This article discusses various aspects of the history and survival of libraries, thanks to their adaptability, diversity and variability as well as their future viewed from the past due to: the rapid growth of content, development of new services increasingly oriented to the user, impressive technological changes, creation of new job profiles, virtualization of their user communities, content production and globalization. It also shows the existence of several futures based on a swot analysis and changes in key functions such as acquisitions, gateways to information and its preservation, some positive and negative points that depend largely on the academic institutions they serve, management of new content (in particular the impact of the Internet, the preservation of heritage material and data management), its new involvement in the information value chain (such as hosting and management of repositories, knowledge management, evaluation of research and text and data mining) among others. It concludes with several important questions that need to be addressed to reach some conclusions of their possible future.