John Palfrey, founding president of the Digital Public Library of America and a director of Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, recently told the Deseret News that he has “been struck by the number of times people tell [him] that they think libraries are less important than they were before, now that we have the Internet and Google. He says he thinks “just the opposite: Libraries are more important, not less important, and both as physical and virtual entities, than they’ve been in the past.” John Palfrey, author of the new book "BiblioTECH: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google," joins Tom Williams to discuss the future of the library on Thursday’s Access Utah.
John Palfrey is the head of school at Phillips Academy in Andover, MA. Previously, he was chairman of the Board of Trustees at the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and chairman of the Board of Directors of the Digital Public Library of America and Henry N. Ess III Professor of Law and Vice Dean for Library and Information Resources at Harvard Law School. Palfrey is also a faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. His research and teaching focus primarily on Internet law, intellectual property, and the potential of new technologies to strengthen democracies locally and around the world.
He says, “I'm very interested in writing about the way that people use emerging technologies in innovative ways. We are living in an exciting time. It's also a time of great complexity. There's much to explore and to seek to understand. And it seems unlikely, in an exciting way, that anyone will be able to predict the impact that the use of these new technologies will have on institutions and societies at large over the course of the next few decades.”
