Ranganathan's fourth law and smart libraries

Abstract

The technological advances of recent decades have led to spectacular developments affecting an increasing proportion of the population: innovations labelled 'smart' are bringing about profound changes in society. Libraries, which have been striving for millennia to localise and apply innovative solutions, are naturally caught up in the new wave. The technological achievements of the first half of the 21st century - artificial intelligence, data and text mining, mobile technology, the Internet of Things - are reshaping library services before our eyes. New tools, methods and processes can be introduced gradually or all at once to further modernise libraries, make them more sustainable and serve library users' needs even more effectively.