A glimpse into the digital future:
Web pioneer Makulowich will at times venture into the realm where fact
and science fiction merge. But the main focus of this exclusive column
is the researcher's timeline — five to eight years out. By probing the
agenda of public and private labs, we aim to give readers a better grasp
of the exciting high-tech advances that lie ahead. On The Ledge appears biweekly.
Row upon row of books, manuscripts, magazines and papers indexed by
card catalog and housed in a dimly lit chamber — a musty memory of what
libraries used to be.
In libraries built today, books take up less and less space — replaced
by audio recordings and videotapes, CD-ROMs, databases, computer terminals
and networks linking remote resources via the Internet.
Some in the younger generation — my 18-year-old son, Sean, among them
— can count on two hands the number of times in their lives they set foot
in a library, now commonly called an "information center."
If you seek an image of the swift change wrought
by the Internet and information technology, the sign of the digital times
hangs by tape on the front door of the local library. It reads, "Starting
December 1, all patrons will be restricted to one hour on terminals connected
to the Internet."
Inquiring about this change in policy, I discover that abuses of the
system range from teenagers trawling chat boards for hours on end to people
running their e-businesses full time at taxpayers' expense.
At one extreme stand working parents who view the library as alternate
day care; at the other, small business owners who seek a way to defray
research and communications costs.
This portrait does not surprise James O'Donnell, vice provost for information
systems and computing as well as a professor of classics at the University
of Pennsylvania. He also chaired the committee responsible for the recently
published report LC21: A Digital Strategy for the Library of Congress
(National Research Council).
After all, O'Donnell quickly points out, college students are already
running their own businesses over university networks.
However, what does intrigue O'Donnell — and which is a subject of the
committee report — is the dramatic change in the intellectual role of libraries
caused by the explosive growth in digital information.
The paradigm of the Western library — the features that make it distinctive,
like widely and freely available information and strong research and rare
book collections — is being transformed. The outcome remains fuzzy.
Indeed, how is information technology likely to alter the landscape
for libraries in the years ahead, especially for the end user?
O'Donnell gives two answers. One, the library of tomorrow will look
a lot like whatever you have in your hands or at your fingertips to access
information. Simply stated, much of what we did traditionally in library
buildings we will do beyond their walls. Gone will be the days of limited
access — of buildings open only 12 hours a day seven days a week — and
24-7 will rule.
The second answer addresses the library layout — a front as well as
a back of the house. The back section will get more complex, more expensive
and more challenging to build and maintain. Why? Because it will house
the more sophisticated talent and equipment that make the flashy resources
in the front available.
The front of the library will undergo a social change. Not only will
it be a place where trained professionals help you organize your assault
on information, but it also will increasingly be a place where people go
to work on and work with information together. This change is already evident
in colleges and universities.
I vividly recall seeing a few years ago the eerie glow on the faces
of eight students at Thunderbird, the country's oldest Master of International
Management Program in Glendale, Ariz. The graduate students were hunched
over their laptops in the lunch room while working on a team project —
all with umbilical-like cords tied from their computers into network jacks
along the walls.
Other social changes lie ahead that will define and deflect the effect
of technology. A case in point is whether we will depend on people bringing
their own hardware to the information center or on the campus supplying
it.
On the cellular phone model, will we carry a wireless network information
appliance that we use for most purposes, including information gathering?
Or — on the pay phone model — will we walk around empty-handed in the belief
that any time we need a machine one will be handy? Library staff are already
finding the pay phone model deficient; the potential use is well beyond
what campuses can reasonably be expected to provide.
For O'Donnell, the interesting wave will form in the next one to five
years, when data, voice and video converge in one master network. Then
we will use more video and integrate more physical talk with our data connections.
In fact, O'Donnell believes that the golden age of e-mail might soon
come to an end. Marking its demise will be the ability to talk to people
live on the Internet as well as to easily leave long voice messages. This
will create the need for a whole new etiquette of when to send e-mail or
when to leave a recording of what you meant to say. That in turn will lead
to new problems with archiving.
The issues multiply simply because the quantity of information generated
will not allow one person to work through it in a lifetime. As more audio
and video materials are created and used, we will face a critical challenge:
how we preserve our cultural past when we think about what it is we are
preserving.
You get a taste of this information glut from a new Web site started
by the University of California at Berkeley called How Much Information?
Researchers there estimate that the world's total yearly production of
print, film, optical and magnetic content would require about 1.5 billion
gigabytes of storage — equal to 250 megabytes per person for each man,
woman and child on Earth!
How Much Information?
