The Ubiquitous Library is Here

For years many of us have dreamed of being able to use a ubiquitous library. That is, a library available anytime, anywhere. Some of us are helping to make this dream a reality. We have done this over the last 25 to 30 years by planning, developing, and making our online library catalogs and databases available to our customers outside of the bricks and mortar library. For a few years this ideal was called "a library without walls." This went along with the idea of a "university without walls," which manifests itself today as online classes from all types of colleges and universities. In recent years libraries have added digital reference services, which were limited to just e-mail in the beginning but now include chat services, making librarians accessible both in synchronous and asynchronous modes. Some of these chat services are cooperatives on a statewide level, and some are expanding into national and international cooperatives. In the next few paragraphs I will explore if chat services are just a fad or if there is an infrastructure being built to support them. Are software and standards being developed to support chat services, and is there a research agenda being developed to understand and improve this new service? I will conclude by reviewing how well some of these services are performing and what their users have to say. All of this should lead to the conclusion—yes, we do have staffed ubiquitous libraries today.