How should we plan for the library of the future? Please try not to.
Colleagues, please do not plan for the future library. Instead, realize that it is planning your future and that of human culture. It will grow organically as did the current library, using all tools of communication available. The texts, images, scrolls, codices, internet pages, databases and networks will emerge, seem chaotic at first, and then our collective ordered intelligence will organize it.
For each human inquiry, the more we understand of our universe, world, culture and discipline, the easier it will be to organize it. Gaining this understanding will take a lifetime of serendipity, of discovery. This will never occur with "buy on demand" because then we will know only what most people know by sharing. We need to find the un-shared.
Justinian's Code shows less order in so many ways, and to our modern eyes- it still seems difficult to outline, mark and retrieve statements of law in this particular codex. By the time of the Napoleonic Code, the outline has improved and is simpler. Orderly. The West Key Number Digest improved the way we create a library of cases.
It is not easy. Our tags in Zotero and on LibraryThing already show inconsistencies in our libraries of research. Each of us has, and is, a library. Daniel C. Dennett's Mandel Lecure quotation is now itself a meme (the original quotation is one you can see if you have access to JSTOR; one should not trust alone in memes yet, of which more below). He was not that happy with his slogan:
"A scholar is just a library's way of making
another library." Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 48, No. 2 (Spring, 1990), pp. 127-135 at 128.
Is it not just as true that
"A library is just a scholar's way of making another scholar."?
Scholars share their libraries through their footnotes and bibliographies and blogs and hypertext.
Who picks the random items that may be stumbled upon in stacks or searches? Librarians.
As our links rot and our paper struggles against the warming climate, we have only our memes and memories. For centuries, only our stories survived. Each librarian should, as in Ray Bradbury's Farenheit 451, memorize a book. The time may come when they will need us and our progeny.
The library of the future? Librarians: Replicate.
Colleagues, please do not plan for the future library. Instead, realize that it is planning your future and that of human culture. It will grow organically as did the current library, using all tools of communication available. The texts, images, scrolls, codices, internet pages, databases and networks will emerge, seem chaotic at first, and then our collective ordered intelligence will organize it.
For each human inquiry, the more we understand of our universe, world, culture and discipline, the easier it will be to organize it. Gaining this understanding will take a lifetime of serendipity, of discovery. This will never occur with "buy on demand" because then we will know only what most people know by sharing. We need to find the un-shared.
Justinian's Code shows less order in so many ways, and to our modern eyes- it still seems difficult to outline, mark and retrieve statements of law in this particular codex. By the time of the Napoleonic Code, the outline has improved and is simpler. Orderly. The West Key Number Digest improved the way we create a library of cases.
It is not easy. Our tags in Zotero and on LibraryThing already show inconsistencies in our libraries of research. Each of us has, and is, a library. Daniel C. Dennett's Mandel Lecure quotation is now itself a meme (the original quotation is one you can see if you have access to JSTOR; one should not trust alone in memes yet, of which more below). He was not that happy with his slogan:
"A scholar is just a library's way of making
another library." Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 48, No. 2 (Spring, 1990), pp. 127-135 at 128.
Is it not just as true that
"A library is just a scholar's way of making another scholar."?
Scholars share their libraries through their footnotes and bibliographies and blogs and hypertext.
Who picks the random items that may be stumbled upon in stacks or searches? Librarians.
As our links rot and our paper struggles against the warming climate, we have only our memes and memories. For centuries, only our stories survived. Each librarian should, as in Ray Bradbury's Farenheit 451, memorize a book. The time may come when they will need us and our progeny.
The library of the future? Librarians: Replicate.
