As we begin to look forward to the new year, let’s think about how our world is changing. We are in a period where Technology is making change constant. I heard on NPR this morning a retrospective of their soundbytes of the last decade. Wow… ten years ago, we didn’t even have iPods, much less ebooks! And in the Library’s history, ten years ago, we were migrating from the old card catalog to the computer, we didn’t have a web page, and we had just gotten our first four publicly accessible computers. Our staff still used typewriters for most of our paperwork, we offered paper cards, our brand-new digital camera used floppy disks and on our busiest day, we only served 77 people. A lot has changed in ten short years!
So where are we headed now? I get asked this a lot, by the Board of Trustees and by our patrons. What do I think the Library will look like in 2021? Do I think we will still have paper books, or do I think they are going to be obsolete? Will people still use the Library to find information? Will libraries be outsourced to computers?
Lots and lots of questions. I will go out on a limb (but not far out) and say that I DON’T think paper books are going to be obsolete by 2021 (2121? Yes, probably). E-book readers are still expensive, and for them to supplant books entirely will require every reader in every house to have their own individual devices. And, since we are still fighting the proprietary wars, it remains to be seen which format will dominate. However, they (like computers and the internet) are not some passing fad; they are definitely where we are headed, and anyone who grew up watching Star Wars, Star Trek, and other SF movies and tv shows have known it forever. Star Trek had iPads back in the sixties. Come to the Library and borrow the DVDs if you don’t believe me!
Even so, the Library will still be a book place. We will offer e-books to users, cataloged and downloadable from the comfort of your home. We will also still have the print books for those people who, ten years from now, still don’t have e-book readers. My mother is a good example. She got her first iPod this Christmas, and whether she will be willing to use it remains to be seen. So, ten years from now, I foresee that the Library will still be migrating to e-books and other downloadable materials. However, that is indeed where we are headed.
As for whether people will still use libraries, we only need to look to our own reference statistics. Even with the advent of Google (another of those things that was brand-new ten years ago), we get far more questions now than we did then. The questions may be harder, because people usually do check Google first, but that’s no bad thing. We are specialists at finding information; people get the easy stuff themselves, then come to us for the things that they can’t find easily. Even in that mythical 2121, people will still come to us with the hard questions, because facilitating research had been our traditional function for the past several thousand years. Don’t believe me? Even George Lucas can’t imagine a time without a library; Obi-Wan made a visit to the Jedi Library at the very beginning of Attack of the Clones.
By the way, I am not looking to old (and new) science fiction for inspiration just because it’s a genre that I love. Any good SF writer (or reader) will tell you that the genre is not predictive, but I have noticed that the people inventing the new technologies tend to be SF “geeks.” Any new technology created by humans is, naturally, limited by human imagination. The creative imaginations of SF writers therefore feed the minds of the creators of the new technology. Cyberspace? A term coined by SF writer William Gibson in 1982. Calling a bunch of computers globally linked together was called the “Net” by SF writer John Brunner in 1975; he is also the first to call a self-propagating program a “worm.” I could keep going on, but I think you get the point. SF tells us not what will be, but what we could MAKE to be. And we will be here, collecting the books, providing workshops to help people learn new technologies and skills, and answering questions to make sense of it all.
Happy new year, and happy new decade. I can’t wait to see what the future brings!
