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The economic crisis has been harmful for libraries. Although the studies that have been done by professional associations have given evidence of their economic and social value, the reasons given to justify budget cuts and closures show that the real problem is not an economic problem but one of perception: Politicians and citizens give libraries a secondary place when competing with other basic services for financing. Everyone recognizes the past importance of libraries, but few situate them in contemporary education, information, and knowledge. The future of libraries depends mostly on what people think of them. Professionals can help to build a new popular awareness that places value on the idea of the library's utility and neutralizes its presumed digital obsolescence. In this sense, technology is changing the role that institutions play, as well as the space that they have traditionally occupied. Technology has also changed our expectations towards institutions. In order to make the library something appealing and useful, the librarian must be able to facilitate the interconnection (cooperation, networking, benchmarking, and co-creation) and seek to reduce the barriers between the library as an institution and the users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the first time there is a full-year report (of 2015) of ebook lending from Spanish public libraries, and the outcome does not seem entirely satisfactory. Although it is a short period of time in which to attempt to ascertain the success or failure of ebook lending, data reveals that the service must be improved. The low volume of titles, the lack of a joint catalogue, use of prohibitive DRM, and some other use conditions are even more restrictive than those for traditional print books, and all of this ultimately penalizes the readers' experience. Librarians are sceptical about the viability of a the current ebook lending model for obvious reasons. These problems are not specific to Spanish public libraries. It is clear to the author that ebook lending is needed, but must follow different rules; the author advocates promoting and improving the visibility of public domain works and abandoning, if only temporarily, other onerous content that hinders other services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Spanish city of Burgos hosted the VI National congress of public libraries and the Europeana conference, October 9-11, 2012. The events shared venues and registrants under the theme of "Public library: individual memory, global heritage". Building the European memory requires the involvement of citizens and Europeana is working hard to achieve it. The difficulties encountered by public libraries attempting to become involved in the project are described, pointing out some of the things they can do to integrate local memory into the larger repositories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The generation of new multimedia content that facilitates contact with mobile devices is a pending task for cultural agents. From the perspective of the public library, we take augmented reality as an example and the video game industry as a reference to demonstrate some possible actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Web 2.0 convergence with the mobile web is shifting the very nature of the Internet. Local multimedia holdings generated in a mobile-networked society often don't fit with library catalogs. Their methods of diffusion and discovery move away from those associated with the traditional library and into social networking and new devices. Local archive-building in this new context requires content fitted to the new devices, skilled people to interact with them, and libraries that understand new forms of information demand and consumption. In order to find its place in this context, the library must combine its traditional role as a dynamic agent specialized in providing access to bibliographic resources with a new role as an advocate for informal web content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]