One of the courses I found useless in my university days was the course known as Use Of Library. I hated the course because It was one of the few things in my life I never got to understand its essence. Like why study a course called library, how would the knowledge benefit me. As long as I have not had an answer for that, I prefer to not even want to have anything to do with it. Personally, I do not find the course interesting, not to talk of the fact that we never got to enter a library whatsoever. The library itself isn’t something that is worth a lot in this day and age knowing that there are different ways to learn new things and most of the knowledge we find there is often outdated.
If I will appreciate an effort from AI, it is the fact that it can search any topic giving the required answers instead of the wild variety of answers that google provides. The best thing about this is that we no longer need to search for pages in textbooks when looking for the information we need. Gone are those days when research took days and sometimes weeks. These days, a good amount of minutes is required for a research you know about, and a few hours is very okay when you are trying to familiarize yourself with the research work. It is funny how we grew from textbooks and newspaper publications into digital libraries, and now we have AI which is a more advanced version of a digital library like wikipedia.
Lazy beings like me who find it difficult to pay attention to words written now have the leisure of listening to books from great authors. I remember when I just started using spotify to read books, it was thrilling for me to see how much I could absorb in a day. I just plug in my airpods listening to chapters after chapters and books after books being in the action of the writer's story. Even books that were boring to read no longer sound boring because I could be doing a lot of other stuff while listening to my ebook. For someone like me who is really good with splitting concentrations, I can say It’s something I have come to find fun.
If you ask me if libraries are needed in this age and time, I would reply with a question as a Nigerian that I am… “Why do you add this age and time alongside libraries in one sentence”. This might sound funny, but to be honest Libraries for me are historical inventions that should be thought of as a part of history and not something that should even try to fit in this age and time. This age and time has gone beyond what any library has ever produced and will continue to advance over it. Our research and knowledge are no longer in physical books making them outdated. Very soon, a generation would come, never knowing that paper was ever used.