This piece by C. A. Cutter (1883) [en.wikisource.org] imagines what the Buffalo Public Library would be like in 1983.
Some very interesting ideas which have clearly been achieved today, e.g. "Their intention was to make the work easy and quick, and to reduce time and space as nearly as possible to zero."
But the part that really got me was this: "The standard catalogue card now is ten centimeters wide and fifteen high." Fancy that, a reference to the metric system in the US in 1883…