Yesterday, the director of a North American research library said to me “Fifteen years ago, no one could have predicted that we now would be accessing full-text journals and newspapers over the Internet. Then we were focused on spending money on local networking of CD-ROM towers to get to this mateiral. Who would have known what the future had in store.”

In the early 1990s, however, it was fairly easy to predict (though with some risk) that the networked present would have developed. Of course, it may not have been so obvious that it would have developed to such a great extent, be so commercialized and an integrated part of many people’s lives. But, the point is that careful, reasoned thinking about technology forecasting can result in fairly clear insights as to what is 10 years down the road. While the specifics may be fuzzy and the predictions may not always be on target, visoins of the information future are emerging. And interestingly, the vision is often coming from outside of the library community. Perhaps that’s just because libarians (and I am one myself) are - by necessity - so focused on providing library services that meet the present day-to-day needs of their users that little time is left over for reflective thinking about the future. Of course, there are small segments of the library profession that are thinking very hard about the future, but I suspect that this dialogue is not an essential fabric of most daily library operations.

Richard Koman asks “Who wants yesterday’s papers?”. He references Dan Gilmor’s blog entry that challenges newspapers to oopen up their archives.

Koman also links to Simon Waldman’s entry on The Importance of Being Permanent, which is a very interesting article with thoughful comments from others.

I think that it’s inevitable that, at some point, an Internet search engine, such as Google, realizes that it can purchase quality content for a price and then make it available through its search portal and subsidize the cost through advertising. At this point, which is very likely to happen within the next ten years, what role will libraries adopt? Libraries now spend millions on licensing full-text electronic resources but what happens when another, larger player enters this marketplace?

Maybe, if quality full-text content is available through another source, libraries will focus their material funds on the creation of content and partner with companies such as Google to make the information accessible. This would be a dramatic shift for libraries, which would move from being consumers and “middlemen” in the information chain to being producers (or even publishers). The end result could result in not only advantages for a library’s own specific patrons but also in supporting open access to information, a particularly important issue for developing countries.