Gregor Horstkemper kicked of the second session of "The public, the media and politics: intellectual debate and science in the age of digital communication". The talk mainly covered the transformational processes that libraries are facing today. The classic library services comprise collection, curation, conservation and arranging. One of the points he mentioned that resonated with me was the competition that Google et al. constitute for the hybrid (paper/digital) collections of libraries. Another, related issue was the transformation of libraries from a pull to a push service.

This latest transformation triggered questions such as: are libraries in a crisis? What are libraries good for today?

He showed screenshots from E-Tutorials on YouTube on how to use their library. He also showed that their library is developing modern, online library catalogues, organized to allow for browsing where searching does not work. These works lead to yet another transformation of modern liibraries into teaching libraries. An impressive screenshot showed a collaboration with Google where his library is digitizing ancient texts, allowing for full-text searching of ancient tomes. A final point was to demonstrate the topic-specific virtual libraries developed by a number of libraries.