Dertouzos on future libraries

[Jul,Erik]

[Cross-posted to INTERCAT]

Thanks to Joe Schallan for introducing a discussion of

Dertouzos, Michael.  1997.  What Will Be: How the New World of Information 
Will
Change Our Lives.  HarperEdge.

I have quoted the paragraph that Mr. Schallan cited in many presentations I 
have made about cataloging Internet resources.  (It's the one mention of 
libraries that appears in the index.)

Some additional thoughts on the paragraph from "What Will Be":

>"Other changes are more certain.  Libraries will remain the
>custodians of physical educational materials, notably books.

Dertouzos goes out on a limb here to state the obvious.  What may be most 
sobering about this prediction is that it means libraries will for a long 
time continue to be responsible for providing easy and efficient access to 
information in multiple formats.  Print and other media will exist for as 
long as Dertouzos can see side by side with digital media.

The impact of this on libraries should be obvious: managing information will 
become increasingly more complex, not easier, and more expensive, not 
cheaper.  Library administrators and funders take note.

>But they will also become managers of the information links
>to other knowledge sites,

In a book that staggers between the radically imaginative and the mundane, 
this observation could easily describe what is going on in many libraries 
today.  Dertouzos doffs his futurist's hat with such statements.  What is 
futuristic about his observation is the extent to which and the means by 
which the management of information links will be performed.

>with the important proviso that
>they, the libraries, control the quality of these virtual
>bookshelves,

Bingo.  Another dead-center description of a value-adding service that 
libraries have long provided.  Any library that today is identifying, 
selecting, and cataloging electronic resources can attest to the role of 
selection and collection development in (1) providing accesss to information 
that meets some objective criteria, (2) meeting or anticipating the needs of 
a community of users, however defined, and (3) creating a body of work (a 
collection) the sum of which is greater than its parts.

It's not futuristic to imagine that these same value-adding services pertain 
to digital resources.

>deciding which knowledge residing at other
>institutions should be targeted by the pointers and hyper-
>organizers of the local library.

For those who have not read the book, the "hyperorganizers of the library" 
are not librarians jazzed up on caffeine, but the software tools used by 
those librarians, caffeine notwithstanding.  Here we hit upon the chewy 
caramel center of future information management.  While we can demonstrate, 
indeed, have demonstrated, the role that libraries, librarians, and library 
standards, practices, and systems play in the management of electronic 
resources, we have not yet realized the full benefits of even today's 
applied technologies, let alone, tomorrow's.

Only time, not technology, for example, stands between us and the widespread 
adoption and implementation of metadata schemes whereby, finally, we can 
record and capture information *once* at the point fo creation (for example, 
title, author, publisher, and date) and use that information in a variety of 
information systems, including library catalogs, without subsequent manual 
transcription and human verification.  This alone, perhaps the least of all 
potential benefits to be realized, would nevertheless save enormous amounts 
of time and money.

>The new librarians will
>actively ensure the presence of only those virtual links
>that preserve a quality and currency of shared knowledge
>deemed necessary and complementary by their institution.

Thanks again to Mr. Dertouzos for describing what many libraries do today.

What often puzzled me as I read "What Will Be"  (and here I readily admit 
that it is far easier to criticize a futurist than to be one, and I do feel 
that Mr. Dertouzos is a credible futurist) was his meandering anachronisms. 
 Why, for example, if we have "hyperorganizers" in the sentence above do we 
still have "librarians...actively ensur[ing] the presence...of links...."? 
 Today, yes.  Tomorrow, I hope not.  This is a problem if ever there was one 
that begs for a technological solution, and it's a problem that is far 
easier to solve than, let's say, the automated subject analysis or automated 
abstracting, the sorts of things that humans do well and computers do 
poorly.  On the other hand, computers ought to be good at keeping track of 
things, such as the network location of a resource, or its name, or its 
description.

>Effective management of these shared knowledge pointers
>will be critical to the quality of tomorrow's educational
>institutions,

Why?  Not because the links have inherent value, but because the resources 
that are linked, and the knowledge expressed *by* their linkage, is 
valuable.  An undifferentiated information mass such as the World Wide Web 
taken as a whole is of far less value than a differentiated mass, whether it 
be differentiated by description, classification, subject, or some other 
scheme.  No doubt the Internet has and will continue to profoundly change 
the way we create, access, share, and use knowledge.  What must accompany 
that change is the ancient recognition that all information is not equal and 
that efficient knowledge management is the underpinning of effective 
knowledge transmission across the generations.

>especially because students and faculty
>will also have access to their own huge arsenal of distant
>knowledge links."

My reading of Dertouzos left me thinking just how much in the forefront 
libraries have been and will remain.  Some of what the author sees in the 
future, I see today in hundreds of libraries worldwide.  And what I don't 
yet see in place I can imagine in a timeframe shorter than that painted by 
Dertouzos.  But the author is right, it "will be."

 --Erik

Erik Jul
jul at oclc.org