I have taken my time writing my account of the JISC Libraries of the Future 09 event, to the extent that the future is now with us And, as JISC themselves provide a good account of who said what, and videos, and if you read Bruce Royan's account, and the Twitter feeds, you have as good a grasp of the event as can be had without attending. I took no notes, as I twittered instead, the results of which can be seen here.
PS John MacColl's account, Libraries of the future, plurality and multi-scalarity, while difficult to pronounce clearly if you have drink taken, is worth a read
I left beautiful Oxford in evening spring sunshine, and tried to work out what it all meant for the less attractive environment I inhabit, a South London further education library. It was a puzzling event: there were some very good contributions, but some that retrod ground that we have passed over and over for the past ten or more years.
- It seemed to me that many times when speakers were trying to define the future, they were talking about the present, describing what is current practice an event, not only in a few advanced libraries but in many institutions
- The library of Alexandria came up from time to time. It's an interesting case, not least because of its ability to attract scholars, so the library had a central place that modern libraries in educational institutions lack; but people should remember that the library was destroyed, not in a single cataclysmic event, but as a result of the antagonism to pagan learning of religious fundamentalists, and through plain neglect.
- Few speakers seemed to have understood the effects that the slump will have, generally and on on library developments. Ritual incantations of the need for 'new models' and 'partnerships' with the private sector sound a little thin in this crisis.
- Ken Chad make a scathing attach on libraries failure to aggregate.
- The one interesting point made by the Google speaker, Santiago de la Mora, was that the idea of Google book search predating Google's attempt to be a universal library; there is probably a good article to be written on the history of the concept of the universal library
- Some speakers seemed to believe that every library shares the rich digital collections of institutions like Harvard or Oxford, Not so, especially for my sector, further education, or for public libraries.
- There were some gross oversimplifications flying around about age and familiarity with and use of social networking
- And for all the boasting about the long tail, it has not yet delivered. See for example the results of the Andromaque test, the search for a copy of Racine's Andromaque in a public library.
