Philosophical Background: Origins of the public library as a social institution

There is a race nowadays to become the first university with new and exciting ideas. MIT may be considered the first university that embraced the venture of letting everyone see and use the material from that university. But what does that mean in practise? Is this the start of the library of the digital age or is it something else? Could a digital library be something more and is this the origin? I don´t think that. Using open software and other digital material is just the beginning of something much bigger. Therefore i think we´ve need to define what is what. We did that in the first part in this course but as I see it everything is so new and we´re just in the beginning in a new era of digital development. So when talking about the origin We need to wait a couple of years before we can define what we´re talking about.