1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

Pattern three: collaboration

In a whole variety of ways, using all sorts of technology, it really is becoming easier for people to connect to do things together. The pattern that clearly emerged as we scanned the landscapes is that the technology adoption curve is very fast for devices and environments that allow people to work together and talk to one another seamlessly—untethered from classrooms, labs, electrical outlets and time. The desire for better collaborative tools, software and environments, however, is not new. Michael Schrage wrote Shared Minds: The New Technologies of Collaboration in 1990 about the technologies on the horizon that promised to encourage and foster collaboration. Almost 15 years later, we might all truly be poised to reap the benefits of collaboration technologies. Bill Gates believes that the next great leap forward in computing terms will engineer social change as barriers among people, systems and information disappear. He touts “Longhorn,” the next edition of Windows, as a collaboration framework, rather than a computing platform.6

Perhaps it’s time to coin a new term to use in a seamless computing environment. Rather than “connect” or be “connected,” people will “context” or be “contexted.” In an infosphere that continues to get larger and more diverse, context will be ever more important. As we’ve discussed above, the people and institutions that acted as guides to content disappeared into a virtual world and have not been replaced in any meaningful way.

Librarians have always excelled at providing context. Amazon and others work to emulate this role by building context into personalization systems and other collaborative technologies. Amazon has, in essence, built a readers’ advisory service into its Web site. “People who read this book also liked these titles.” The service that librarians offered to readers in a pre-Internet, face-to-face world has not been translated into the catalog or library Web site environments. There are many readers’ advisory Web sites, but they offer no personalization features or advisory technology beyond lists of titles organized in various ways. Context is not there. Amazon currently fills a void. Privacy issues in an online environment might have prevented librarians from acting on the need people have for context. What is clear from the trends scanned is that people hunger for context and environments that encourage dialogue, conversation and the ability to share. Librarians by nature will welcome virtual work environments that encourage dialogue, conversation and the ability to share and collaborate with colleagues and with information consumers.

It is important to note that a search for content and context in the infosphere may not yet reveal libraries and their sister organizations. But a visit to a physical library—particularly a public library—will reveal a place that is full of people seeking content and context. As we observed in the Research and Learning Landscape, libraries are places of social assembly and are vitally important to their communities.

Future frameworks: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5