Precisely. Libraries have always striven to be vital organizations - champions of literacy, people's universities, cornerstones of democracy. But the next few decades will sorely test their adaptability on a scale that the grim-faced MacArthur would find tactically challenging. Depending on how they deploy their resources, libraries could find themselves either collateral damage at the side of the information highway or in clear control of all vital supply routes.

Although VPL's new 300,000-square-foot building probably won't be rendered redundant during its 30- or 40-year lifetime - libraries and books are more popular than ever (and the paperless office predicted a decade ago still hasn't arrived) - Vancouver's new central library, like its cousin opening next year in San Francisco, is likely among the last of its generation. This isn't necessarily bad news for libraries - as information becomes increasingly digitized during the next few decades, the reach of libraries will extend into people's homes. Already, patrons can browse library shelves, as it were, with an ordinary home computer and modem, place holds, and have books delivered to local branches. Increasingly, the books on those shelves will be electronic, allowing patrons to obtain the information they contain without a trip to the library. But as "books" become digital, the logic goes, print-based book collections will become rarely visited museums or archives that won't require high-rent space in the downtown core.

VPL's director, Madge Aalto, sees the new branch as continuing to play a critical role for decades to come by serving the community's needs for both hard information and recreational reading as only a big centralized facility can. As computer terminals gradually replace bookshelves, those, too, will need physical space. "Libraries are protean organizations," Aalto says. "One of the reasons the central library in Vancouver is such a vital organization is because it serves both information and recreational needs."

Vancouver's new central library represents a transition between the print and digital-electronic eras. Within its walls and floors radiates a kind of fibre-optic vascular system designed to accommadate not dozens but hundreds of computers. Each floor contains a subfloor, or crawl space, to allow easy access for changing and adding fibre-optic cables. Fibre-optic vertical risers lead from the communications room on the seventh floor to communications closets that serve as switching points on each of the floors below. If faster lines are needed for particular applications, such as multimedia, it's just a matter of changing a card in a hub under the floor. Says Brian Campbell, VPL's systems and planning director, "It's a library that's certainly been designed to evolve, there's no question."

Frederick Kilgour, the founder of the OPAC system, which is now in use in libraries around the world, believes libraries will have to shift their primary concern from books as artifacts to the data and information they hold. He sees the library of the future as consisting of a centralized database. Imagine one province-wide public library, with a toll- free number, situated in a low-rent industrial park. A reductio ad absurdum, some would argue, but such a centralized database (and conduit to databases worldwide) could readily serve the whole province at comparatively low cost. To ensure access for all - because even in the technologically utopian future, not everyone will have a computer or the ablity to use one - storefront satellite libraries could be scattered around the cities, each consisting of a few computer terminals and printers and staffed by one librarian.

Missing from this picture, of course, are certain social aspects of the public library, such as the library as community living room, a neighhourhood melting pot where students can work together on their homework, where old people can read the newspapers - the one place, librarians like to point out, where people and their needs will not he judged.

"Libraries are no longer simply places where you store books and people come in and borrow them and take them away," says Roger Hughes, the architect of VPL's new state-of-the-art Renfrew branch, which opens next month on East 22nd Avenue. Hughes sees a blurring of roles between community centres and libraries, which have gradually expanded their children's programming over the years and now also serve as social- integration facilities for non-English-speaking immigrants, released mental patients, and others.

Also lost would be the notion of libraries as warm, inviting places where people interact with books by browsing shelves and reading in comfort. Libraries, especially in the US, already have been losing readers to market-sensitive bookstores that provide comfort, ambience, and amenities like cappuccino bars and children's programming.

Although the Lower Mainland has seen its own flurry of public-library constuction during the past five years - spurred by population growth - in fact, public- library spending across North America, both capital and operating, tapered off in the 1980s. Demand, meanwhile, has continued to rise - between 1981 and 1993, queries to VPL's circulation and reference jumped by more than 50 percent. Thus, libraries are caught in an ongoing paradox: meeting rising public expectations (driven partly by technology) in the face of fiscal restraint.

VPL has concentrated on books and other media - in fact, videos, cassettes, and CDs now make up 20 pecent of the library's circulation, a proportion expected to keep growing. Videos are usually superior to books for showing how to tile a bathroom or improve a golf swing. Even if Canadians have access to "500 channels with nothing on," libraries can fill an important video niche, Whitney believes. "If I'm really interested in French films from the 1930s, I don't think that stuff is going to be out there on the airwaves."

During the transition to an information society over the next few decades, libraries have to resist demands for transitional technologies, Whitney believes. "The problem is, people want access to all that at the same time as they want us to maintain all our existing services. Sure, our support's been increasing, but it's not been keeping pace with our use level. And that's the rub."

Yet libraries can't afford simply to maintain the status quo. If they remain on the technological sidelines, libraries stand to lose their central position in the flow of information as consumers turn to commercial vendors to obtain what they want. Lost in the shuffle to the private sector will be the librarians' pre-eminent philosophy of public service - their concern with access for all, their resistance to censorship, and so on.

British academic librarian Maurice Line agrees that professionals and corporations will gradually forsake public libraries in favour of private online services. In his essay "Libraries and Information Services in 25 Years' Time," he writes: "The concept of information as a public good will have all but disappeared by AD 2015. The private information sector will be very big...and will be carrying out some of the work traditionally carried out by libraries."

As libraries become caught between a technological tidal wave and a receding tide of government spending, the issue is control over information: how much will lie with public-sector librarians sensitive to equitable access, and how much will lie with the private sector? Librarians like Campbell have been the prime movers in the creation of freenets across Canada. "It's certainly important that public libraries remain at the forefront of providing access to information, because that's the basis of an informed citizenry," says Ken Haycock, director of UBC's School of Library, Archival and Information Studies. "There's a real danger that we're going to have tools and access to information for those who can afford it and not for those who can't."

Against this backdrop, it's difficult to envision VPL as a dynamic force in the 21st century. And yet the library has been showing glimmers of innovation: the Renfrew branch will be the first Canadian library west of Ontario to introduce self-checkout, where patrons "wand" their own books before leaving the building. VPL has created self-serve databases covering popular reference subjects, such as NHL statistics and consumer-product ratings. And it's steadily expanding its telephone services, soon allowing patrons with computers or touch-tone phones to place reserves, renew books, and find out how much they owe in fines, among other things. VPL makes all its books availible to all its branches. And it's a member of the Lower Mainland's Interlink, which provides reciprocal library use to all residents in all jurisdictions.

But VPL's largest policy decision of the past few decades is certainly the costly new central library. Within VPL, there's a philosophical debate as to whether the strength of the library system rests with the central branch as a full-scale research/reference facility or with the popular neighbourhood services provided at all branches: children's books and programming, popular-materials collections, and so on. By most accounts, in fact, VPL has too many branches - at least, too many little ones. Of the 21 branches many are less than 5,000 square feet, and some storefront branches - Riley Park and Kensington - are less than 2,000 square feet, which is unusually small for any urban library system and too small to contain a critical mass of books and services. A smaller number of larger libraries would also be less expensive to bring online.

Librarians worry that because the federal goverment decided to tax books, library funding won't prove immune from cuts, especially when cash-strapped governments have to weigh it against health or educational funding. Some jurisdictions, such as California, have seen a wave of library closures during the past decade. On the bright side, the future may hold more than grumpy taxpayers and grumpier politicians. A 1992 Gallup poll found that more than half of US citizens randomly surveyed were willing to support their public libraries at a level greater than US$20 per capita. The national average for library funding then was actually about US$6 per capita. VPL's funding that year was the equivalent of US$31 per capita. But then, BC residents use their libraries, per capita, twice as much as other North Americans.

If there's any public support for libraries that governments aren't recognizing, BC's libraries hope to tap it. In June, the government proclaimed legislation establishing a BC Library Foundation, which will begin accepting private donations for any of the province's 72 library boards. The first of its kind in Canada, the library foundation has Crown-agency status, allowing rich donors to claim generous tax deductions. (This same Crown status has been conferred lately on universities, allowing certain campuses to reap hundreds of millions in donations.)

Although the patrician era of Andrew Carnegie may be long gone, the foundation could induce rich Canadians to demonstrate philanthropy. "I think it's an enlightened move," says Celia Duthie, a member of the foundation's board. In fact, the new downtown library helped spur the move. Because the old site didn't fetch what it was supposed to, the foundation became imperative. Says Duthie, "The impetus is the new library, which is obviously going to be a costly venture."

Indeed, for all it may be a drain on VPL's overall operation, the new downtown showpiece may prove a public-relations coup by winning friends and influencing well-heeled patrons to part with their millions. "Certainly, the downtown library is the really big, new high-profile thing that's happening," says foundation chair Lyme Copeland. "It's an incredible structure, and there's a lot of interest in making it a modern, forward-looking library and forward-looking service."

Technology, in fact, will be one of the foundation's priorities. So will multicultural resources for a changing population, although the foundation's board has yet to meet and work out the details. Copeland says BC probably wouldn't have needed such a foundation in the comparatively affluent 1960s, but she says the point is to prepare for the future. "Libraries are trying to do a lot more now, to serve a broader clientele, for example, and do some electronic things we obviously didn't do 20 years ago," she says. "There are a lot of expectations."

By Larry McCallum