DECEMBER 15 — Of all the departments in an educational institution, the library has to be the most paradoxical one. 

It's because that’s the place where people go to read books and do research, right? But the key thing any visitor to a library inside a Malaysian university will realise within five minutes of entering it is that people hardly “read books” in these places anymore.

Today a library is more like a multi-purpose commons.

A library nowadays is where students go to "chill", to spend three hours checking their WhatsApp or post photos on Instagram or, okay, even do some work on their devices. 

Does this make the library look like your average Starbucks outlet? Absolutely. 

If the campus has a paucity of space for students to hang out before or after class, the library is where most of them will be if only to kill time. 

So, yeah, nowadays it’s also hard to tell the difference between a campus library and a capsule-hotel lounge. 

Furthermore, assuming the furniture is comfy enough, it’s also where students (and lecturers) go to catch some shut eye; sometimes this reminds me of an airport departure gate for a red-eye flight.

For many college campuses, the library is also usually attached to the computer labs. So it’s also a chance for students who didn’t bring their laptops to do some online work. 

Put another way, a college library today can be essentially an Internet cafe which also happens to have bookshelves.

Another purpose of a college library today is providing event space. I’ve seen interviews, talks, mini-shows, forums and even one or two (quiet?) musical performances held at the centre of a library.

In many universities, students reserve consultation rooms so half a dozen or so people can brain-storm ideas for an upcoming assignment or society event. 

So, hotels, watch out. The college next to you may offer business centre/meeting room space to rival yours. 

The point is a library today is no longer the place where people “go to borrow and read books”. Yet, for all the new (re)-purposes above, a library in 2025 remains the place where "reading materials" are centralised.

However — and here’s the rub — what if these "reading materials" are being accessed less and less frequently? What if reading simply isn’t “done” as much as it used to be? Wouldn’t this eat at the very heart of that entity we know as a library?

A superficial "solution" here would be for libraries to be repurposed as media centres (which is sort of what they’ve also been all this time).

However, what if 90 per cent of the media students want can be accessed online via their devices? What then? It’s like a cinema if almost everybody prefers to watch movies from their homes: the very role of this entity (let alone the physical space!) would be up in the air. 

What would be the #1 purpose of any library other than a) a custodian of e-databases (which will require way smaller physical spaces) and b) a physical repository of materials which somehow cannot be downloaded or viewed online, surely a set of items which are decreasing in number every week?

I mean, what can a library or librarians do better than everybody else? Maybe that’s an urgent meeting that should be held... in the library, of course.

* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.