change.
The starting point is an outside-in perspective. Strategic planning often concentrates on what an organization wants to accomplish and what its leaders believe they can control. However, many of the forces that disrupt those ambitions originate elsewhere. Rasmus uses social, technological, economic, environmental, and political uncertainties—the STEEP framework—to broaden the conversation. For libraries, that means examining AI alongside public trust, intellectual freedom, digital licensing, surveillance, demographic change, government policy, and climate disruption. Technology’s development is only one part of the environment in which it operates.
The presentation organizes this exploration around a focal question: What will libraries’ role be in 2036? Two central uncertainties help structure the scenarios: the boundaries of automation and the allocation of power. Will automation substitute for people or augment their capabilities? Will control concentrate within powerful institutions and platforms, or become more distributed? Other uncertainties give each future its particular character. The resulting stories offer different conditions for examining library missions, services, relationships, and choices.
Rasmus emphasizes that these stories require discipline. A compelling narrative can hide weak assumptions or untested connections. Scenarios need internal consistency, with details that make sense within each world’s established conditions. Research helps identify evidence that makes a scenario’s imagined developments plausible. The exercise asks participants to take each future seriously, explore its implications, and then move into another future with a different set of conditions.
In the Metered Commons, prosperity exists, but licenses, identity checks, scores, and permissions govern access to its benefits. Libraries operate within AI, identity, and resilience infrastructure, helping people navigate systems that can be difficult to understand or challenge. Staff explain denials, work through administrative barriers, and seek exceptions for people whose circumstances do not fit automated categories. Privacy, anonymity, and the freedom to inquire without being scored become especially valuable. The library remains important, while its independence and ability to protect patrons face persistent constraints.
The Cooperative Commons explores a more participatory distribution of power. Communities, cooperatives, and public institutions share responsibility for the technologies shaping their lives. AI becomes civic infrastructure that people can inspect, configure, and govern collectively. Libraries help people understand, assess, and contest these tools. They become places for civic learning and participation, including examining automated decisions and questioning the systems used in public services or employment. Shared ownership and cooperation create possibilities for greater agency, while climate volatility and political uncertainty still require ongoing adaptation.
In the Uncommons, everyday life is marked by chronic insecurity and procedural friction. Systems function, but people must repeatedly navigate portals, eligibility checks, subscriptions, risk scores, and administrative demands. Automation focuses more on monitoring and scoring than on relieving burdens. Libraries absorb the consequences, providing human help when institutional systems offer little explanation or flexibility. Their staff becomes translators between people and technology, helping patrons access benefits, training, housing, and other essential services. The library’s importance grows as sustaining that work becomes harder.
The Stable Commons considers a society that deliberately values reliability and recovery. Technology changes more slowly and operates within stronger expectations for auditing, accountability, and public oversight. Libraries serve as dependable infrastructure for learning, work transitions, administrative navigation, and community resilience. Climate disruption is expected, and libraries provide reliable places and resources for adaptation. This scenario invites participants to consider the value of slowing down: making systems understandable, allowing people to challenge decisions, and reducing volatility in their lives.
To make these futures tangible, Rasmus introduces fictional patrons whose experiences reveal what the scenarios mean in practice. Their visits involve navigating benefits, challenging an automated hiring decision, finding clean air and power during environmental disruption, or seeking dependable human assistance. These personas connect large uncertainties to everyday circumstances. Participants can also develop stories about staff, library leaders, and governing institutions, examining the same future from different positions and discovering implications that a high-level description might miss.
The scenarios also challenge assumptions about what makes a library a library. If enormous quantities of text can be stored on a tiny device, defining the institution primarily through storage leaves its purpose vulnerable. The presentation moves the conversation toward access, learning, interpretation, civic participation, and support. In the closing discussion, Rasmus acknowledges that rural, urban, academic, enterprise, and specialist libraries would develop different scenarios. Their missions, stakeholders, resources, and communities shape both the questions they ask and the responses available to them.
Scenario planning also requires a balance between imagination and decisions. Participants need enough time to understand future consequences while staying connected to strategy. Endless refinement can turn the exercise into storytelling without practical application; rushing toward closure can prevent useful exploration. Rasmus describes AI as one analytical resource for comparing narratives, identifying similarities and differences, and examining whether important uncertainties have been overlooked. Its contribution sits within the broader work of research and interpretation.
The work continues after the workshop. Libraries need to identify early indicators, observe developments, revisit contingencies, and update their scenarios as uncertainties resolve or new ones appear. That ongoing attention makes a planning exercise valuable. By rehearsing several plausible futures, leaders expand their ability to recognize what is changing, reconsider assumptions, and respond with options they have already begun to explore. The presentation offers library leaders a way to make uncertainty part of their ongoing strategic practice.
Thank you to Information Today for the opportunity.
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