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ZHANG Xiaolin / Disruptive changes and the post-library era: Toward supply-side structure reform of knowledge services 013

etc. Further, data analytics may become default and requisite infrastructure in new circumstances
instead of luxuries. According to the research by O’Reilly, there would be 50 Zettabyte (500 TB)
data and even more in 2030, which would make us approach singularity of Connections (Nambiar,
2017). People, objects, organizations, locations, time, images, sounds, process, interaction
and scenes will be merged by data analytics. Integrated with semantics, smart analytics and
personalization, it will become the new foundation of social functioning and introduce new actions
and services (Meeker, 2017).
In such a case, far beyond material retrieval and utilization, information literacy will include
data literacy, multimedia literacy, data computing literacy, smart organizing literacy as well
as experiments and discovery literacy based on knowledge, and so on. People replaced by
machines in industrialization era can be called machine refugee; those refrained by digital divide
in information era can be called information refugee; while those unable to take advantage of
resources and capacities to win in computer era will be computational refugee. Knowledge service
providers must possess abilities to organize computable contents, provide smart reading and
discovery services, off in-depth analysis and intelligent decision. Therefore, computing analytics
will be a new approach to success (Davenport & Harris, 2007).

3 From libraries to knowledge service platforms (KaaS platform)

The library is a knowledge service platform based on contents. When knowledge is digitalized and
computerized, the objectives, means and capacities of library services will also transform.

3.1 Strategic choices of key institutions

The Association of College & Research Libraries (2015) has done environmental scan and
predicted the development of scholarly libraries. It proposed cooperative collection, research
data services and discovery services, fostered learning abilities and supported the library as
the makerspace, and so on. As the makerspace, the library architecture will become scholarly
space whose main function is to provide academic services and the rest of space will be used as
repository. The library will be equipped with the most advanced technologies as well as flexible
facilities and furniture to guarantee users’ access. Libraries services are embedded everywhere on
the campus, such as retrieval, counseling, writing, multimedia making, data mining, cooperative
studies and research. In this way, libraries will transform to digital academic centers which
supervise data resources and equipment, supply professional knowledge and support in-depth
services including helps in project planning, software application, metadata, intellectual property
protection and knowledge conservation.
In 2007, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2017) released a report on future libraries.
The report put forward that libraries would be a repository of knowledge and data that could be