Library Informatics as a Challenge, or the Library without walls : Does It Have a Future?

Bujdosóné Dr. Dani Erzsébet <>
Eötvös József Főiskola


The library of our days and its informatics-based services are undergoing newer paradigm changes effected by the informatics components gaining more and more ground. The change that started out as machinization and continued as digitalization may lead to the disappearance of traditional library work processes.They are replaced by informatic processes which require intensive informatic skills. The change can be regarded to be positive or negative. The library, being an information resource has to face this challenge. Changing course, timely recognition of changing circumstances and requirements may guarantee survival. The presence of informatics in library science, in training librarians, and in everyday library activities is no longer a requirement but a necessity for existence. Intensification in digitalization may result in pushing the walls of the library into virtual space as it were, where the physical objects known as books are unable to follow. If this happens, does the „collection” in the traditional sense still make sence.

My presentation is an attempt to explore what the library without walls could mean for the user? In what ways and to what extent the library’s informatic functions can be impaired or transformed? How does that transform the librarian’s work and the training programs of library science and informatics? How far can we push the borders of digitalization without causing damage?

Do we really need the library without walls? But it is also justified to ask: do we really still need the traditional (paper-based) libraries? Under such circumstances, what can be the fate of the paper-based collection that accumulates the knowledge of millenia? After all, it is not simply that the type of information carrier changes, but the whole structure of the institution behind the collection will be overwritten. Raising the issue generates more questions.

On the whole, it seems essential to find answers to the following questions.

1. Where are we coming from and where are we going?

2. Wherei s our place in the expanding cyber space?

3. What kinds of solutions do we have to choose so that tradition and innovation should expand the borders of the library together, through their joined strengths, while the base of tradition should remain as solid as ever before?