Looking To The Past To Predict The Future

On Monday Tony Hirst and myself co-facilitated a workshop on “Preparing for the Future: Technological Challenges and Beyond” which preceded the ILI 2015 conference. In the workshop we explored ways in which librarians could help to identify technological developments which may affect the range of services libraries provide and how broader trends may accelerate or hinder such developments.

In the workshop we discussed a number of techniques which may be useful in providing more flexible approaches to predicting the impact of technical developments, including asking questions such as “What did you notice for the first time?” and exploring answers to the question “Did you try the library?“.

We also discussed ways of playing with time, such as the describing the history of technologies in reverse, such as taking the recent EU decision on illegality of the “Safe Harbor” agreement and explore how that could lead to social media services such as Facebook being used in only 21 universities by 2005, with Mark Zuckerberg officially scrapping Facebook in October 2003 and then starting a course at Harvard University. Exploring possible reasons, such as loss of advertising income through changes in technologies, political developments and user hostility towards failures to make adequate tax payments, may be useful in identifying relevant trends which could occur in the future.

It is appropriate to highlight such approaches on #BackToFutureDay, with the BBC featuring articles on “Back to the Future II: What did it get right and wrong?” and, on their sports pages asking, with tongue in cheek, “How will sport look in another 30 years?”

At the workshop we also discussed how we can learn from conferences: not only from the content of talks but also from the titles of talks and how they may be groups together. I pointed out that the ILI 2015 conference was featuring a number of talks on use of video in a variety of contexts which, it seemed to me, indicate a newish trend in the library sector.

The ILI conference was launched in 2000 and I have attended – and spoken at – all bar one of the conferences; the exception being ILI 2008 when I was speaking at a conference held at the National Library of Singapore. ILI conference web sites are available for a number of recent ILI conferences but no, I think, all 15 conferences. However since all of my slides are available online, I am able to view the titles and abstracts of my talks and the slides I used. I’ve provided links to the materials in the following table.

A number of things occur to me looking at this list:

• In 2001 I described Jisc-funded work on “Advertising on Your Web Site” which investigated whether adverting revenue on Jisc service web sites could be used to fund the services. Following the dot.com crash around the turn of the century it was decided not to explore this possibility. It’s interesting that the more severe economic crash in 2008 didn’t lead to a revival of interest.
• ILI 2002 saw interest in mobile devices, in particular dedicated ebook readers and PDAs. How important would the Rocket ebook reader and the Palm PDA be for librarians, we discussed. That seems such a long time ago!
• The talk on “Beyond E-mail! Wikis, Blogs and Social Networking Software” at ILI 2004 could have been entitled “An Introduction to Web 2.0” – except for the fact that the term “Web 2.0” wasn’t popularized until late 2004! But it is interesting that the conference organisers felt that this area was of relevance to libraries in 2004.

Of course a richer insight into the trends relevant to Internet librarians would require access to the complete programme for the 15 ILI conferences. For me this is a reason why it is important to preserve access to resources such as conference programmes, with access being open to anyone with an interest in what we could refer to as “Internet archeology“.

Happy #backtothefutureday!

xxx

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