Dave, first of all, is there a link you can give us for this?

Thought provoking indeed. However, here is one initial reaction: to date, number 9 is flat out wrong. Books meet the criteria for being a technology in all but the most narrow modern senses. This technology has endured.

More later…

I have to admit that I hadn’t followed the link from OCLC Abstracts before, but now that I have, I’m a little embarrassed by OCLC’s attention to this “article”.

I think one of the most surprising points made by this “Executive Director and Senior Futurist at the DaVinci Institute” is, “6. Over time, we will be transitioning to a verbal society.” My personal observation is quite the opposite, actually; I’m much more likely right now to type a message to a friend than to call that friend on the phone. Much more likely than, say, five years ago. If we will be transitioning, I wonder what’s needed to support that? Even cell phone users like their texting ability.

Many of this article’s recommendations actually presuppose a public library with a vast amount of funding, or bling. The suggestion that libraries should purchase and become experts on all new information technology is a pipe dream at best, and the author’s idea that libraries ought to provide “creative spaces” (for bloggers, local rock bands, and theater groups) only reinforces the obvious utopianism of the “DaVinci Institute.”

But the points still serve as good brain exercises. We do indeed need to “Evaluate the library experience.” I would personally like to have have a library experience like some more privileged and exciting people have. Or, perhaps I need a new way of experiencing my life, not just the library.

Perhaps by going through Flag, and crossing the Bridge, I can achieve “true spiritual release and freedom” from my own Library myopia.

This library as a center of culture in an experience-based economy conjures up images of a society where emo-kid descendants in unitards swap multi-colored microscopic knowledge crystals through their pores whilst swinging from virtual monkey bars on nostalgia-enhanced playgrounds.

Sign me up!

Thomas, thank you for joining and commenting on our discussion. (I don’t think any of us realized that our blog was read outside of our group of authors!)

A clarification on the point I was making: I was not talking about paper specifically, but the technology of books in a broader sense as an information architecture that has evolved with certain best practices and standards such as page numbering, chapters, indexes, tables of contents, etc. I am less concerned with whether paper is the current physical manifestation. The book, itself, is not likely to be replaced by something else in my lifetime.

I think I understand Dave’s point regarding information technology expertise. As a new tech librarian myself, I am trying to learn everything I can about technologies that will be relevant to serving my patron community. However, key to whether I learn a new programming language, for example, is whether it can be employed towards this mission of serving patrons. If not, I cannot justify the time and resources to I learn it.

I would guess that there are many new information technologies that are used for marketing purposes or data harvesting or demographic analysis that would be at odds with some of the profession’s ethics. I would agree with Dave that all new technologies is a pipe dream.

I believe that one of the greatest assaults on the relevancy of librarians and libraries would be for the profession to ignore the users who not only turn to new technologies, but demand them. In my professional life I use Nexis, Factiva, etc more than 90% of the time, books play a minor role. I help with the archiving process of our papers and by archiving I mean enhancing the electronic records for electronic access.

That said, I can envision only a few possibilities where paper-based information transfer is replaced by something more comprehensively electronic. And being a newspaper librarian I realize I have a vested interest in this statement.

In my archiving course in library school, I recall our instructor passing around several government documents created in the early 1990s. The bland, white sheets were a small sample of the countless documents that were (and presumably are) inaccessible due to their being stored on and accessed through a technology that fell out of favor quickly after it was adopted. Our instructor had had the foresight to print off what he could before the system went offline.

I recall sometime after that demonstration shelving in Rare Books. In my hands were items several hundred years old, and despite the fragility we assigned them, they were actually healthy, living, points of information – books. Barring language barriers, I could open them, read them, and talk with Dave (who was upstairs tangling with mylar) about what I had just leafed through.

I think technology is getting closer, I think more people are willing to trade paper for zeroes and ones for a portion of how they get their information, but it would take a particularly magic bullet to truly end the age of paper.