On 17 March 2007, Karen Coyle wrote:
> In the user view, I think the library "catalog" should disappear into
> the Net and become part of the whole world of information. The users may
> not even know that a catalog, as such, exists.
I agree. I combined two statements I really like:
* Wendy Newman's "we think that there are lots of different libraries out
there, but really there's just One Big Library, and it has lots of
different branches."
* Dan Chudnov's professional mission to "help people build their own
libraries."
And I got: I want to help people build their own personal branch of the
One Big Library, and to help them build their own customized catalogue to
that branch.
People won't think of it as a catalogue. The term will be outdated.
Nevertheless, they'll have a mass of stuff, physical or on their computers
or the network, same as today, and the catalogue will help them manage and
use it.
Some of what they can get to, as you say, will be through a library
service. Some will be through other institutions and services. It'll be
seamless and once set up they won't need to think much about who provides
what. When they move to another computer or another place, as much as
possible of their personal branch and catalogue should go with them.
People will be able to open up parts of their personal branch to others,
and get into parts of personal branches that other people have made.
> He may never "go to" a library catalog, because the library serves it
> all up through web services.
Yes!
I recommend Vernor Vinge's 2006 novel RAINBOWS END to anyone thinking
about the future of libraries. He's the computer scientist/SF writer who
came up with the idea of the technological singularity. (Wikipedia has a
good article on it.) The book is set in the 2030s, just this side of the
singularity. It involves the wildest library digitization project you've
ever heard of, and it's worth reading for that alone.
Vinge describes a world of ubiquitous computing, one where contact lenses
or glasses go beyond heads-up displays and into computer-mediated reality.
Everyone is on the network all the time, and so is everything they own.
Read it and ask, "What do librarians do in a world like this?" Anyone who
is unsettled by all the changes in the field in the last ten or twenty
years, or the pace of change now, will have a knot in their stomach. It's
enough to make any of us wonder where the hell things are going.
This list is about the next-generation catalogue. I think the current
generation will start to die out soon, and perhaps SirsiDynix's
announcment about this new system they call Rome will help push people
away from aged ILSes to new ones, with new catalogues that are the start
of the next generation.
I think free and/or small software projects will lead the way for the next
generation; I think of Koha, Evergreen, and LibraryThing. Larger systems
and commercial vendors will follow, but slowly. The next generation will
be much like this generation, but it will work better, look nicer, be more
distributed, and have open APIs.
The generation after that takes us to Web 3.0 or the Semantic Web or
whatever. Talis, the UK company, is skipping the previous step and
working to get the jump on this. What the big search engines will be like
then and how much they'll have invaded/taken over what librarians think of
as theirs, I have no idea.
That one-after-next generation will be where no-one goes to OPACs any more
and people really start to have their own personal branches of the One Big
Library.
That's when things start to get unspeakably freaky.
So, while we're building the next generation catalogue now, we need to
keep our eyes on the one that comes after it.
One final note about this state library idea:
> My dream would be that state libraries become the virtual libraries for
> all citizens of the state, because they might be large enough to be
> visible in the greater information space.
Here in Ontario there's a big project coming along called Knowledge
Ontario (formerly the Ontario Digital Library). It's aiming to be one
massive consortium of every school, college, university, and public
library in the province. Once you get a library card, you get access to
everything it has. High school kids can see the same things as university
students, and when they graduate from college or university, they don't
lose access to all those great resources.
Perhaps in the next generation of whatever, all this province- or
state-wide (or country-wide!) stuff will be in the greater information
space and people will find it there, out in public. After that, I think
personal catalogues will eat it all and it will come to users without them
having to go look for it--especially not with them trying to find it mixed
into the mass of porn, advertising, and spam that the Internet is.
Bill
--
William Denton, Toronto : miskatonic.org : frbr.org : openfrbr.org
Received on Sun Mar 18 2007 - 03:01:03 EDT