Transcript Slide 1
ACRL – NEC Spring 2005 Conference The Future of College & Research Libraries: The Future is Now May 20, 2005 Brinley Franklin Vice Provost University of Connecticut Libraries Future Libraries? “To prophesy is extremely difficult – especially with respect to the future” (Chinese proverb) Future Libraries? “The age of reason has ended, and now we must organize around chaos.” Watts Wacker, CEO, FirstMatter and Futurist Future Libraries? “There wasn’t anything special about the equipment except that there were extra keys giving direct access to several major libraries such as Harvard’s and the Washington Library of the Atlantic Union and the British Museum without going through a human or network linkup-plus the unique resource of direct access to Boss’s library, the one right beside me. I could even read his bound paper books if I wanted to, on my terminal’s screen, turning the pages from the keyboard and never taking the volume out of its nitrogen environment.” “That morning I was speed-searching the index of the Tulane University library (one of the best in the Lone Star Republic), looking for history of old Vicksburg, when I stumbled onto a cross-reference to spectral types of stars and found myself hooked. I don’t recall why there was a cross-referral but these do occur for the most unlikely reasons.” “One morning I found “my” console occupied. I looked inquiringly at the head librarian. Again he looked harried. ‘Yes, yes, we’re quite crowded today. Um, Miss Friday, why not use the terminal in your room? It has the same additional controls and, if you need to consult me, you can do so even more quickly than you can here. Just punch local seven and your signature code and I’ll instruct the computer to give you priority. Satisfactory?” Robert A. Heinlein Friday 1982 Future Libraries? Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson 1992 Future Libraries? “The room is filled with a three-dimensional constellation of hypercards, hanging weightlessly I the air. It looks like a high-speed photograph of a blizzard in progress. In some places, the hypercards are placed in precise geometric patterns, like atoms in a crystal. In other places, whole stacks of them are clumped together. Drifts of them have accumulated in the corners, as though Lagos tossed them away when he was finished. Hiro finds that his avatar can walk right through the hypercards without disturbing the arrangement. It is, in fact, the three dimensional counterpart of a messy desk. The cloud of hypercards extends to every corner of the 50-by-50 foot space, and from floor level all the way up to about eight feet, which is about as high as Lagos’s avatar could reach. ‘How many hypercards in here?’ ‘Ten thousand, four hundred and sixty-three,’ the Librarian says. I don’t really have time to go through them, Hiro says. Can you give me some idea of what Lagos was working on here? Well, I can read back the names of all the cards if you’d like. Lagos grouped them into four broad categories: Biblical studies, Sumerian studies, neurolinguisitc studies, and intel gathered on L. Bob Rife. ‘Without going into that kind of detail – what did Lagos have on his mind? What was he getting at?’ “What do I look like, a psychologist?’ the Librarian says. ‘I can’t answer those kinds of questions.’ ‘Let me try it again. How does this stuff connect, if at all, the subject of viruses?’ ‘The connections are elaborate. Summarizing them would require both creativity and discretion.’ As a mechanical entity, I have neither.’ Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson (1992) The Future is Now “This is a book about what happens to people when they are overwhelmed by change. It is about the ways in which we adapt – or fail to adapt – to the future.” Future Shock by Alvin Toffler, 1970 The Future is Now “Web-bio? It’s the linking of the web with biology. Until now, information technology has influenced biotech. From this point on, biotech begins to influence information technology and it’s inevitable to me that we’re going to see all sorts of strange fusions of the two.” Alvin Toffler, BUSINESS2.COM, September 26, 2000 The Future is Now “A generation of new learners and consumers who demand a more graphical, integrated, and interactive multimedia presentation of information.” “Academic Libraries 2000 and beyond” by Jim Neal Library Journal, July 1996 The Future is Now “Information is going to become far more complicated as technology expands our understanding of what information is.” Thomas Frey, Executive Director and Senior Futurist, the DaVinci Institute The Future is Now Just in case Just in time Just for me The Future is Now • Library as Place • Library Services • Library Collections • Scholarly Communication • Open Access The Future is Now Library as Place “Books are being cleared away to make room for digital learning laboratories, a phenomenon that is transforming research and study on campuses around the country.” “College Libraries Set Aside Books in a Digital Age” By Ralph Blumenthal NY Times, May 14, 2005 The Future is Now Library as Place Undergraduate students, fine arts, and humanities scholars in particular continue to choose the library as their study and research habitat. Libraries continue to serve as social spaces and as collaboratories for group projects. The Future is Now Library as Place Will tomorrow’s libraries become more like museums of today – depositories of cultural artifacts? The Future is Now Library Services “A new generation of technologically savvy librarians who are passionate about public service and the values of librarianship are ready to take on the digital world.” OCLC Newsletter April/May/June, 2004 The Future is Now Library Services Librarians have a role as information intermediaries on the campus learning team. Libraries continue to have a role as learning centers. Peter Brophy, The Library in the Twenty-first Century: New services for the information age. The Future is Now Library Services Will reference and interlibrary loan become unmediated services to the extent that circulation and reserve are now? Will information literacy and library instruction become a passing trend when search engines are intuitive and databases are indexed using artificially intelligent devices? The Future is Now Library Collections No single library (not even Harvard or the Library of Congress) can own all of the information being created in the 21st century – all libraries will become consortially interdependent. Librarians’ role shifts from “managers of materials” to “managers of access to materials.” (AAU Provosts Meeting, September, 2004) The Future is Now Library Collections “Google Print legitimizes the whole idea of doing large-volume digitization” Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archives The Future is Now Scholarly Communications 20th Century Model Universities charge back the federal Government through their F&A rate 21st Century Model Federal Government funds research Federal Government funds research University Libraries buy back research from publishers Publishers make restricted access to published research available Universities perform research and submit for publication Universities perform funded research and make it publicly accessible The Future is Now Open Access “Scientists from all major Dutch universities officially launched (http://www.darenet.nl/page/language.view/home) where all their research material can be accessed for free. Interested parties can get hold of a total of 47,000 digital documents from 16 institutions. No other nation in the world offers such easy access to its complete academic research output in digital output, the researchers claim. Obviously, commercial publishers are not amused.” “In Hungary, financier and philanthropist George Soros is also backing a new effort (http://www/soros.org/openaccesss/) to provide free and unrestricted access to scientific and other academic literature.” “Dutch academics declare research free-for-all” By Jan Libbenga, The Register May 11, 2005 The Future is Now Digital Preservation • JSTOR • LOCKSS • Portico “I chafe at the presumption that once you digitize, there is nothing left to do. There is an enormous amount to do, and digitizing is just scratching the surface.” Don Waters, Andrew Mellon Foundation Technology Review May, 2005 The Future of College & Research Libraries: The Future is Now Information Cafes, Homer Babbidge Library, University of Connecticut www.lib.uconn.edu~bfranklin