Sustainability Services for Public Libraries within a Smart City Environment

Abstract

Nowadays, public libraries should take the necessary initiatives in order to establish their position as the knowledge centers of modern smart cities. Facing a fierce competition from other knowledge sources like the Internet, public libraries should find alternative ways to reach new audiences among the citizens of a smart city. The offering of interesting, entertaining, engaging and exploitable digital services, along with the proven quality of library resources, could be a way towards that direction. The limited public budgets directed to the public libraries present an additional obstacle for the sustainability of those institutes. A solution to that problem could be the development of new exploitation digital services that a public library would provide to its visitors, individuals or businesses. In this work, we present a prototype digital system that supports the goal of sustainability for a modern public library. The system offers a wide variety of digital services that aim at attracting new audiences of library visitors, engaging them in spending more time within the library and creating new sources of revenue for the institute. The system helps in transforming the library into a social space by allowing visitors to form ad-hoc social networks. Trying to tackle the disadvantage of quantity in digital resources, the system supports the procedure of digitization of the library's physical resources through a participatory endeavor that involves the audience of library visitors under the supervision of library's personnel. We conducted a first evaluation of the proposed system by comparing it with three other digital systems, which operate in public libraries around the world with positive results.