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Future frameworksWhat might these three patterns suggest for the future of libraries, allied organizations and the companies that serve them? We will argue that the only way to answer this question is to re-view the landscape using the lens of the information consumer. How does a library appear today through the information consumer’s lens? What is the shape of the user’s “infosphere?” The following diagram suggests how the information grid of material might look when viewed from the user’s perspective.8 How do the users view the library in their personal infosphere? The library is in focus when a book is needed or if attempts to find the materials on the Web are unsuccessful. But just how much mind share the library holds is fuzzy, based on the patterns surfaced in this report. And perhaps, the goal of libraries might be invisibility, in the sense that the service is ubiquitous and fully integrated in the infosphere—to be in the circle next to the user. After all, technology and services are most welcome in our lives when we do not have to devote much thought to them. We press a switch and light comes or goes. Expecting the information consumer to pay attention to the differences between William Shakespeare the author and William Shakespeare the subject as search terms is akin to expecting Joe Householder to know if the red wire or the black wire should be grounded before he plugs the lamp in—and to expect Joe to go to RedWire.com to figure out what happens if he’s wrong. Thankfully, clever people have hidden all this technology inside a box and millions are saved from a shocking experience. What might the trends presented in this scan suggest for OCLC and other organizations working with libraries to deliver services and products to information consumers?
The challenges inherent in such changes should not be viewed as threatening but as an opportunity for renewal and rejuvenation. But how do we decide what to do? Libraries and museums in particular have introduced new services and programs, built up over the old ones in almost archaeological layers. But preservation of everything is an unaffordable luxury. We have to embrace the opportunity of the changed landscape, not reconstitute the old landscape in a new space. “We have to preserve the identities and reputations we have built in our communities—while morphing into entities that are very different.”9
The anti-environment. What if libraries and OCLC and all the other players in the world of structured access to information erased the organizational charts, the artificial separations of content, the visible taxonomies, and the other edifices real or otherwise built to bring order and rationality to what we perceive as a chaotic universe? What if we built an infosphere rich in content and context that was easy to use, ubiquitous and integrated, designed to become woven into the fabric of people’s lives; people looking for answers, meaning and authoritative, trustable results? How do we take information, information sources and our expertise to the user, rather than making the user come to our spheres? If all the trends in this environmental scan were distilled into one statement it might look something like this (incredibly obvious) truism: Libraries and allied organizations do not exist separately from their communities. There’s a perhaps apocryphal business school example that is instructive here. When Joe Householder goes to a hardware store to buy a drill, he’s not actually buying a drill. He’s buying the ability to make a small hole. Perhaps libraries and allied organizations have become overly focused on drills of late. In 1971, Fred Kilgour built a really good drill, better than any others that were made around then, and he got it to the marketplace before other good drills were built. That drill is WorldCat. But, the power of the Kilgour drill was not that the drill bit was more robust than others, or that the motor was larger. It was that a good tool gave people a better way of doing things—specifically cataloging things other people had already cataloged. And that is a very good and powerful model. It saved people and institutions time, and allowed, for the first time, a way of seeing what other libraries had in their collections. A technological innovation became a collaborative revolution. With WorldCat as the “metadata hub,” OCLC has been able to broaden the scope of its services over the years, helping libraries serve Information Consumer. How do we together build on this remarkable legacy to capitalize on collaboration technologies, push technologies, personalization, open-source software, gaming and the energy of young information professionals—and take our world to Information Consumer’s world? Coming together as community
Libraries, museums, historical societies and information industry companies are filled with very bright, dedicated people who sit on committees, attend conferences, deliver papers and, perhaps, now and then, wake up at 3 am wondering, so, what is the future of libraries, of my museum? One trend that was evident in this scan was that for at least ten years, all those bright people have been writing and speaking eloquently about possible futures. Yet, not much has fundamentally changed. Rather than dissect why this might be so, here’s a proposal. Libraries are exemplars of the notion that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The library community could hold a “hackfest,”11 an agenda-less conference that identified a set of problems that needed fixing and then let loose clever people to come up with solutions. “Get a bunch of smart and capable people in a room with the time allocated to focus on a problem or a set of problems, and magic can happen.”12 Some of those clever people would have to be information consumers, young and old, so that solutions were designed with them, not for them. “We guess at how to do this quite a bit, but I don’t think we actually study these issues outside of the library world, which is where it is more important to be these days. In a way, that’s the ‘anti-environment.’ We already have a lot of research explaining how users fit into our infosphere. Now, we need to start with bleeding edge adopters, all the way down to those most left behind by the digital divide (by necessity or by choice) and follow them around, ask questions, observe them to find out how libraries and our services fit into their worlds. It’s a very key difference and you’d have to start with no existing assumptions of how library services already reach these people, which can be very difficult to do.”13 Let the future beginThere are, of course, many more implications inherent in this environment than only those suggested in this scan. Many trends have not been noted, and just about all specific products and services that libraries, allied organizations and companies offer have been left out. And there are many more questions that arise than are expressed here. Many readers are familiar with Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and subsequent works. It seems relevant to end this environmental scan with a reminder that asking the right question is more important than asking a lot of questions. “The answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything—as given by the supercomputer Deep Thought to a group of mice in Douglas Adams’s comic science fiction series The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy—is 42. According to the Guide, mice are 3-dimensional profiles of a pan-dimensional, super-intelligent race of beings. They built Deep Thought, the second greatest computer of all time and space, to tell them the answer to the question of life, the universe and everything. After seven and a half million years the computer divulges the answer: 42. ‘Forty-two!’ yelled Loonquawl. ‘Is that all you’ve got to show for seven and a half million years’ work?’ ‘I checked it very thoroughly, said the computer, and that quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you’ve never actually known what the question is.’”14 Information on the Web is fragmented; disaggregation of content splinters it further. Seamless computing may expose even more content to Information Consumer. Few institutions outside of libraries have the ability to put the pieces of the puzzle back together or build the trails for navigation, but it is critical that the right questions are asked.15 The question is not what should be digitized and preserved. The question is not what role will the library play in the institutional repository. The question is not MARC or METS or MODS. The question is not how will retiring librarians be replaced. The critical question is how does Fazeela in the Maldives complete her school assignment on wolf snakes? How does Adrian in England finish his family tree? How can Kofi in Ghana find scientific data on mercury levels in Volta Lake? The ultimate question of life, the universe and everything is: How do we together, as a community of libraries and allied organizations, move our trusted circle closer to information consumers at the level of their need? All this can come true…so maybe this library I created will be real, let the future begin! Kirstie Help OCLC recognize patterns in our shared landscapeOCLC wants to hear from you. Each landscape ended with a set of implications we think are apparent from scanning the environment, as well as a set of questions that arise from those implications. Please answer these questions. Ask others. Suggest solutions. You may complete the online feedback form or send postal mail to: |
Some questions arise: Is there a future for the proprietary containers built to guide access to content? If content is increasingly sought after in a “least publishable unit,” does it make sense to devote many resources to building containers? If so, what should the mechanisms of mediation be, and are these being developed? Can OCLC disaggregate itself and its services in order to meet the needs of self-service consumers interested in microcontent? And how can OCLC and others link the worlds of order and chaos, and empower the information consumer to be well-guided? OCLC members and participants value structure and mediated content. Evidence suggests that libraries’ constituents do not value these elements to the same degree. Who then—which constituents—should OCLC research when building a product and service strategy? How can OCLC and other organizations collaborate with libraries to effect changes that bring the collective wealth of libraries to the attention and desktop of the information consumer? 
“It is almost impossible to achieve the requisite awareness of what we haven’t noticed while we are immersed in a nice, comfortable, or at least accustomed environment. We are all subject to the ground rules, that is, the rules and unperceived effects that govern our business ground or context. It is like asking a fish to suddenly become aware of water. [Marshall] McLuhan observed, ‘One thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water, since they have no anti-environment which would enable them to perceive the element they live in.’ It is only when it is pulled from the water that the fish becomes acutely aware of its former environment. The challenge in achieving awareness to notice the formerly unnoticed—what we call ‘integral awareness’ of our total business environment—is to create an appropriate anti-environment.”
There are so many interesting challenges inherent in our landscape that it is not surprising that we have become fragmented as a community: there’s something there to interest everyone. But, it is time to put individual interests aside and come together as a community to reestablish our preeminence in search and retrieval, information and knowledge management, metadata creation and collaboration. Libraries are exemplars of the notion that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Collaboration has built the foundations of modern librarianship and must form the foundation of the new “infosphere” in which libraries and allied organizations marry technology with collaboration to deliver services to the information consumer.