During a speech for the Rotary Club of Suffolk recently, Harry T. Lester, president of the Slover Library Foundation in Norfolk, described that great new flagship library facility in Norfolk and explained how it came to be.

Lester talked about how, in making the initial $20-million donation that launched the drive to build the 138,000-foot facility, the late Frank Batten Sr., former CEO and chairman of Landmark Communications, had shared with Lester his vision of a library that would be among the most technologically advanced in the U.S. Even more important, Batten had suggested, the library should be more than a repository for books — it should be a place for community learning and civic engagement, a sort of public square for the 21st century.

As with so much in Batten’s life, that vision was right on time. As we move into a world in which it seems the entire catalog of human knowledge is or will soon be available on the Internet, folks in the library business around the world are all wondering how to keep their facilities relevant. When every new book, film, magazine, music album and other type of media is available online — and much of it for free from some service or another — what’s the future role of libraries?

That’s a question Batten seemed to be asking, and it’s one Suffolk will be asking before long, as city officials already are in the advanced planning stage for a new facility to replace the aging Morgan Memorial Library on West Washington Street.

Officials have some interesting data available to them as they begin those deliberations here in Suffolk. According to Kristen Marshall, collection strategy supervisor for the Suffolk Public Library system, after reaching a high of 372,257 in 2009, circulation of physical media (actual books, records and other media) fell to 316,884 in 2014. The numbers have been up and down during that period, but it is impossible to ignore the fact that physical library loans have fallen significantly.

On the other hand, there is encouraging news on the digital collections front. In 2012, the city’s library system began offering e-books and e-audiobooks through Axis360 and OneClickDigital. During that year, 1,678 e-books and 802 e-audiobooks were checked out. Since then, the library has added more digital offerings, including Zinio, which lets users check out 63 digital magazines, and Hoopla, a streaming service with downloadable videos, music albums and audiobooks and has recently added e-books and downloadable comics.

While circulation of physical resources — the books and CDs and movies so many of us grew up borrowing from libraries — fell 15 percent in Suffolk, digital circulation has taken off, climbing more than 700 percent to 17,617 pieces of media in 2014, with no signs of the increase letting up.

For many of us, the thought of reading a book on a computer screen is disagreeable. And for most of us, the thought of a city without a library would be mildly offensive, at best.

But as Suffolk begins to consider the next step for its library system, it would be foolish to ignore the trends and plan a new building devoted to bookshelves. It may be that the next library Suffolk builds will actually require less space for books than the current one offers.