I’ve been spending a lot of time in the past few weeks thinking about what libraries (particularly the BU Theology Library) will be in ten years. Libraries are changing so rapidly that it is hard to see more than three to five years into the future. Ten years? That’s hard! But here goes. First some basic assumptions…

1. The School of Theology will still be here and will need bibliographic resources to support its educational and research programs.
2. The Internet won’t melt down. Viruses, worms, spam and obscenity are the present threat, but the flip side is censorship and lock down, and of course that users will be so frustrated that they will simply give up.
3. Most publishers will publish in both digital and print formats.
4. The Google project to digitize the collections of five research libraries, the Open Content Alliance, and numerous other digitization projects will have digitized a significant portion of the existing print collections held by research libraries.

That’s to say that we will still be supporting the educational and research needs of the School of Theology in a culture that is even more defined by digital content. So what will the Library be…

1. During the next ten years, the medium for information storage, discovery, and retrieval will become primarily digital.
2. For many, digital media will also the media of choice for information use. A significant portion of users, however, will require a print on demand service to support the use of information stored in digital format.
3. The concept of a library collection will either be redefined or simply become obsolete. Aggregators and publishers will continue to bundle multiple titles into single price packages available through license agreements. (Libraries have traditionally selected such items individually for purchase and permanent addition to a physical collection.)
4. Publishers and aggregators will market directly to users, bypassing libraries. Information discovery tools the build on the technologies of Google, Yahoo and others will seamlessly index information available through open access as well as licensed materials.
5. The primary pedagogical task for librarians will shift from collection development as a means of filtering information and providing quality control for users to helping users to develop the skills to filter and to critically assess the information they discover.
6. The primary “technical services” task will be to build linking mechanisms that enable social network tagging systems to easily communicate with each other.

In some ways, this doesn’t feel that much different from what where we are now. In other ways, it will be redically different. Much of what I’ve said above focuses on changes in business models and technology. The Library will certainly respond to these changes. In doing so, the Library’s work that has been balanced between serving the needs of users and collecting and preserving documents will shift increasingly to be user focused. Content will become a commodity. The Library’s role will become increasingly pedagogical.

Over at MaisonBisson.com Casey has been playing with a prototype of a WordPress plugin that would function as an OPAC.

This is not to replace the ILS, he argues, but to provide a public interface that allows for data to be pulled from multiple sources and to allow user interaction. In it’s current interation, it pulls data from the online catalog, Amazon.com, wikipedia, and I think, Flikr. Being a WordPress plugin, it allows for comments, and all the features of WordPress. Like Jenny, I would love to give it a try on our site.
I really like the idea. I don’t know that it’s ready for prime-time as the primary user interface, but I’ve been thinking of something like this for a “new books” list.

The other significant issue is that this holds the potential of removing the OPAC from the Librayr’s control. Lorcan Dempsey has been pushing libraries to begin developing ways of feeding data into the user’s system. This is an interesting example of what that might look like….

George Johnson’s response to the Nature article about errors in Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica helpfully points to (and questions) some of the items identified as errors in each. Is omission as a result of an editorial process an error?

The Nitpicking of the Masses vs. the Authority of the Experts – New York Times

By GEORGE JOHNSON

Published: January 3, 2006

Whatever their shortcomings, neither encyclopedia appears to be as error-prone as one might have inferred from Nature, and if Britannica has an edge in accuracy, Wikipedia seems bound to catch up.

The idea that perfection can be achieved solely through deliberate effort and centralized control has been given the lie in biology with the success of Darwin and in economics with the failure of Marx.

It seems natural that over time, thousands, then millions of inexpert Wikipedians – even with an occasional saboteur in their midst – can produce a better product than a far smaller number of isolated experts ever could.

Tagging has been going on for awhile. Flickr and Del.icio.us are popular social networks that allow tagging. There has also been significant conversation about what some have called folksonomies. (See my previous posts.

Amazon tries its hand at tagging | News.blog | CNET News.com

But thanks to a new initiative by Amazon.com, a large number of new people are likely about to get their first taste of tagging. According to the blog Kokogiak, Amazon has formed a “tags team” and has begun using tags on some pages.

The idea, apparently, is to slowly experiment with tags and to give users some power over how certain Amazon products–books, for example–are categorized.