My grandfather spent all this life as a business man. He dropped out of 10th grade to support his disabled mother. For awhile, Granddad worked through a correspondence course to become an attorney. Then the Depression hit.

So though he never became a lawyer, he got a taste for self-education. He remained a voracious reader.

Most of his working life, he drove a pastry truck, and considered himself lucky to have the job. Eventually, he wound up in appliance sales at a big department store, where he worked until his death at 72.

Last week, I took a few days off to give a talk at a library conference in Jackson, Wyoming.

I decided to drive. The library had gotten a complaint about a multiple-CD book, and this would give me a chance to listen to it.

The name of the book was "Light in August," by William Faulkner. Somehow, I'd never gotten around to reading Faulkner before.

Recently, I was elected to something called the OCLC Membership Council. OCLC is a company that has been around for over 30 years, since the dawn of library automation.

Nonetheless, OCLC is a little hard to define. It is...

* A world-wide libary catalog. OCLC is used by librarians in 109 countries to describe over a billion books, music and film recordings, theses, photographs, and other documents.

Recently, I wrote an article for a professional magazine about "the 21st century public library."

I outlined the broad process through which most public buildings are designed and constructed. The idea was to give librarians who haven't gone through all this a template to follow and to tweak.

Since then, I've been thinking more generally about the question, "What will tomorrow's library look like?"