The Future Is Upon Us!

When someone asks you to imagine a public library, I don’t know what pictures pop into your head but I’m willing to bet that, like most people, the image involves dusty stacks of books and oppressive silence patrolled by scowling shush-meisters in cardigans.
With elbow-patches.

Whatever does leap into your mind, I generally find that no-one imagines the library as a futuristic community hub burning with cutting edge technology that you need to visit just to keep up in this fast-paced world.

Which is a shame - because we are, and you should.

Can you imagine a library where the shelves know what books are on them and can guide you to the one you want? What about a way to browse through an e-book just as though it were a real book?
How about keeping the library catalogue on your phone or tablet?

These aren’t vague ideas summoned to dazzle you. They are realities. They exist right now in libraries round the world.

Have you ever looked at a book on a shelf and wondered if you could get it at the library.
Yeah OK, but how do you know if we’ve got it? Or if it’s available?
Well, before you reach for your wallet, try downloading a free app onto your smartphone.
‘Library Anywhere’ lets you use the camera on your phone to scan the barcode on the back of the book, then looks it up and tells you if there are any copies at Masterton Library (or any SMART library) available to borrow. Go one step further and reserve the book right there and then. I’m guessing a two minute walk up the road isn’t going to put a tremendous dent in your day.

What else you might ask? A lot of people are starting to become interested in e-books, but find there’s no way to look at the cover or read a couple of chapters. And how else do you decide if you want to read it?
Masterton Library has thousands of free e-books available to you right now, and the next generation of our software promises to let you scan through those e-books on a screen in the library as though you were browsing it on a shelf.

As you may already know, Masterton is a founding library in the SMART libraries scheme. This allows you as Masterton residents to borrow not just from 60,000 local items but from half a million items across the 23 SMART libraries - at no extra cost. Make a reserve from Masterton, and within twenty minutes your book is fetched and sent to you from Kapiti. Or Weltec. Or Wainouiomata.
We’ve lent nearly two million books this year alone.

Better yet, in the next year we will be installing RFID tags into all our books and once this is done many things will be possible. RFID is a little chip that can communicate wirelessly with nearby sensors in the same way that the new ‘contactless’ bank cards can make payments by waving them over a scanner.
Our first plan is to install ‘Self-Issue’ desks so that customers can avoid a queue and just issue the books themselves. Then Returns can just be replaced by a slide and the same set-up in reverse.
After that, who knows?
Smart shelving can be installed to keep track of RFID stock; hand scanners can save your catalogue search and guide you to your book. All this is possible, right now. The future is already upon us.

You don’t need us to tell you that the world is changing fast - you can see it all around you. But where do you go for advice on all this stuff? Who can you trust to explain it all and not try to sell you something afterwards?
Try the Library. We’re free, we work for you and there isn’t an elbow-patch in sight.

Science fiction isn’t just a genre for us; it’s an instruction manual!