http://dablog.ulcc.ac.uk/2009/04/10/what-is-the-library-of-the-future/
Last Thursday’s Libraries Of The Future (LOTF) event at Oxford University has been well covered elsewhere, so I’ll just note a few key themes as I inferred them. LOTF is a JISC-sponsored campaign begun last year, and continued by means of online social networking (chez Ning) and a JISCInvolve blog, as well as F2F events like this.
If you’d nodded off for even only a couple of years, LOTF might well seem like the product of some post-information-meltdown future, with live Twitter streams projected behind the speakers, and the occasional glimpse of the parallel Second Life auditorium. All the same, one thing we didn’t see, in Real Life or Second Life, were shelves of books, or any books at all for that matter, apart from the JISC Collections catalogue on the registration desk. (By the way, if anyone knows of any shelf-for-shelf library reconstructions iSL, please send me a link.)
On change: Sarah Thomas astutely observed that change only looks fast if you are standing still: the only way to manage it is to be part of it. She proffered sound advice that the past and future – old ways and new ways – should not be set in opposition: we’ll achieve best results by understanding and integrating the best of traditional and innovative approaches to information management. Chris Batt compared the LOTF meeting with a 15th Century gathering of the Society of Scribes, discussing the emergence of “something big”. On that occasion, the “smart” ones, as Chris observed, bit the bullet and set about designing typefaces or investing in their own presses, leaving the rest to soldier on in an ever more marginalised business. This was a more original historical analogy than the usual hackneyed account of the Alexandrian library, though we didn’t escape the day without at least one mention of that. Peter Murray-Rust (“speaking in HTML, not powerpoint“) also had a compelling message: “If you are not aggessively trying to change the world, you will not end up with the Library of The Future.”
On the book: Sarah pointed out that, while the traditional book may still be alive and kicking, we cannot escape or deny the increasing reliance on digital resources, and a need for more and better digitisation projects and online finding aids. Chris picked up this theme, citing Susan Greenfield’s analysis of the information (r)evolution that is replacing “people of the book” with “screen people”: someone born at the start of the 21st Century may have little if any nostalgia for a paper book. (That said, I’m still inclined to think that the dedicated e-Book readers are a conceptual dead-end, except to the extent that they inform the evolution of laptops and other general purpose mobile devices.) From Santiago de la Mora we learned of the potential of Google Books to bring back to life “in-copyright-out-of-print” books.
On libraries and librarians: One particularly interesting observation was the extent to which digitisation breaks down the traditional boundaries between institutions: for example, by undertaking digitisation, a museum in effect is creating a ‘library’ of its digitised objects. Web technology makes it possible for almost any place to become a library, and it is erroneous to conceive of future libraries in terms of their bricks-and-mortar predecessors; libraries themselves must adapt their physical structures and the services they provide. In HE the library of the future will be at the heart of much greater integration across services, departments and institutions, and the trend towards OA research outputs and shared storage (e.g. UK Research Reserve ) is already clear.
On public knowledge: All the speakers expressed commitment to open public knowledge. Peter Murray-Rust cited endeavours like OpenStreetmap , NCBI PubChem, Sourceforge , inter alia, undermining the proprietary nature of data and information. However small, “each individual can do whatever they like on the web… don’t talk… do it!” Peter also aligned himself against Wikipedia’s detractors, and asked why universities aren’t actively helping Wikipedia. Robert Darnton drew audible gasps when he suggested that the best way to accelerate Open Access was for libraries to cancel their subscriptions to paid-for journals. Mining a similar vein, Chris Batt described the job of the “knowledge” (sic) sector as defining, mediating, managing and leading, in creating the public landscape of a Learning Society. The mission must be to remove all barriers to acccess: a universal right to knowledge and integration of knowledge into everyday life, empowering citizens to want to learn. That should involve the kind of creative approach we see in ventures like LibraryThing, rather than some of the more pedestrian public sector online efforts of the past.
I’d be inclined to echo the views on the CILIP blog, that the need for new information skills and literacy training – both of and by librarians – might have been addressed more directly. The nature of librarians of the future was raised by Chris Batt, and implicit in several comments through the course of the afternoon, but at the end of the day I felt we had dealt with many of the new information paradigms, but much less how “informaticians” are going to share that enormous dynamic richness with new and old generations.
And then it was off to the Bodleian Divinity School for a glass or three of Château JISC…
