Discussions about the future of libraries are abundant. Alex Soojung-Kim Pang has started an intriguing discussion about the end of cyberspace. Alex is Research Director at the Institute for the Future and former managing
editor at the Encyclopedia Britannica.

In an article for the Berkshire Savant, (PDF) published by the Berkshire Publishing Group, he writes about the future of libraries when cyberspace itself no longer exists. He finds that even as the library becomes more digital, the “social aspects of learning, knowledge work, and scholarship will remain; and we’ll continue to need places that support them.” I agree that there’s plenty of work to keep librarians busy for decades.

This follows the thinking behind learning spaces and “library as place” or the perspective of “place as library“.

Even in a digital environment that is largely wireless, populated with small, flexible, portable devices for reading and manipulating information, Alex sees that “the primary business of libraries will be creating and supporting collaboration and knowledge creation.”

“In a world with such technologies,
the notion of cyberspace as a different,
superior dimension will seem quaint, and
either/or arguments about digital versus
physical media will seem misguided. The
great challenge of this new age will be to
design objects, services, and institutions
that combine the flexibility and freshness of
bits with the affordances and permanence
of atoms.

What will that mean for books and libraries?
First, books won’t die; they’ll come alive.
Some information devices will copy the
look and feel of books, just as the graphical
user interface copied the metaphor of
desks and documents. Electronic paper will
let publishers add animations and video to
books, à la Prospero’s Books or Harry Potter.
Another interesting possibility is that books
that spark scholarly discussions, or are the
focus of particularly close reading, could integrate
reviews, notes by readers, marginal
annotations, or visualizations showing their
place in citation networks.”

Despite the professions’s emphasis on learning spaces, many users - particularly younger generations - are developing competely different perceptions of the library. Indeed, they may even have no perception at all of the library. For some, the library may simply become not a place but simply part of the world that exists around them, resources and services available digitally that they take for granted, that they simply expect to exist and access as needed. For these users it’s not even about going to a library’s web site or accessing a database; the library experience becomes an unconscious act, part of the normal routine of life. It reminds me of the title of a 1989 article in EDUCOM Review: “The network is the library.”

The new front-end to the NCSU library catalog is likely to get a lot of attention in the library community. (And, well it should). It’s certainly a great example of searching a library catalog. I immediately liked the way that it displayed search results. Yet, I think that libraries are not likely to rush out and adopt the same solution as NCSU.

For most academic libraries, even the larger ones, the third-party e-commerce approach taken by NCSU is likely to be cost and resource prohibitive. Most libraries are likely better off to wait for other solutions, either from their system vendors or OCLC. ILS vendors are in the process of upgrading their OPAC systems.

But as Lorcan Dempsey so elegantly discusses in his weblog on libraries, services, and networks, “the library needs to be in the user environment and not expect the user to find their way to the library environment”. The full post by Lorcan and the rest of his writings are certainly worth reading closely.

Wandering around Google early this morning I stumbled across an interesting PowerPoint presentation, by a talented librarian invovled in developing the new NCSU catalog front-end, which states that users

learn to go to Amazon first and then back to the library catalog when they know what they want

I think that’s pretty much true. I often have done it myself. Or, even more, gone from the catalog to Amazon in order to check the reviews or get more information about the book before wandering up into the stacks.

Reading that statement reminded me of a recent entry by Lorcan about a person at the University of Huddlesfield who had developed a greasemonkey script that automatically would search the library’s catalog from within Amazon and indicate to you on the Amazon page itself if the library held that item. I installed the greasemonkey script, tried it myself on amazon.co.uk and was really impressed. It may not be fully ready for deployment to a broad user base but it’s certainly the right direction as a tool that many users would find very helpful.

Lorcan suggests that such a tool could scale up to multiple libraries, which is a good point. I also wonder how it could be used to initiate interlibrary loan requests for items found in Amazon not held by one’s local library. Understanding the possibilities of such tools can lead to thinking about library services in entirely different ways. OpenURL resolvers and bookmarklets go a long way also towards these services even though many (perhaps most) libraries utilizing OpenURL are still not exploiting its full potential.

Libraries have to decide where to focus their staffing resources and their money. Developing new front-ends for library catalogs and databases while continually revising a library’s web site in order to make it more appealing to users are time consuming efforts. At the same time, developing new Web-based services using emerging technologies are also time consuming. Most libraries will need to choose where to focus their attention. Perhaps, it’s time that more libraries think about how to get into the user’s environment rather than attempting to perfect the library’s own environment.

New Media and Learning in the 21st Century is a small article in the Jan/Feb 2006 issue of EDUCAUSE REVIEW by Lev Gonick - the CIO of Case Western Reserve University. Gonick writes about new media literacy and MediaVision, which is a search tool for the first-year courses captured on video. Other universities also are developing similar projects to capture lectures, courses, and other academic activities on digital video. It’s an endeavor that I expect will become increasingly popular.

Students are spending two to three times more hours on their subject matter and are able to watch and search for key concepts, to outline subjects, and so forth. In some courses, historic benchmarked performance data is shifting positively for the first time in decades. When students are surveyed about MediaVision Courseware, they say it is “cool.” But, like wireless access, such courseware is simply de rigueur. For them, integrated streaming media courseware is an entirely normal extension of how they live, play, and learn.

Gonick also says something clearly aimed other administrators:

…it will be the ways in which we leverage the latest generation of infrastructure for teaching and learning that will differentiate and distinguish academic institutions.
….

The next decade may well be seen by future historians as transformational. The internalizing of the institutional imperative to absorb and project future success through new media will change the dynamic forever. Clearly, old patterns of hierarchies, research traditions, and teaching and learning practices will not disappear overnight. However, just over the horizon, many of the contradictions experienced during the first evolutionary phase of the new media revolution will be resolved. The prestige of our institutions may well depend on that.